Plague Rat or Anopheles: Health Disasters and Home Improvement in Late Colonial Java

Abstract:When plague broke out in Java in 1911, the Dutch responded with home improvement in an attempt to widen the distance between human residents and the rodent host of this disease. Over the following thirty years, home improvement was implemented on a tremendous scale—resulting in the reconstruction of over 1.6 million houses. After the mid-1920s, however, home improvement was gradually implicated in facilitating malaria transmission instead: effectively replacing one set of disease mortality with another. In this article, I trace how this correlation came to light and was responded to. The case of woningverbeteringsmalaria, I suggest, offers a case study for us to reflect on how health priorities were set, how developmentalist colonial policies designed to counter one threat often generated others, and understand how advances in understanding the human-animal relations underpinning health gradually broadened from linear transmission theories into broader ecological models.