The COVID-19 pandemic has raised much discussion and interests on human diseases and the history of blight control and management that emerged in the past two decades. As a zoonotic disease, the ongoing pandemic also serves as a powerful reminder of the embeddedness of humans in the biological and microbial networks of which they are a part of. Human political systems and infrastructures today, as in the past, have similarly played important roles in controlling and managing such diseases and blights.

This roundtable features three themes: disease control, empires, and the environment. The lighting style session brings together five environmental historians whose work engage with plant, animal, and human diseases using a wide range of approaches and methods. Through the lens of doctors, scientists, grassroot campaigners, colonial officials, and smallholders, the presentations explore the various ways in which human and non-human blights were perceived, reported, managed, and exploited in the British, US, and Japanese empires.

Beginning with the British Caribbean, the first two presentations use public health as an avenue to probe at the intersections of race, class, gender in colonial Nevis and Trinidad and Tobago. Medical knowledge and service—or the lack thereof, as they demonstrate, came to be a crucial space for imperial control and power struggles. The second set of presentations turns to tropical commodities of banana and sugar. The absence of scientific knowledge about the ways in which plant diseases interact with natural and human-made environment and technologies, as the two presentations point out, were a major obstacle for controlling and managing the spread of such diseases. Lastly, the final presentation takes on the human-engineered disease of radiation sickness in the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Through the accounts of scientists of the Manhattan Project, the presentation reveals how radiation sickness was trivialized to support the US atomic project in the post-war era.