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As the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in China's Hubei province continues and new cases of the disease increase globally,[1] there is pressure on historians to show the value of history for policy. The designation of the new virus as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses[8] recognises it as genetically related to but different from severe acute respiratory syndrome coronaviruses (SARS-CoVs). 11 R Zhong, P Mozur, To tame coronavirus, Mao-style social control blankets China. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the ‘greening’ of Hong Kong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on the afforestation of the colony's ‘barren’ mountainsides from the 1880s. To date, histories of Hong Kong have tended to focus on the colonial state's urban interventions, particularly on the draconian measures it took to ‘sanitize’ Chinese districts. In contrast, this article connects Hong Kong's urban development with the history of green space and the cultivation of ‘nature’. While the state sought to transform the ‘barren rock’ into a visible correlate of the colony's aspiring status as an imperial hub in Asia, the promotion of hygiene and health provided a further rationale for tree-planting. The article argues that colonial Hong Kong provides insights into the ‘tropicalization of modernity’ and the constitutive processes by which colonial power was naturalized and legitimated through planning practices that extended from the urban to the natural. A study of Hong Kong's afforestation underscores the importance of the natural environment as a ‘contact zone’ between colonial and ‘native’ cultures; it also reveals the extent to which the equation of a ‘green’ landscape with economic (re)production and colonial order, functioned as a critical trope for framing race and labour. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Third Plague Pandemic in Asia during the 1890s, and the institutional stresses it produced, exposed inherent vulnerabilities within the global networks that sustained the British Empire. While commercial and informational routes meshed disparate imperial dominions, they also functioned as pathways for disease and conduits of panic, undermining imperial commerce and threatening social order. Focusing in particular on the 1894 outbreak of bubonic plague in Hong Kong, the paper suggests that an analysis of a ‘local’ epidemic episode and its wider reverberations provides a new perspective on the often heated debates during the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about the meaning and scope of empire in relation to new communication networks. The paper shows how expanding global networks were construed alternatively as sustaining and jeopardising imperial power. The bubonic plague in Hong Kong—a hub of ‘free trade’ in East Asia—and the panicked reactions elicited by the disease's diffusion westwards revealed the economic priorities that informed colonial public health concerns as well as the challenges posed to laissez-faire economic policy and ‘free trade’ by the expanding influence of capital in the ‘New Imperialism’. In so doing, the paper suggests that contemporary preoccupations with ‘globalisation’, ‘biosecurity’ and ‘emerging diseases’ have antecedents that lie beyond the Second World War and the interwar period in a late-nineteenth-century imperial biopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Writing in the late 1980s in the midst of the AIDS crisis in the United States, historian Charles Rosenberg suggested that epidemics furnished "useful sampling devices" for examining "fundamental patterns of social value and institutional practice." This paper reconsiders Rosenberg's seminal essay and the central question it addresses—what is an epidemic?—from the vantage of a historian in Hong Kong working on colonial and postcolonial Asia in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper begins by setting Rosenberg's essay in its historical context and then considers whether explanatory models developed in a Northern American context may be applicable (or not) to other non-Western settings. The paper makes the case for a re-interrogation of the "epidemic" as an epidemiological and social category, and it concludes by suggesting that COVID-19 is challenging underlying assumptions about what a "crisis" is to the extent that the pandemic may be understood as a crisis of crisis itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]