Deborah Neill
Associate Professor
Office: 2162 York Lanes
Phone: 416-736-2100 Ext: 20365
Email: dneill@yorku.ca
Media Requests Welcome
I am a Modern European Historian at York University in Toronto, specializing in the histories of Germany, France, European colonialism in Africa, and the history of colonial medicine. My first book, Networks in Tropical Medicine: Internationalism, Colonialism, and the Rise of a Medical Specialty, explores the ties between European tropical medicine experts across national boundaries, their shared research endeavours in parts of eastern and western Africa in the early 20th century, and their impact on colonial health policies (particularly sleeping sickness). I have also explored the history of food and nutrition in France and its colonies. My current project uses the company John Holt & Co (Liverpool) as a case study to explore the expanding commodity trade and the rise of multinational firms in British, French, Spanish, and German-controlled territories in west-central Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
My teaching interests are broadly focused on the history of modern Europe and Imperialism since 1789 and includes colonialism, World Wars One and Two, the Holocaust, Modern Germany, Modern France, War, Revolution and Society in the 20th century, and Globalization.
Degrees
PhD, University of TorontoMA, University of Toronto
BA, University of Waterloo
Professional Leadership
Co-Organizer, Joint York-University of Toronto Seminar in French History (with Eric Jennings, Margaret Schotte and William Nelson) 2010-present
Co-organizer, Workshop on German Colonial Capitalism (With Kim Todzi, University of Hamburg and Tristan Oestermann, Humboldt University) May 2021
Research Interests
- John Bullen Dissertation Prize, Canadian Historical Association - 2005
- Hannah Millennium History of Medicine Doctoral Thesis Award, Honourable Mention - 2005
Current Research Projects
-
Summary:
- John Bullen Dissertation Prize, Canadian Historical Association - 2005
- Hannah Millennium History of Medicine Doctoral Thesis Award, Honourable Mention - 2005
This project uses the company John Holt & Co. to explore broad economic changes in west-central Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Description:By the beginning of the 20th century, John Holt & Co. (Liverpool) had plantations, factories, shipping facilities and retail stores across British, German, French and Spanish colonies in west-central Africa. it was a large importer of diverse retail goods and a major exporter of rubber, wood, ivory and other commodities. Along with understanding its transnational endeavours and relationships to multiple governments, in this project I explore the experiences of Africans who worked for or partnered with the company, showing how they faced racial discrimination in the company's culture but were able to find opportunities to innovate and further both their own and the company's goals. In looking at Holt I more broadly examine the development of exploitative practices by western companies in Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries and the way this period fits with the broader history of economic change in modern Western Africa and Europe.
Start Date:
- Month: Apr Year: 2014
End Date:
- Month: Apr Year: 2018
Funders:
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)
-
Summary:
This book was published by Stanford University Press in 2012.
Description:The book explores transnational connections between tropical medicine experts as they emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special emphasis on cooperation and competition in human trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) research. I argue that combating tropical diseases depended on the cooperation of experts across European and African borders, but that this did not lead to notable success in eradicating or curing diseases like sleeping sickness. Indeed, the physicians and officials who developed policies to combat sleeping sickness in Africa before 1914 privileged biomedical research and harsh containment methods that left a painful legacy in many territories. My case studies include what was at the time German East Africa, British Uganda, French Congo and German Cameroon.
Minor Research Grant (York University)
-
Description:
In this project, my goal is to demonstrate how the transnational campaigns against the colonial liquor trade in Africa between the 1880s and 1930s represented an important contributing moment to shaping the character of modern western activist movements in the global south. Many European countries participated in the manufacturing, sale and distribution of liquor to the colonies. Western missionaries, philanthropists and humanitarians were horrified by the extension of this trade. Building on the tactics developed by the anti-slavery campaigners in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a new generation of activists organized a campaign against colonial government policies, the lucrative European liquor industry, and consumers of high-alcohol content spirits in West and Central Africa. Their focus may have been on alcohol, but their work ultimately highlighted some of the larger systemic problems of colonialism. Yet the solutions they proposed unfairly targeted the consumers of alcohol rather than taking on problems in the industry itself.
SSHRC Small Grants Program
Canadian Centre for German and European Studies (CCGES)
York Internal Grant - Minor Research Grant
York Conference Travel Fund
Networks in Tropical Medicine: Internationalism, Colonialism, and the Rise of a Medical Specialty, 1890-1930 (Stanford University Press, 2012) http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=11368
(with Juanita De Barros), “The Business of Tropical Medicine: Connections Between Anti-malarial Campaigns in Sierra Leone, 1899-1901, and Jamaica, 1908,” in Mauro Capocci and Daniele Cozzoli, eds., Empire, Nation-Building, and the Age of Tropical Medicine, 1885-1960. London: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2024, 75-99.
“John Holt’s Economic Conscience,” in Felix Brahm and Eve Rosenhaft, eds., Global Commerce and Economic Conscience in Europe, 1700-1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, 191-213.
“Of Carnivores and Conquerors: French Nutritional Debates in the Age of Empire, 1880s-1914,” in Elizabeth Neswald, Ulrike Thoms and David Smith, eds., Setting Nutritional Standards: Theory, Policies, Practices. Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2017.
“Science and Civilizing Missions: Germans and the Transnational Community of Colonial Medicine,” in Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley, eds., German Colonialism in a Global Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
J.P. Daughton, In the Forest of No Joy: the Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism (New York: Norton, 2021). H-France (2022).
Samuël Coghe, Population Politics in the Tropics: Demography, Health and Transimperialism in Colonial Angola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). H-Soz-Kult (2022).
Anna Greenwood, ed., Beyond the State: the Colonial Medical Service in British Africa. Manchester, 2016. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 48, no. 1 (2017): 116-118.
Evans, Andrew. Anthropology at War: World War One and the Science of Race in Germany. Chicago, 2010. For German History, 30, no. 1 (2012): 145-146.
Stephen A. Toth, Beyond Papillon: The French Overseas Penal Colonies, 1854-1952. Lincoln, NE: 2006. For Itinerario, 31 (1) (2007).
Brantlinger, Patrick, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930. Cornell: 2004. For The Canadian Journal of History, 40, no. 1 (2005).
Maurer, Konrad and Maurer, Ulrike, Alzheimer: The Life of a Physician and the Career of a Disease. New York: 2003. For H-German, (August 2004).
Penny, Glenn. Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany. Chapel Hill and London: 2002. German History, 22, no. 2 (2004): 277-8.
Walther, Daniel Joseph. Creating Germans Abroad. Athens, Ohio: 2002. German History, 22, no. 2 (2004): 278-279.
“Cocoa, Credit, and Agro-Capitalism: John Holt & Co. in Spanish Fernando Po, c.1890s-1914,” co-written with Kyle Prochnow, African Economic History, 50, no. 2 (2022) 87-113.
"Merchants, Malaria, and Manliness: a Patient’s Experience of Tropical Disease,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46, no. 2 (2018).
Neill, D. “Finding the “Ideal Diet”: Nutrition, Culture and Dietary Practices in France and French Equatorial Africa, c. 1890s to 1920s,” Food and Foodways, vol. 17, no. 1 (2009), 1-28.
Neill, D. “Paul Ehrlich’s Colonial Connections: Scientific Networks and the Response to the Sleeping Sickness Epidemic, 1900-1914,” Social History of Medicine, vol. 22, no. 1 (2009), 61-77.
“Commerce, Cookbooks and Colonialism: Cross-Cultural Cuisine in the Age of Empire,” World History Bulletin, 1 (Spring 2008): 10-13.
“John Holt’s Economic Conscience,” presentation at the conference “Moralising Commerce in a Globalising World: Approaches to a History of Economic Conscience 1600-1900,” German Historical Institute London, June 2017.
“Technologies and Health Care in the history of Freetown,” presentation at the “Technologies and Trials of Global Health in Africa” panel, “Innovation, Transformation, and Sustainable Futures in Africa,” Dakar, Senegal, June 2016.
“Capitalism and Humanitarianism: A British Merchant and the Campaign against Labour Abuses in the French Congo,” Britain and the World Conference, June 2016.
“Visions of ‘Humane Development’: John Holt and the Campaign against Concession Company Rule in the French Congo, 1899-1915,” Society for French Historical Studies (SFHS), Nashville, April 2016.
“Surviving the ‘White Man’s Grave’: a Merchant’s Experience of Tropical Disease,” Midwest Conference on British Studies, Detroit September 2015.
(with Juanita de Barros) “The Business of Tropical Medicine: Transnational Corporations and the Development of the Liverpool School in the early Twentieth Century,” American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) New Haven May 2015.
“Friedrich Karl Kleine and the British in Interwar Africa,” Canadian Historical Association, (CHA), Brock, May 27, 2014.
“Bayer 205: Propaganda, Rivalry, and Drug Therapy Research in Africa, 1920-1930,” American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) May 19, 2013.
“The Colonial Anti-liquor Campaigns and the Origins of Western Humanitarianism, 1880-1930" Max Kade Center for European and German Studies, Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN, November 29, 2012.
“The History of Humanitarianism: Complicating the Grand Narrative,” roundtable at the Western Society for French History, Banff, October 13, 2012.
“From Global Knowledge to Local Standards: Foreign Influences on Emerging Nutritional Science in France, 1890s to 1914,” Conference entitled “Setting Standards: the History and Politics of Nutritional Theories and Practices, 1890-1930,” Brock University, August 2010.
“Crossing Borders: Competition, Cooperation and Medical Expertise in the African Sleeping Sickness Campaigns Before World War One,” Columbia University Centre for International History, New York, December 3, 2010.
“Health Reform or Moral Crusade? French Doctors and the Colonial Anti-Alcohol Movement, 1890-1914,” Society for French Historical studies (SFHS), New Jersey, April 2008.
“The Intellectual Origins of German Colonial Studies: Interdisciplinary Origins of an Evolving Research Agenda,” roundtable at the American Historical Association (AHA), Washington D.C. January 2008.
“Colonial Cuisine: Hygiene, Health and “Frenchness,” 1890-1940,” presented at the French Historical Studies Association, Houston Texas, March 16, 2007.
“Germans and the International Anti-Alcohol Movement, 1880-1914,” presented at the German Studies Association, San Diego, October 2007.
“The International Anti-Alcohol Movement and the Atlantic World, 1885-1930,” presented at the York University Workshop “Alcohol and the Making of the Atlantic World: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” Toronto, October 2007.
“Trading Spaces: Duala Elites in Europe Before and After World War One,” presented at a roundtable at the American Historical Association (AHA) Annual Meeting, Atlanta Georgia, January 2007.
"Transnationalism, Internationalism, and Scientific Networks Before World War One," Second Annual German Modernities Workshop, University of Michigan, May 2006.
"Sleeping Sickness in Africa: Colonialism, Medical Ethics and the Search for a Cure, 1900-1914," African Studies Association (ASA) Annual Meeting, Washington D.C., November 2005.
"'Accidents May Happen': Experimentation and the Treatment of Sleeping Sickness in the African Colonies, 1900-1914," McMaster Colloquium in the History of Medicine, Hamilton, October 2005.
“Vaccinations and the Decline of Diphtheria,” Active History.ca, June 3, 2015 http://activehistory.ca/2015/06/vaccinations-and-the-decline-of-diphtheria/
Current Courses
| Term | Course Number | Section | Title | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fall/Winter 2023 | AP/HIST4330 6.0 | A | Issues in the Hist. of Modern Germany | SEMR |
| Fall/Winter 2023 | AP/HIST2920 6.0 | A | The First Global War | LECT |
I am a Modern European Historian at York University in Toronto, specializing in the histories of Germany, France, European colonialism in Africa, and the history of colonial medicine. My first book, Networks in Tropical Medicine: Internationalism, Colonialism, and the Rise of a Medical Specialty, explores the ties between European tropical medicine experts across national boundaries, their shared research endeavours in parts of eastern and western Africa in the early 20th century, and their impact on colonial health policies (particularly sleeping sickness). I have also explored the history of food and nutrition in France and its colonies. My current project uses the company John Holt & Co (Liverpool) as a case study to explore the expanding commodity trade and the rise of multinational firms in British, French, Spanish, and German-controlled territories in west-central Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
My teaching interests are broadly focused on the history of modern Europe and Imperialism since 1789 and includes colonialism, World Wars One and Two, the Holocaust, Modern Germany, Modern France, War, Revolution and Society in the 20th century, and Globalization.
Degrees
PhD, University of TorontoMA, University of Toronto
BA, University of Waterloo
Professional Leadership
Co-Organizer, Joint York-University of Toronto Seminar in French History (with Eric Jennings, Margaret Schotte and William Nelson) 2010-present
Co-organizer, Workshop on German Colonial Capitalism (With Kim Todzi, University of Hamburg and Tristan Oestermann, Humboldt University) May 2021
Research Interests
Awards
Current Research Projects
-
Summary:
This project uses the company John Holt & Co. to explore broad economic changes in west-central Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Description:By the beginning of the 20th century, John Holt & Co. (Liverpool) had plantations, factories, shipping facilities and retail stores across British, German, French and Spanish colonies in west-central Africa. it was a large importer of diverse retail goods and a major exporter of rubber, wood, ivory and other commodities. Along with understanding its transnational endeavours and relationships to multiple governments, in this project I explore the experiences of Africans who worked for or partnered with the company, showing how they faced racial discrimination in the company's culture but were able to find opportunities to innovate and further both their own and the company's goals. In looking at Holt I more broadly examine the development of exploitative practices by western companies in Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries and the way this period fits with the broader history of economic change in modern Western Africa and Europe.
Project Type: FundedRole: Principal Investigator
Start Date:
- Month: Apr Year: 2014
End Date:
- Month: Apr Year: 2018
Funders:
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)
-
Summary:
This book was published by Stanford University Press in 2012.
Description:The book explores transnational connections between tropical medicine experts as they emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special emphasis on cooperation and competition in human trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) research. I argue that combating tropical diseases depended on the cooperation of experts across European and African borders, but that this did not lead to notable success in eradicating or curing diseases like sleeping sickness. Indeed, the physicians and officials who developed policies to combat sleeping sickness in Africa before 1914 privileged biomedical research and harsh containment methods that left a painful legacy in many territories. My case studies include what was at the time German East Africa, British Uganda, French Congo and German Cameroon.
Project Type: FundedRole: Author
-
Project Type:
Funded
Funders:
Minor Research Grant (York University)
-
Description:
In this project, my goal is to demonstrate how the transnational campaigns against the colonial liquor trade in Africa between the 1880s and 1930s represented an important contributing moment to shaping the character of modern western activist movements in the global south. Many European countries participated in the manufacturing, sale and distribution of liquor to the colonies. Western missionaries, philanthropists and humanitarians were horrified by the extension of this trade. Building on the tactics developed by the anti-slavery campaigners in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a new generation of activists organized a campaign against colonial government policies, the lucrative European liquor industry, and consumers of high-alcohol content spirits in West and Central Africa. Their focus may have been on alcohol, but their work ultimately highlighted some of the larger systemic problems of colonialism. Yet the solutions they proposed unfairly targeted the consumers of alcohol rather than taking on problems in the industry itself.
Project Type: FundedFunders:
SSHRC Small Grants Program
Canadian Centre for German and European Studies (CCGES)
York Internal Grant - Minor Research Grant
York Conference Travel Fund
All Publications
(with Juanita De Barros), “The Business of Tropical Medicine: Connections Between Anti-malarial Campaigns in Sierra Leone, 1899-1901, and Jamaica, 1908,” in Mauro Capocci and Daniele Cozzoli, eds., Empire, Nation-Building, and the Age of Tropical Medicine, 1885-1960. London: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2024, 75-99.
“John Holt’s Economic Conscience,” in Felix Brahm and Eve Rosenhaft, eds., Global Commerce and Economic Conscience in Europe, 1700-1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, 191-213.
“Of Carnivores and Conquerors: French Nutritional Debates in the Age of Empire, 1880s-1914,” in Elizabeth Neswald, Ulrike Thoms and David Smith, eds., Setting Nutritional Standards: Theory, Policies, Practices. Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2017.
“Science and Civilizing Missions: Germans and the Transnational Community of Colonial Medicine,” in Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley, eds., German Colonialism in a Global Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
J.P. Daughton, In the Forest of No Joy: the Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism (New York: Norton, 2021). H-France (2022).
Samuël Coghe, Population Politics in the Tropics: Demography, Health and Transimperialism in Colonial Angola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). H-Soz-Kult (2022).
Anna Greenwood, ed., Beyond the State: the Colonial Medical Service in British Africa. Manchester, 2016. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 48, no. 1 (2017): 116-118.
Evans, Andrew. Anthropology at War: World War One and the Science of Race in Germany. Chicago, 2010. For German History, 30, no. 1 (2012): 145-146.
Stephen A. Toth, Beyond Papillon: The French Overseas Penal Colonies, 1854-1952. Lincoln, NE: 2006. For Itinerario, 31 (1) (2007).
Brantlinger, Patrick, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930. Cornell: 2004. For The Canadian Journal of History, 40, no. 1 (2005).
Maurer, Konrad and Maurer, Ulrike, Alzheimer: The Life of a Physician and the Career of a Disease. New York: 2003. For H-German, (August 2004).
Penny, Glenn. Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany. Chapel Hill and London: 2002. German History, 22, no. 2 (2004): 277-8.
Walther, Daniel Joseph. Creating Germans Abroad. Athens, Ohio: 2002. German History, 22, no. 2 (2004): 278-279.
Networks in Tropical Medicine: Internationalism, Colonialism, and the Rise of a Medical Specialty, 1890-1930 (Stanford University Press, 2012) http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=11368
“Cocoa, Credit, and Agro-Capitalism: John Holt & Co. in Spanish Fernando Po, c.1890s-1914,” co-written with Kyle Prochnow, African Economic History, 50, no. 2 (2022) 87-113.
"Merchants, Malaria, and Manliness: a Patient’s Experience of Tropical Disease,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46, no. 2 (2018).
Neill, D. “Finding the “Ideal Diet”: Nutrition, Culture and Dietary Practices in France and French Equatorial Africa, c. 1890s to 1920s,” Food and Foodways, vol. 17, no. 1 (2009), 1-28.
Neill, D. “Paul Ehrlich’s Colonial Connections: Scientific Networks and the Response to the Sleeping Sickness Epidemic, 1900-1914,” Social History of Medicine, vol. 22, no. 1 (2009), 61-77.
“Commerce, Cookbooks and Colonialism: Cross-Cultural Cuisine in the Age of Empire,” World History Bulletin, 1 (Spring 2008): 10-13.
“John Holt’s Economic Conscience,” presentation at the conference “Moralising Commerce in a Globalising World: Approaches to a History of Economic Conscience 1600-1900,” German Historical Institute London, June 2017.
“Technologies and Health Care in the history of Freetown,” presentation at the “Technologies and Trials of Global Health in Africa” panel, “Innovation, Transformation, and Sustainable Futures in Africa,” Dakar, Senegal, June 2016.
“Capitalism and Humanitarianism: A British Merchant and the Campaign against Labour Abuses in the French Congo,” Britain and the World Conference, June 2016.
“Visions of ‘Humane Development’: John Holt and the Campaign against Concession Company Rule in the French Congo, 1899-1915,” Society for French Historical Studies (SFHS), Nashville, April 2016.
“Surviving the ‘White Man’s Grave’: a Merchant’s Experience of Tropical Disease,” Midwest Conference on British Studies, Detroit September 2015.
(with Juanita de Barros) “The Business of Tropical Medicine: Transnational Corporations and the Development of the Liverpool School in the early Twentieth Century,” American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) New Haven May 2015.
“Friedrich Karl Kleine and the British in Interwar Africa,” Canadian Historical Association, (CHA), Brock, May 27, 2014.
“Bayer 205: Propaganda, Rivalry, and Drug Therapy Research in Africa, 1920-1930,” American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) May 19, 2013.
“The Colonial Anti-liquor Campaigns and the Origins of Western Humanitarianism, 1880-1930" Max Kade Center for European and German Studies, Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN, November 29, 2012.
“The History of Humanitarianism: Complicating the Grand Narrative,” roundtable at the Western Society for French History, Banff, October 13, 2012.
“From Global Knowledge to Local Standards: Foreign Influences on Emerging Nutritional Science in France, 1890s to 1914,” Conference entitled “Setting Standards: the History and Politics of Nutritional Theories and Practices, 1890-1930,” Brock University, August 2010.
“Crossing Borders: Competition, Cooperation and Medical Expertise in the African Sleeping Sickness Campaigns Before World War One,” Columbia University Centre for International History, New York, December 3, 2010.
“Health Reform or Moral Crusade? French Doctors and the Colonial Anti-Alcohol Movement, 1890-1914,” Society for French Historical studies (SFHS), New Jersey, April 2008.
“The Intellectual Origins of German Colonial Studies: Interdisciplinary Origins of an Evolving Research Agenda,” roundtable at the American Historical Association (AHA), Washington D.C. January 2008.
“Colonial Cuisine: Hygiene, Health and “Frenchness,” 1890-1940,” presented at the French Historical Studies Association, Houston Texas, March 16, 2007.
“Germans and the International Anti-Alcohol Movement, 1880-1914,” presented at the German Studies Association, San Diego, October 2007.
“The International Anti-Alcohol Movement and the Atlantic World, 1885-1930,” presented at the York University Workshop “Alcohol and the Making of the Atlantic World: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” Toronto, October 2007.
“Trading Spaces: Duala Elites in Europe Before and After World War One,” presented at a roundtable at the American Historical Association (AHA) Annual Meeting, Atlanta Georgia, January 2007.
"Transnationalism, Internationalism, and Scientific Networks Before World War One," Second Annual German Modernities Workshop, University of Michigan, May 2006.
"Sleeping Sickness in Africa: Colonialism, Medical Ethics and the Search for a Cure, 1900-1914," African Studies Association (ASA) Annual Meeting, Washington D.C., November 2005.
"'Accidents May Happen': Experimentation and the Treatment of Sleeping Sickness in the African Colonies, 1900-1914," McMaster Colloquium in the History of Medicine, Hamilton, October 2005.
“Vaccinations and the Decline of Diphtheria,” Active History.ca, June 3, 2015 http://activehistory.ca/2015/06/vaccinations-and-the-decline-of-diphtheria/
Current Courses
| Term | Course Number | Section | Title | Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fall/Winter 2023 | AP/HIST4330 6.0 | A | Issues in the Hist. of Modern Germany | SEMR |
| Fall/Winter 2023 | AP/HIST2920 6.0 | A | The First Global War | LECT |
