Since the flourishing of Indian Ocean research in the 1950s, scholars of the Indian Ocean World (IOW) have expanded our knowledge of the region beyond the conventional maritime histories characteristic of pre-1950 historical scholarship to explore the links between maritime events and actors, and land-based political, social, economic and ideological changes and exchanges from ancient times to the present. The result has been to more thoroughly integrate the IOW – particularly its coastal societies in the eastern portion of this region – into existing world historiographies. Anna Winterbottom and Facil Tesfaye's edited collection, Histories of Medicine and Healing in the Indian Ocean World, vol. 2: The Modern Period – a product of the proceedings of the Indian World Center's 2013 Histories of Medicine in the Indian Ocean conference – continues in this vein, but with a focus on a much less researched topic for Indian Ocean studies: the subject of health, disease and healing.

This collection – including the preceding volume reviewed above – is the very first to use the notion of an ‘Indian Ocean world’ as a conceptual and geographical framework for the study of medicine and healing. While Indian Ocean studies is a well-established sub-field within the ‘area studies’ paradigms that extend across the disciplines, the notion of an ‘Indian Ocean world’ is still a somewhat nascent conceptual and geographic category. Hence the central argument that Winterbottom and Tesfaye explain ‘informs our juxtaposition of these chapters’, which span a diverse set of times, spaces and queries: ‘that the Indian Ocean might be regarded as a conceptual “world” rather than merely a geographical space … as a “state or realm of existence”’ within which ‘[c]urrents of water and wind directed the course of expeditions around the Indian Ocean and directed the course of not only the transmission of disease but also the trade in healing objects, along with the movement of people and faiths’ (p. 27).

Volume 2 of this collection includes nine chapters, each focused on a specific area within the IOW, along with a short conclusion written by Michael N. Pearson, associate of the Indian Ocean World Center and a leading scholar in the field of Indian Ocean studies (the introduction to the collection is only included in the first volume). It is dominated largely by historians and/or scholars who employ what have, over the past sixty years, become conventional (e.g. archival/documentary and ethnographic) historical sources and methods for scholars working in the IOW and other parts of the ‘Global South’. The contributors provide detailed analyses of a wide range of subjects in a variety of geographical contexts, from the evolution of medical ideologies in relation to indentured labour in Mauritius (Yoshina Hurgobin), to changing explanations for disease transmission and containment in Réunion (Karine Aasgaard Jansen), healing in relation to colonialism and indigenous conceptions of health and healing in Tanzania and South Africa (Jonathan R. Walz, Julie Laplante), shifting state power and the internationalization of public health in India (Shirish N. Kavadi), Russian ‘medical diplomacy’ in Ethiopia (Rashed Chowdhury), and state policy with regard to the health of slaves and migrant workers in Egypt (George Michael La Rue).

Beyond the innovative conceptual/geographical IOW approaches taken throughout, the authors contribute significantly to our knowledge of how, when and why the IOW has been (re)integrated into a global healing network throughout the modern era, revealing how this region has not only assimilated, but also contributed to, Western medical and scientific knowledge systems. For instance, Kavadi explains how the Rockefeller Foundation – in a 1920s campaign against hookworm – was able to integrate medical techniques established in the southern US throughout the Indian Ocean region, effectively transforming ‘the scale and intensity of inter-regional connections in the shaping of health and welfare in Asia’ (p. 62). Additionally, Chowdhury analyses Russian attempts to establish a religious qua military alliance with Ethiopia through the establishment of hospitals with temporary in-resident Russian physicians in Addis Ababa from 1896 to 1913, highlighting the long-lasting effects of this shaky Russo-Ethiopian alliance throughout the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first. And in an almost poetic, postcolonial style analysis of Zigua healing in the mountains of north-eastern Tanzania, Walz deploys what he calls a ‘critical archaeology of healing’ (p. 212) to explore how ‘Zigua lives and medical practice draw from a geographical, historical, and cultural borderland of mountains and the Indian Ocean to comprise a worldview in motion’ (p. 197). Walz's analysis reveals a constantly emergent world view among the Zigua that – largely as a result of a long history of imperialism(s) in the area – is deeply reflective of a complex amalgamation of both African and Indian Ocean influences, fragments of which can be found within the various elements that have come to constitute Zigua healing practices. Walz's powerful interdisciplinary analysis moves beyond conventional archeological and/or historical methods to illuminate how this region specifically – and Eastern Africa more broadly – can provide us with evidence of ‘coast–hinterland linkages and resonance between more recent times and deep antiquity’ (p. 210), and is a superb example of the invaluable knowledge to be gained from the expansion of our view of the IOW to its western edges.

While this collection is rich in geographical diversity, many of the early chapters present what appear to be very preliminary findings, and, as such, these chapters lack the kind of systematic analysis (e.g. a broad overarching/central argument) that one might hope for with regard to such an interesting topic as Indian Ocean studies. The preliminary nature of some of the research and analyses presented likely also explains the absence of interdisciplinary methods and concepts throughout many of the chapters and the resultant dominance of conventional historical evidence or methods mentioned above. However, this is less a critique and more an expression of a hope for more to come in the future from each of these scholars.

Overall, this collection is a wonderful addition to the swiftly expanding literature within Indian Ocean studies, highlighting the multiple and complex ways in which ‘[h]ealing draws from and treats all phases of community experience in a hermeneutic circle that enchains antiquity to the future’ (p. 197). The vast geographic focus – particularly its inclusion of the western Indian Ocean world or ‘Indian Ocean Africa’ – makes it an invaluable addition not only to the current literature on the IOW, but also to the fields of history of medicine and science, helping to move research in these fields beyond a conventional national or geographic vantage point. It might, therefore, be easily considered essential reading for scholars of the IOW, as well as for state- and/or nation-specific specialists of the region, and for scholars working in the fields of medical and scientific history and specialists in world/global history.