Three men and three women: a plant collector, a merchant and his novelist wife, a military officer, and two famous women travelers went to China between the Opium War and the formal end of the opium trade, 1842–1907. Their range of perspectives, their acquaintance with one another and their similar scope of travel to Hong Kong, the treaty ports, and Sichuan lend intensity to their picture of China and the Western presence there.

What the travelers record reveals is a continuity in the response of the West and China to each other. Susan Schoenbauer Thurin’s study of these writings presents a rich tapestry of impressions, biases, and cultural perspectives that inform our own understanding of the Victorians and their views of the world outside their own.

The strange mix of opium and missionaries, the aura of fabled “Cathay” and its valuable trade items, the attraction and repulsion of the exotic otherness the travelers experience, reflect the political, religious, and racial views of their era, and explain the allure of the Orient that, in part, characterized their age. Victorian Travelers and the Opening of China, 1842–1907 is a remarkable look into the cultural past.

Virus Research in Twentieth-Century Uganda presents the stories of scientists at the Uganda Virus Research Institute (UVRI), a biomedical center founded in 1936. The book analyzes the strategies and conditions that allowed the institute to endure and thrive through successive political and scientific regimes of the interwar period, the postwar period, the transition to independence, the conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s, and the Museveni presidency. Julia Ross Cummiskey combines methods and themes from the history of medicine and public health, science and technology studies, and African studies to show that the story of the UVRI and the people who worked there transforms our understanding of the nature of local and international expertise and the evolution of global health research over the course of the twentieth century. Global health is one of the chief areas in which African and foreign institutions interact today. Billions of dollars are invested in global health projects on the continent, many involving strategically selected “local partners.” In the discourse of these projects, local and global are often framed as complementary but distinct categories of people, institutions, traditions, and practices. But the history of biomedical research at the UVRI shows that these distinctions are unstable and mutable and that people and institutions have mobilized both categories to attract funding, professional prestige, and research opportunities. The book complicates the local/global binary that is implicit (and sometimes explicit) in many studies of colonial, international, and global health and medical research, especially in Africa. Moreover, it challenges assumptions about global health as an enterprise dominated by researchers based in the Global North and recenters the history of biomedicine in Africa.