Journal of Health & Development Vol. 4 No. 1 & 1 January – June 2007 65 HEALTH & DEVELOPMENT RESEARRCH COLONIAL POLICIES AND SPREAD OF TUBERCULOSIS An Enquiry in British India (1890- 1940) Bikramaditya Kumar Choudhary INTRODUCTION The period between the 15 th and 19 th century witnessed an era of expanding empires by the European powers.1 This expan- sion of empire took place through trade relations and other coercive and subversive methods that included economic, political and military means, and which continued and even accelerated with new knowledge about resources (Smith, 1978).2 The intention of this expansion was nothing but the accumulation of wealth and the occupation, or rather exploita- tion, of the so-called ‘unclaimed’ land full of mineral and other resources. There were also unintended consequences of this expansion, ranging from cultural amalgamation to the ‘crea- tion of disease network’, which spanned the world (Watts, 1999). Such expansion was often referred to as imperialism, and it was not a mere set of economic, political and military phenomena. Rather, imperialism was a complex ideology which had widespread intellectual, cultural and technical expression in the era of European world supremacy. Imperial- ism, in the sense of colonial capitalist expansion, started in the late 19 th century and continued, with certain modification, for the interest of a handful of imperialists, just as the rest of the world is still dominated by a few metropolitan centres (Paul, 1978: 271). There have been different kinds of justifications for impe- rial rule, right from cultural supremacy to technological advancements. The spread of western medicine is one such justification for imperial rule. By the close of the 19 th century, medicine had become a tool for demonstrating European superiority over the ‘tropical world’ in terms of political, 1-4 2008