Medical Mercenaries and Transimperial Science

This book is available on back order and is due to be published in June 2026

Medical Mercenaries and Transimperial Science between the Dutch East Indies and German-speaking Europe traces the trajectories of some 300 physicians from German-speaking Switzerland, Habsburg Austria, and the German Empire who served in the Dutch East Indies’ military and civil medical institutions between the 1870s and 1920s. The book offers new insights into the transimperial networks that shaped medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, highlighting the crucial yet ambivalent role of foreign physicians in the Dutch Empire. It shows how colonial medicine functioned as a vehicle for performing bourgeois respectability, scientific authority, and imperial masculinity, all while constantly being challenged and renegotiated in light of unfamiliar diseases, indigenous expertise, and local resistance. Following German-speaking physicians across the colonial military, laboratories, and plantations, the study reveals how colonial medicine structured hierarchies of race, class, gender, and nationality, and how knowledge forged in the tropics reshaped metropolitan medical discourse in German-speaking Europe and beyond.

Monique Ligtenberg is a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich. Her work examines the entanglements of science and empire from a transimperial perspective. She has published widely on the histories of medicine, natural history, and scientific collecting, with a particular focus on colonial Southeast Asia.