White Health as Global Health

Abstract

With the expansion of European imperialism, public health concerns became globalized, necessitating cooperation with other imperial powers for the treatment and prevention of diseases. This essay traces the role of race and racism in the development of global public health law. It explores the connections, legacies, vestiges, and important disjunctions between tropical medicine and global public health, and considers the primacy given to white health as one of the animating purposes behind the emergence of the global public health regime. The centrality of protecting the health and interests of white people then and now continues to inform the global health agenda. This essay surfaces the role of international law through omission and commission in structuring and reifying racialized hierarchies of care and concern. It concludes that transformational reforms aimed at addressing this legacy are necessary.