In India, during the 1918 influenza pandemic, a staggering 12 to 13 million people died, the vast majority between the months of September and December. According to an eyewitness, “There was none to remove the dead bodies and the jackals made a feast.”
At the time of the pandemic, India had been under British colonial rule for over 150 years. The fortunes of the British colonizers had always been vastly different from those of the Indian people, and nowhere was the split more stark than during the influenza pandemic, as I discovered while researching my Ph.D. on the subject.
The resulting devastation would eventually lead to huge changes in India – and the British Empire.
Read full article in The Conversation
Maura Chhun received her Ph.D from the University of Colorado (at Boulder) 2015, where she researched the 1918 Flu Pandemic in British India, focusing on the inadequate response of the British government. She has been teaching the history of World War II and the Holocaust at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota since 2016. Her research interests lie in the intersection of the history of public health and empire, while her teaching focuses largely on the history of war and genocide. She has presented public lectures on World War I as well as the history of concentration camps, and co-designed a course on the math and history of global pandemics with Matthew Moynihan at Framingham State University. (Courtesy of The Conversation.)