Excursions into political economy of health

S.M. Hillier and J. A. Jewell, Health Care and Traditional Medicine in China 1800–1982, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983. Pp.xix + 452; £25.00.

D. Banerji, Poverty, Class and Health Culture in India (Vol.1), New Delhi: Prachi Prakashan, 1982. Pp.x + 309; Rs.100.

W.A. Zaman, Public Participation in Development and Health Programs: Lessons from Rural Bangladesh, London and New York: University Press of America, 1984. Pp.xix + 291; £15.15. (paperback).

J.K. van Ginneken and A.S. Muller (eds.), Maternal and Child Health in Rural Kenya: An Epidemiological Study, Beckenham, Kent: Croom Helm, 1984. Pp.viii + 373; £15.95.

The expression ‘political economy of health’ has quite different implications to scholars working within differing paradigms. The range of interpretations is apparent from an overview of work in this field in recent years. Two studies of singular importance for the student of health politics and health care in Asia are singled out for detailed review: one on China, the other on India. The reviewer also raises the question as to how far health education has been seen in the radical tradition as contributory towards the process of politicisation in peasant societies: here the literature is more scattered and a deeper analysis would be well repaid.     

The war‐making state and privatisation

States, created with the central purpose of defending national independence, resist the process of macro‐economic reform since it appears to limit their power to pursue this aim. The states of the former Centrally Planned Economies were marked out by their extreme subordination to the military drive, so the resistance to reshaping the ‘war‐making state’ into a ‘market‐facilitating state’ is considerable. The transition tends to be halted where the old structures of central control are ended without markets supplying alternative imperatives — a ‘rent‐seeking state’ is created. These themes are examined in relationship to privatisation of state owned enterprises in four countries: Russia, China, Vietnam and the Ukraine.     

Obituaries: Lady Delia Pilcher

The New York-born journalist and travel writer Francis Nichols (1879-1904) is best known for his travels through early 20^th-century China. However, his attempt in 1903-4 to travel through Tibet to Lhasa ahead of the Younghusband Mission, and thus to become the first westerner to reach the city, has been forgotten, partly on account of his death in the field and the loss of his diary. From new research in recently-catalogued documents and letters in the archives of the American Geographical Society (AGS), the author has compiled an account of Nichols’ mission to Lhasa, including the support he received from US backers, including the AGS, his travels in China, Tibet and India, and his relations with Younghusband and the British. Although Nichols was unable to reach Lhasa, the author observes that he should be credited as the first American to travel from India into the Chumbi valley in southern Tibet and across the Tibetan plateau from Phari to the town of Gyantse, 120 miles south-west of Lhasa.     

Hanging the Kaiser: Anglo-Dutch relations and the fate of Wilhelm II, 1918-20

The flight of the German Kaiser to the Netherlands at the end of the First World War led to a crisis in Anglo-Dutch relations. Prime Minister David Lloyd George made the trial of the Kaiser a key issue in the British general election campaign of December 1918. Article 227 of the Treaty of Versailles called for the Kaiser's surrender by the Netherlands government for trial before an international tribunal, a request the Dutch repeatedly refused during the period January to March 1920. Using both British and Dutch sources, this article highlights the internal Dutch debate over the fate of the Kaiser, and the confusion and hypocrisy with which the problem was handled by the British government.     

‘Venona’: the British dimension

‘Venona’ remains the greatest secret of the Cold War yet to be declassified, and offers the pieces of a jigsaw that, when assembled and interpreted, reveals the identities of dozens of Soviet agents who participated in GRU and NKVD networks across the globe between 1940 and 1948. Among them, operating in London, were Professor J.B.S Haldane, codenamed ‘Intelligentsia’, and Lord Swaythling's son, the Honourable Ivor Montagu, appropriately codenamed ‘Nobility’. Contained in the sometimes partially decrypted texts are clues to hundreds of other, as yet unexposed, spies, active in Australia, Mexico, Sweden, the United States, Britain, and numerous other countries. Betrayed by William Wiesband and Kim Philby, the ‘Venona’ project failed to find the traitor known as ‘Baron’ inside the wartime GCHQ, but was responsible for the arrest of Klaus Fuchs, confirming the guilt of Alger Hiss, Donald Maclean and the Rosenbergs, supporting the allegations of Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, and sparking off molehunts on three continents. ‘Venona’ sheds important new light on the assassination of Trotsky, Soviet penetration of the Manhattan project at Los Alamos and Berkeley, and reveals high-level espionage in the White House, OSS, the State Department and virtually every government department in Washington DC.