Toxic Histories is a unique book on a unique theme. Toxicity affects society both locally and globally but, maybe because of the paucity and complexity of sources, it remained a neglected area of research for the humanities and social sciences. Only outstanding scholarship could have woven something so interesting and relevant out of almost thin air. David Arnold uses poison as a prism to find some less visible shades of the politics, society and culture in colonial and post-colonial India. But his primary focus remains on the colonial modes of poison governance and the role of toxicology. As a medical historian of great eminence, he rightly enquires, is poison medicine's evil twin and toxic other? Are not poisoning and pollution connected? How did this connectivity and overlapping evolve? Such questions would no doubt force us to rethink not only environmental but medico-scientific history as well.

The book is neatly arranged in seven chapters along with a well-laid introduction and a brief, almost poetic, concluding section. Chapter 1 begins with a section on what the author calls ‘India's poison culture’ as found in the Indian mythologies and oral and literary traditions, as well as in ancient medical texts and practices. Another section is titled ‘The social function of poison’ (without the due apology to J.D. Bernal). Here one finds not really the ‘function’ but the misuse of poison and the contemporary colonial sources are full of such examples on female infanticide, abortion and thugee. More insightful is the section on ‘Poverty and poison’. Extreme poverty made people consume toxic grains to stave off death by starvation. Did the people consume such grains in pre-colonial times or did this practice became more widespread due to colonial rapacity?

Chapter 2 discusses the emergence of toxicology as scientific knowledge within colonial parameters, some kind of an imperial version of the Greek pharmakon. The efficacy of a drug depended also on the way it was used. Potentially harmful in one instance could be helpful in another. The author alludes to a Jekyll-and-Hyde character of a potent drug and its local practitioners. This had to be mediated by the colonial scientists and doctors who served under a dual mandate of representing the metropolitan knowledge and at the same time exploring the indigenous ideas and resources. Out of this quest emerged a new kind of colonial toxicology. Its pioneers were W.B. O'Shaughnessy, John Fleming, Forbes Royle, William Dymock, Kanny Lall Dey and many more. The nineteenth century was truly a century of bio-prospecting. The colonial medical men who explored the plants and minerals and local knowledge were not simple explorers; they thought and worked ‘like a state’, examining minutely the benefits and dangers of a particular product or practice (p. 66).

In the next two chapters the author goes deeper into the panics and scares that the fear of poison created, and the medical jurisprudence that emerged to deal with such situations. The society at the receiving end was bound to be a fearful society. Even well-intentioned medical interventions were received with fear and alarm. The colonizers were also scared of the ‘wider culture of criminality’ that they perceived among the colonized (p. 99). So colonial laws had to be equipped and strengthened. Science and law now had to collaborate, and the office of the chemical examiner played a crucial role not only in individual cases (of poisoning, murder, etc.) but more so in terms of public health, sanitation and epidemics. In Chapter 5 Arnold delights with two poison plots. Here the historian turns detective. These are private instances of ‘murderous infidelities’ and ‘poisonous intimacies’ which could have dented the prestige of the Raj. These needed not only scientific analysis but also a fairly quick judicial resolution.

The Poisons Act of 1904 comes as the ‘toxic watershed’. It sought to limit the availability and sale of poisonous substance like arsenic. Previous legal stipulations were not powerful enough to give the desired result. But even in the context of the Act of 1904, one wonders whether the law was deficient or the will to enforce was weak. In a vast country like India with so many contradictory traditions and requirements, the enforcement machinery was always found weak and at best prickly. It is here that the author moves from individual and sporadic instances to societal poisoning. Issues like environmental degradation, poor sanitation and adulteration come to the fore in Chapter 7. I wish he had given more space to these issues and a little more to the pioneers like H. Hankin and W. Haffekine. But whatever comes is based on primary data (mostly from Maharastra State Archive). The turn of the century saw the notion of the polluted city emerge. C.H. Bedford, the then chemical examiner of Bengal, reported in 1902, ‘no country in the world furnishes anything like the amount of toxicological material that India does’ (p. 4). If this was the situation in the high noon of the empire, what would be the situation a century later? The post-colonial phase gets hardly ten pages or so but the link is established clearly. From the sporadic tales of poison we have moved to unprecedented and pernicious pollution. This book tells the path of this journey and explains, in a way only an accomplished historian can, why and how we live in ‘an age of poisons’.