“The Cultivation of Whiteness can usefully be read as a narrative of disciplinary growth and professionalization in tropical medicine. It also explores the enduring power of colonial medicine and medical geography to shape political decision-making through rich primary sources. . . . Anderson's use of wide-ranging source material is laudable and exciting. . . . [E]ssential and enjoyable reading for scholars of medicine and empire, certainly, but also for historians of the Progressive Era, of race, and of global and public health.” — Roberta Bivins, Technology and Culture
“[A] well-produced and well-argued book. . . . [It] should be widely read.” — Roy MacLeod, Bulletin of the History of Medicine
“Anderson deserves high praise for his exhaustive work with primary documents to sort out the complex network of players, institutions, and debates that make up Australia’s racial science history. One can only hope that this encyclopedic effort will enable a second generation of scholars to probe further the meanings and historiography behind that history.” — Elizabeth Green Musselman, ISIS
“This broad-ranging study builds on a considerable body of local research to produce the first comprehensive history of Australian medical and scientific ideas about race from the early nineteenth century to the 1940s. It is a work of major significance. Anderson has written both an authoritative and prescient synthesis and a work of original research, utilizing the letters, journals, publications, and other surviving documentation of local medical practitioners and scientists. It is a work distinguished by command of its field and clarity of exposition.” — Andrew Markus, American Historical Review
“[Anderson] writes with passion, wit, and panache, and the principal virtues of The Cultivation of Whiteness are the old-fashioned ones of thoroughness, accuracy, and impeccable documentation. . . . [His] sensitive study is a model of how contentious historical issues can be confronted.” — W. F. Bynum, TLS
“One of the virtues of The Cultivation of Whiteness is that it brings together aspects of Australian life and history that are now more often separated—race and environment, blood and soil, medicine and geography, tropical science and urban health, biological thought and national policy, Aboriginality and immigration, the body and the mind. The result is a rich and subtle history of ideas that is both intellectual and organic, and that vividly evokes past states of mind and their lingering, haunting power.” — Tom Griffiths, Sydney Morning Herald
“The Cultivation of Whiteness is an unusual and well-crafted history, a model of method for historical and anthropological studies of medicine and public health.” — Judith Farquhar, author of Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China
“Warwick Anderson is one of the foremost historians of medicine and postcolonialism and The Cultivation of Whiteness one of the most detailed and persuasive explorations of exactly how scientific medicine is influenced by, and in turn promotes, racialization and racism.” — Priscilla Wald, Duke University
“The Cultivation of Whiteness is a beautifully written, extensively researched, and conceptually robust account of what it meant to be white in Australia from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century.” — Elizabeth A. Povinelli, author of The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality