John Nott, "Between Feast Famine: Food, Health, and the History of Ghana's Long Twentieth Century" (UCL Press, 2025)

Ghana’s twentieth century was one of dramatic political, economic, and environmental change. Sparked initially by the impositions of colonial rule, these transformations had significant, if rarely uniform, repercussions for the determinants of good and bad nutrition. All across this new and uneven polity, food production, domestic reproduction, gender relations, and food cultures underwent radical and rapid change. This volatile national history was matched only by the scientific instability of nutritional medicine during these same years.

Moving between the dry Northern savannah, the mineral-rich and food-secure Southern rainforest, and the youthful, ever-expanding cities, John Nott's Between Feast and Famine: Food, Health, and the History of Ghana’s Long Twentieth-Century (UCL Press, 2025) is a comparative history of nutrition in Ghana since the end of the nineteenth century. At the heart of this story is an analysis of how an uneven capitalist transformation variously affected the lives of women and children. It traces the change from sporadic periods of hunger in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through epidemics of childhood malnutrition during the twentieth century, and into emergent epidemics of diet-related non-communicable disease in the twenty-first century. Employing a novel, critical approach to historical epidemiology, Nott argues that detailing the co-production of science and its subjects in the past is essential for understanding and improving health in the present.

John Nott is a Research Fellow in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests sit primarily across the history of medicine and economic history, with a particular focus on colonial and postcolonial contexts. He also has complementary interests in medical anthropology and STS, and is currently a Research Fellow on Lukas Engelmann's ERC-funded project, "The Epidemiological Revolution: A History of Epidemiological Reasoning in the Twentieth Century." Amongst other things, he is working on a monograph detailing the economic and medical history of surveillance in Anglophone Africa. Dr. Nott is also the Principal Investigator of a collaborative British Academy-funded project, "Population Health in Practice: Towards a Comparative Historical Ethnography of the Demographic Health Survey," which explores the history and contemporary production of epidemiological and demographic data in Ghana, Tanzania, and Malawi.

Dr. Nott was trained at the University of Leeds, where his PhD focused on the history of nutrition and nutritional medicine in Ghana since the end of the nineteenth century. Immediately before coming to Edinburgh, he was a fellow at the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA) at the University of Ghana. Before this, Dr. Nott was based at Maastricht University as a Research Fellow on Anna Harris' ERC-funded project, “Making Clinical Sense: a Historical-Ethnographic Study of the Technologies Used in Medical Education. The edited collection, “Making Sense of Medicine: Material Culture and the Reproduction of Medical Knowledge,” recently won the Amsterdamska Award by the European Association for the Study of Science & Technology (EASST).

You can learn more about his work here.

Afua Baafi Quarshie is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on mothering and childhood in post-independence Ghana.

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