Themes

British interest in the climate and health of foreign lands was evident at the very outset of colonial endeavour. Early studies documented the arrival of European sickness in the “New World” – wiping out several native populations in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – and the exchange of diseases that was a part of the colonial encounter. Such was the interest that images of foreign sickness began to appear in early modern literature, including the works of Shakespeare.

When yellow fever ravaged the United States (1793-1822), the American responses to the epidemic were influenced by the nascent nation’s relations with Great Britain and its colonized past. From the 1780s, textbooks like James Lind’s An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates on how British sailors and travellers could deal with the Indian subcontinent’s temperatures, insects and likely illnesses were published and widely read. Likewise, the African climate and landscape received considerable attention from medical specialists as colonization proceeded. As a consequence of such attention, diseases like scurvy, cholera and malaria entered the British social imaginary, and may have even influenced the literature of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In the Asian or African continent, the colony was constructed as the climatological Other to Europe, although this attitude shifted over time. It was the place of deadly diseases and was the graveyard of the European. Later, the European began to see the colonial disease zone as an index of the natives’ poor hygiene, primitive habits and social conditions, which the “modern” science of the European battled. Tropical medicine emerged in the face of this interpretation of the threat posed by the colony to the British body and identity. The difference in constitutions, and concomitant responses to the environment of the colony, became a code for racial difference itself. Eventually, tropical medicine also burgeoned into discourses and practices of “public health” in most parts of the British Empire.

Another important response to the environmental conditions encountered in India, particularly during the summer months, were the British built hill-stations as summer residences. Places like Shimla and Darjeeling offered British families a refuge from the heat and dust of the plains, and entire families with their vast entourages made their way there. So massive was this seasonal migration that at the height of summer the whole of British India was in effect governed from Shimla. Not only that, Shimla today with its church, library and post office bears the imprint of British annexation.

In related fields, the tropics was also imagined as a space where rampant sexuality of the colonized, producing raging venereal diseases among the European soldiers, resulted in stringent legislations, including enforced medical inspections and spatial segregation, especially in Africa and the Indian subcontinent.  In fields such as psychiatry, the incidents of mental illness among the colonizers were seen as indexes of racial weakness that needed to be controlled, and colonial psychiatric practice evolved as a means to exploring and controlling such conditions.

Katherine Arner’s work on the politics of health around the yellow fever epidemic is a useful starting point to examine colonial contexts of disease. László Máthé-Shires examines the British discourse around Africa in the late 19^th century. Stephen Legg shows the link between the British perception of the disease environment and colonial legislation. Ryan Johnson and Amnar Khalid’s volume covers the history of colonial public health in Africa, India, Burma etc.