ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the interrelationship between empire and infectious disease during the close of the second era of imperial expansion in South and Southeast Asia. It shows how debates about cholera's identity were interconnected with changing views of Britain's place in the world, as the mercantilism of the early nineteenth century shifted to a more aggressive search for markets and trade in the East, and as the Canton system gave way to more permanent self-governed foreign settlements in China. Epidemics of cholera were to recur in the second half of the century, during the Second Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion, when the disease again reached China along the networks of the British Empire from India to Hong Kong. Empire becomes analogous to an emergent disease, which is discernable through an assemblage of symptoms and 'hot spots' on the map. Cholera was construed as a condition that could be educed from a collection of disparate symptoms.
