Health, Hearth and Empire: Climate, Race and Reproduction in British India and Western Australia (2021)
In the wake of the Indian Uprising in 1857, British sanitary campaigner and statistician Florence Nightingale renewed her efforts to reform Britain's military forces at home and in India. With the Uprising following so soon after the Crimean War (1854-56), where poor sanitary conditions had also taken an enormous toll, in 1859 Nightingale pressed the British Parliament to establish a Royal Commission on the Sanitary State of the Army in India, which delivered its report in 1863. Western Australia was the only colony to present its case before the Commissioners as an ideal location for a foreign sanatorium, with glowing assessments offered by colonial elites and military physicians. In the meantime, Nightingale had also commenced an investigation into the health of Indigenous children across the British Empire. Nearly 150 schools responded to her survey from Ceylon, Natal, West Africa, Canada and Australia. The latter's returns came from just three schools in Western Australia: New Norcia, Annesfield in Albany and the Sisters of Mercy in Perth, which together yielded the highest death rate of the respondents. Although Nightingale herself saw these inquiries as separate, their juxtaposition invites closer analysis of the ways in which metropolitan elites envisioned particular racial futures for Anglo and indigenous populations of empire, and sought to steer them accordingly. The reports reflect prevailing expectations and anxieties about the social and biological reproduction of white society in the colonies, and the concomitant decline of Indigenous peoples. Read together, these two inquiries reveal the complex ways in which colonial matters of reproduction and dispossession, displacement and replacement, were mutually constituting concerns of empire. In this article I situate the efforts to attract white women and their wombs to the temperate colony of Western Australia from British India in the context of contemporary concerns about Anglo and Aboriginal mortality. In doing so, I reflect on the intersections of gender, race, medicine and environment in the imaginaries of empire in the mid-nineteenth century.
...MoreArticle Katie Holmes; Ruth Morgan (2021) Placing Gender: Gender and Environmental History. Environment and History (pp. 187-191).
Similar Citations
Book
Pratik Chakrabarti;
(2017)
Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics
Book
Harrison, Mark;
(1999)
Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600-1850
Article
Parsons, Meg;
(2012)
Creating a Hygienic Dorm: The Refashioning of Aboriginal Women and Children and the Politics of Racial Classification in Queensland 1920s--40s
Article
Godden, Judith;
Helmstadter, Carol;
(2004)
Woman's Mission and Professional Knowledge: Nightingale Nursing in Colonial Australia and Canada
Book
Gourlay, Jharna;
(2003)
Florence Nightingale and the Health of the Raj
Book
Mowbray, Patricia;
(2008)
Florence Nightingale and the Viceroys: A Campaign for the Health of the Indian People
Article
Arnold, David J.;
(2009)
Diabetes in the Tropics: Race, Place and Class in India, 1880--1965
Article
Arup K. Chatterjee;
(2022)
Aconite in Victorian Tropical Toxicology
Book
Bhattacharya, Nandini;
(2012)
Contagion and Enclaves: Tropical Medicine in Colonial India
Book
Chakrabarti, Pratik;
(2012)
Bacteriology in British India: Laboratory Medicine and the Tropics
Book
Conor Heffernan;
(2023)
Indian Club Swinging and the Birth of Global Fitness: Mugdars, Masculinity and Marketing
Thesis
Pande, Ishita;
(2005)
Curing Calcutta: Race, Liberalism, and Colonial Medicine in British Bengal,1830--1900
Book
MacLeod, Roy;
(2000)
Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise
Book
Wald, Erica;
(2014)
Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780--1868
Article
Seng, Loh Kah;
(2008)
“Our lives are bad but our luck is good”: A Social History of Leprosy in Singapore
Book
Esme Cleall;
(2022)
Colonising Disability: Impairment and Otherness Across Britain and Its Empire, c. 1800–1914
Article
Paul Turnbull;
(2022)
‘Thrown into the fossil gap’: Indigenous Australian ancestral bodily remains in the hands of early Darwinian anatomists, c. 1860–1916
Article
Toby Raeburn;
Kayla Sale;
Paul Saunders;
Aunty Kerrie Doyle;
(2022)
Aboriginal Australian mental health during the first 100 years of colonization, 1788–1888: a historical review of nineteenth-century documents
Article
Rowse, Tim;
Shellam, Tiffany;
(2013)
The Colonial Emergence of a Statistical Imaginary
Book
Lina-Maria Murillo;
(2025)
Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands
Be the first to comment!