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Article ID: CBB580956211

“A Decided Inaptitude in His Constitution”: Race, Slavery, and Disability in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (2024)

Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 39
Pages: 95-113
Publication date: 2024
Language: English

URI: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/730404

DOI: 10.1086/730404

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Great Britain, colonies Medicine and race Imperialism Science and race Statistics Disabilities; disability; accessibility Slavery 19th century West Indies

This chapter explores relationships between disability, race, slavery, medicine, and statistics in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. At its core are reports on military medical statistics, principally authored by Alexander Tulloch, that would become the backbone for subsequent claims about the reality and numerical value of race. Tulloch’s Statistical Reports drew on his earlier (1837) statistical defense of plantation owners’ treatment of the enslaved, published only a few years after the formal abolition of slavery. In those Reports, Tulloch argued for the inability of Africans to adapt to climates far removed from those of their homelands. White bodies, by contrast, were hyper-able. Maladaptability, in other words, was cast as a form of racialized disability. Africans, by Tulloch’s logic, could move (or be moved) to relatively few places safely, while Europeans—committed to a range of settler-colonial projects—could claim a swathe of the world as their domain, even if the tropics remained a graveyard.

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Article Mara Mills; Jaipreet Virdi; Sarah F. Rose (2024) Disability, Epistemology, Sciencing. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 1-24). unapi

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