PLAGUING THE EMPIRE: COLONIAL EXPERIMENTS IN GOVERNING DISEASE

Durgesh Solanki, Johns Hopkins University

The control of epidemics has been an important feature of the state. States desire to curb the spread of infectious diseases since they result in mass casualties, political instability, and financial loss. State responses to epidemics are assumed to be rooted in scientific health discourses. In my paper, I examine the case of a series of bubonic plague epidemics in the early 20th century. Almost all major port cities were impacted by disease but my work focuses on outbreaks in Hong Kong (1894), Bombay (1896), and Cape Town (1901). The causative bacterium for the plague was discovered by Alexandre Yersin, a French scientist, during the Hong Kong plague in 1894. Following the plague outbreak in Bombay, Paul Louis-Simond identified fleas as the vector for the spread of the disease from rat-to-rat and rat-to-human (Butler 2014). One might expect that these discoveries would alter the colonial administration’s response to the disease. And yet in each of these cities, the response to plague were similar, involving quarantine, policing, and the development of sanitation systems. Through comparative archival research, my paper makes two arguments. Firstly, I argue that the bubonic plague epidemics in the three cities served as political opportunities for the colonial administration to expand its reach. In this way, successive outbreaks served as a series of experiments in colonial governance; British administrators used these as chances to test and refine strategies to govern and exploit colonial populations. Secondly, I advance the concept of repertoires of governance, which I define as sets of ideas and practices that states develop to govern populations. Through this concept, I argue that the colonial state and its emissaries identified the disease as existing in the racialized bodies of native subjects.

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 Presented in Session 72. Fertility, Mortality, Plagues and Epidemics