Contagion and Enclaves: Tropical Medicine in Colonial India

by Nandini Bhattacharya

Overview

Colonialism created exclusive economic and segregatory social spaces for the exploitation and management of natural and human resources, in the form of plantations, ports, mining towns, hill stations, civil lines and new urban centres for Europeans. Contagion and Enclaves studies the social history of medicine within two intersecting enclaves in colonial India; the hill station of Darjeeling which incorporated the sanitarian and racial norms of the British Raj; and in the adjacent tea plantations of North Bengal, which produced tea for the global market. This book studies the demographic and environmental transformation of the region: the racialization of urban spaces and its contestations, establishment of hill sanatoria, expansion of tea cultivation, labour emigration and the paternalistic modes of healthcare in the plantation. It examines how the threat of epidemics and riots informed the conflictual relationship between the plantations with the adjacent agricultural villages and district towns.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781846318290
Publisher:	Liverpool University Press
Publication date:	02/15/2013
Series:	Liverpool University Press - Postcolonialism Across Disciplines Series , #10
Pages:	219
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Dr Nandini Bhattacharya is Wellcome Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leicester.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
1. Disease and Colonial Enclaves
2. The Sanatorium of Darjeeling: European Health in a Tropical Enclave
3. Pioneering Years in Plantation and Medicine in Darjeeling, Terai and Duars
4. The Sanatorium Enclave: Climate and Class in Colonial Darjeeling
5. Contending Visions of Health Care in the Plantation Enclaves
6. The Plantation Enclave, the Colonial State and Labour Health Care
7. Tropical Medicine in Its 'Field': Malaria, Hookworm and the Rhetoric of the 'Local'
8. Habitation and Health in Colonial Enclaves: The Hill-station and the Tea Plantations
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"... this is an interesting book with several fresh perspectives. ... a book that adds greatly to our understanding of European perceptions of the 'tropics'."—Social History of Medicine

"The book's significant emphasis on the socioeconomic and administrative history of tea plantations in northern Bengal makes it as much a contribution to the history of labor in colonial India as a contribution to the history of medicine."—Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

From the Publisher

Combining original observations with very sophisticated arguments, written both clearly and elegantly, this makes an important contribution to the field.

Mark Harrison