Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

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2. Introduction: Empires and Emotions

   • Harald Fischer-Tiné, Christine Whyte

   Pages 1-23

3. The Health of Body and Mind

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 25-25

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   2. Minds in Crisis: Medico-moral Theories of Disorder in the Late Colonial World

      • Dane Kennedy

      Pages 27-47

   3. The Poison Panics of British India

      • David Arnold

      Pages 49-71

   4. The Settler’s Demise: Decolonization and Mental Breakdown in 1950s Kenya

      • Will Jackson

      Pages 73-96

4. Imperial Panics and Discursive Responses

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 97-97

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   2. Mass-Mediated Panic in the British Empire? Shyamji Krishnavarma’s ‘Scientific Terrorism’ and the ‘London Outrage’, 1909

      • Harald Fischer-Tiné

      Pages 99-134

   3. The Art of Panicking Quietly: British Expatriate Responses to ‘Terrorist Outrages’ in India, 1912–33

      • Kama Maclean

      Pages 135-167

   4. Mirrors of Violence: Inter-racial Sex, Colonial Anxieties and Disciplining the Body of the Indian Soldier During the First World War

      • Gajendra Singh

      Pages 169-197

5. Practical and Institutional Counter-measures

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 199-199

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   2. Colonial Panics Big and Small in the British Empire (1865–1907)

      • Norman Etherington

      Pages 201-224

   3. Imperial Fears and Transnational Policing in Europe: The ‘German Problem’ and the British and French Surveillance of Anti-colonialists in Exile, 1904–1939

      • Daniel Brückenhaus

      Pages 225-257

   4. Repertoires of European Panic and Indigenous Recaptures in Late Colonial Indonesia

      • Vincent Houben

      Pages 259-277

   5. ‘The Swiss of All People!’ Politics of Embarrassment and Dutch Imperialism around 1900

      • Bernhard C. Schär

      Pages 279-303

6. ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Ignorance’

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 305-305

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   2. Arrested Circulation: Catholic Missionaries, Anthropological Knowledge and the Politics of Cultural Difference in Imperial Germany, 1880–1914

      • Richard Hölzl

      Pages 307-344

   3. ‘The Strangest Problem’: Daniel Wilberforce, the Human Leopards Panic and the Special Court in Sierra Leone

      • Christine Whyte

      Pages 345-368

   4. Critical Mass: Colonial Crowds and Contagious Panics in 1890s Hong Kong and Bombay

      • Robert Peckham

      Pages 369-391

7. Back Matter

   Pages 393-404

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This book argues that the history of colonial empires has been shaped to a considerable extent by negative emotions such as anxiety, fear and embarrassment as well as by the regular occurrence of panics. The case studies it assembles examine the various ways in which panics and anxieties were generated in imperial situations and how they shook up the dynamics between seemingly all-powerful colonizers and the apparently defenceless colonized. Drawing from examples of the British, Dutch and German colonial experience, the volume sketches out some of the main areas (such as disease, native ‘savagery’ or sexual transgression) that generated panics or created anxieties in colonial settings and analyses the most common varieties of practical, discursive and epistemic strategies adopted by the colonisers to curb the perceived threats. 

 

• colonies
• empire
• imperial
• colonialism
• panic
• cross-colonial

• Zurich, Switzerland

  Harald Fischer-Tiné

Harald Fischer-Tiné is Professor of Modern Global History at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zürich), Switzerland. Previous to his appointment in Zurich he taught at Jacobs University, Bremen, Humboldt-University, Berlin and the University of Heidelberg. He has published extensively on South Asian colonial history, the history of the British Empire and global history. His most recent monograph is the biography of an Indian revolutionary in European exile: Shyamji Krishnavarma: Sanskrit, Sociology and Anti-Imperialism (2014)

Policies and ethics