Abstract
This chapter examines the interrelation between contagious disease and ‘native’ panic in two sites of the British Empire: Hong Kong and Bombay during the onset of the Third Plague Pandemic in the 1890s. It shows how colonial concerns about the destabilizing impact of bubonic plague in Asia became intertwined with anxieties about the management of ‘panic-stricken’ indigenous crowds. A metropolitan interest in the ‘crowd’ as a phenomenon of mass industrial city life, popularized in works such as Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895/1896), was recast in the Asian colonies. There, the teeming populations of Eastern cities and their vast hinterlands exposed the precariousness of colonial authority. In Hong Kong and Bombay—both key port cities of the Empire—new scientific knowledge about the aetiology and transmission pathways of the plague ‘germ’ overlapped with a quasi-scientific understanding of the ‘contagious’ nature of native crowds. The chapter argues that this co-production of imperial knowledge about crowds and germs had a countervailing effect: it induced novel forms of anxiety and infective panic.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Anderson, Clare. 2012. Subaltern Lives: Biographies of Colonialism in the Indian Ocean World, 1790–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Arnold, David. 1993. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Arnold, David. 1987. ‘Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896–1900’. In Subaltern Studies V: Writings on South Asian History and Society, edited by Ranajit Guha, 55–90. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Arnold, David, and Stuart Blackburn. 2004. Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography, and Life History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Barrows, Susanna. 1981. Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Bayly, Christopher A. 1988. Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Benedict, Carol. 1996. Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-Century China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Booker, M. Keith. 1997. Colonial Power, Colonial Texts: India in the Modern British Novel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Booth, General [William]. 1890. In Darkest England and the Way Out. New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls.
Borch, Christian. 2012. The Politics of Crowds: An Alternative History of Sociology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Callard, Felicity. 2006. ‘The Sensation of Infinite Vastness’; Or, the Emergence of Agoraphobia in the Late 19th Century. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24(6): 873–89.
Campbell, James MacNabb. 1898. Report of the Plague Committee on the Plague in Bombay, for the Period Extending from the 1st July 1897 to the 30th April 1898. Bombay: Times of India Steam Press.
Cantlie, James. 1897. Report on the Conditions under which Leprosy Occurs in China, Indo-China, Malaya, the Archipelago, and Oceania. Compiled Chiefly during 1894. London: Macmillan.
Cantlie, James. 1890. Leprosy in Hongkong. Hong Kong: Kelly & Walsh.
Catanach, Ian J. 2007. ‘The Gendered Terrain of Disaster’?: India and the Plague, c. 1896–1918. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 30(2): 241–67.
Catanach, Ian J. 1988. ‘Plague and the Tensions of Empire, 1896–1918’. In Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, edited by David Arnold. Studies in Imperialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Chadwick, Osbert. 1882. Mr. Chadwick’s Reports on the Sanitary Condition of Hong Kong: With Appendices and Plans. London: Colonial Office.
Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan. 1998. Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, c. 1850–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan. 1992. ‘Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India, 1896–1918’. In Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence, edited by Paul Slack and Terence Osborn Ranger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cohn, Bernard S. 1996. Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cohn, Bernard S. 1987. ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia’. In An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays, edited by Bernard S. Cohn, 224–54. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Condon, J.K. 1900. The Bombay Plague: Being a History of the Progress of Plague in the Bombay Presidency from September 1896 to June 1890. Bombay: Education Society’s Steam Press.
Couchman, M.E. 1897. Account of Plague Administration in the Bombay Presidency from September 1896 till May 1897. Bombay: Government Central Press.
De Quincey, Thomas. 1823. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. 2nd edn. London: Taylor and Hessey.
Desrosières, Alain. 1998. The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Echenberg, Myron. 2007. Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901. New York: New York University Press.
Eitel, E.J. 1895. Europe in China: The History of Hongkong from the Beginning to the Year 1882. London: Luzac & Co.
Forman, Ross G. 2013. China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gatacre, W.F. 1897. Report on the Bubonic Plague in Bombay, 1896–97. Bombay: Times of India.
Hacking, Ian. 1990. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harris, Richard, and Robert Lewis. 2013. ‘Colonial Anxiety Counted: Plague and Census in Bombay and Calcutta’. In Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia, edited by Robert Peckham and David M. Pomfret, 61–78. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Kerr, Douglas. 2008. Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Kidambi, Prashant. 2007. The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Kidd, Benjamin. 1898. The Control of the Tropics. New York: Macmillan.
Kipling, Rudyard. 1899. Without Benefit of Clergy. New York: Doubleday & McClure.
Klein, Ira. 1988. Plague, Policy and Popular Unrest in British India. Modern Asian Studies 22(4): 723–55.
Lahiri Choudhury, Deep Kanta. 2010. Telegraphic Imperialism: Crisis and Panic in the Indian Empire, c. 1830. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lambert, David and Alan Lester, eds. 2006. Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Le Bon, Gustave. 1896. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. New York: Macmillan.
Le Bon, Gustave. 1895. Psychologie des Foules. Paris: Félix Alcan.
Le Bon, Gustave. 1887. Les civilisations de l’Inde. Paris: Firmin-Didot.
Mackinder, Halford. 1900. The Great Trade Routes: Lecture V. Journal of the Institute of Bankers 21(5): 266–73.
Masselos, J.C. 1993. The City as Represented in Crowd Action: Bombay, 1893. Economic and Political Weekly 28(5): 182–88.
McClelland, J.S. 2010. The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti. London: Routledge.
Mishra, Saurabh. 2011. Pilgrimage, Politics, and Pestilence: The Haj from the Indian Subcontinent, 1860–1920. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Moses, Michael Valdez. 2007. Disorientalism: Conrad and the Imperial Origins of Modernist Aesthetics. In Modernism and Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899–1939, edited by Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses, 44–45. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Nathan, Robert. 1898. The Plague in India, 1896–1897. Vol. 3. Simla: Government Central Printing Office.
Nye, Robert Allen. 1975. The Origins of Crowd Psychology: Gustave LeBon and the Crisis of Mass Democracy in the Third Republic London: Sage.
O’Connor, Errin. 2000. Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Orwell, George. 2003. Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays. London: Penguin.
Peckham, Robert. 2016a. Epidemics in Modern Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peckham, Robert. 2016b. Spaces of Quarantine in Colonial Hong Kong. In Quarantine: Local and Global Histories, edited by Alison Bashford, 66–84. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Peckham, Robert. 2016c. Hong Kong Junk: Plague and the Economy of Chinese Things. Bulletin of the History of Medicine 90(1): 32–60.
Peckham, Robert. 2015. ‘Introduction––Panic: Reading the Signs’ in Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties, edited by Robert Peckham, 1–21. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Peckham, Robert. 2013. Infective Economies: Empire, Panic and the Business of Disease. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41 (2): 211–37.
Pick, Daniel. 1989. Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Poovey, Mary. 1995. Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Porter, Theodore M. 1986. The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rogers, Nicholas. 1998. Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Rudé, George F.E. 1981. The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Saussy, Haun. 2006. Crowds, Number, and Mass in China. In Crowds, edited by Jeffrey Thompson Schnapp and Matthew Tiews, 249–69. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Schnapp, Jeffrey Thompson. 2006. Mob Porn. In Crowds, edited by Jeffrey Thompson Schnapp and Matthew Tiews, 1–45. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Sighele, Scipio. 1895. La Folla delinquente. Studio di psicologia collettiva. 2nd edn. Turin: Fratelli Bocca.
Simpson, W.J. 1905. A Treatise on Plague, Dealing with the Historical, Epidemiological, Clinical, Therapeutic and Preventive Aspects of the Disease. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Simpson, W.J. 1903. Report on the Causes and Continuance of Plague in Hongkong and Suggestions as to Remedial Measures. London: Waterlow.
Tratner, Michael. 1995. Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Worboys, Michael. 2000. Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900. Cambridge History of Medicine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wright, Gwendolyn. 1991. The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Xiao, Tie. 2011. In the Name of the Masses: Conceptualizations and Representations of the Crowd in Early Twentieth-Century China. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Chicago.
Zhang, Li. 2001. Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China’s Floating Population. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Peckham, R. (2016). Critical Mass: Colonial Crowds and Contagious Panics in 1890s Hong Kong and Bombay. In: Fischer-Tiné, H. (eds) Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45136-7_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45136-7_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-45135-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-45136-7
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)