Abstract
This chapter investigates how and why sugar estate owners in one Indian Ocean1 context—Mauritius—contributed to the making of a medical ideology2 that regimented the “body” of labor. While existing historiography of the relationship between colonial India and the British Empire in the tropics emphasizes the role of India as a center of sub-imperialism,3 this chapter argues that plantation colonies with their regulative security state apparatus, in collaboration with the Indian colonial state, acted as the source of particular medical ideologies and practices concerning indentured workers. By drawing on the experiences of health administration of indentured immigrant workers in Mauritius, a sugar colony in the Indian Ocean, this chapter highlights how medical ideologies concerning workers’ health and the control of pandemics among workers were contingent on various factors (such as cost-cutting measures, perceptions, and physicality of climates) and were formed diversely either in Mauritius or in medical circles in Calcutta.
Archival records used for this chapter were consulted at the Mauritius National Archives (MNA) in Coromandel, Mauritius; British National Archives (BNA) in Kew, England; and the British Library, India Office Records (IOR) in London, England. The abbreviations used in this chapter are as follows: RRC—Report of the Royal Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the Treatment of Immigrants in Mauritius, 1875; BPP—British Parliamentary Papers; CCE—Calcutta Commission of Enquiry from BPP, 1841 (XVI.287, Session 1 (45) Hill Coolies); and PRO—Public Records Office. A version of this chapter was presented at the “Histories of Medicine in the Indian Ocean World” conference, April 26–27, 2013, Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, Montréal, Canada. The author expresses her sincere thanks to Subho Basu and Anna Winterbottom for their numerous comments and help with this article.
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Notes
For a detailed discussion of the Indian Ocean World and its related historiographies, see Markus P. M. Vink (2007), “Indian Ocean Studies and the ‘New Thalassology’”, Journal of Global History, 2(1): 41–62.
While ideology can have several definitions and the definition(s) can be somewhat slippery, ideology is not a set of fixed ideas; it has to do with power, control of productive sources, and how a dominant socioeconomic group controls the body of workers for productive and profit purposes. I derive this definition from Terry Eagleton (1991), Ideology: An Introduction (London and New York: Verso), p. 6
Thomas R. Metcalf (2007), Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press).
Dipesh Chakrabarty (1989), Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. 4.
Subho Basu (2008), “The Paradox of Peasant Worker: Re-Conceptualizing Workers’ Politics in Bengal 1890–1939,” Modern Asian Studies, 42(1): 50.
Rajnarayan Chandavarkar (1998), Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 2.
David Arnold (1993), Colonizing the Body: State, Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Mark Harrison (1994), Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,), pp. 2–3.
Daniel R. Headrick (1981), The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Philip D. Curtin (1989), Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Ryan Johnson and Amna Khalid (2012), Public Health in the British Empire: Intermediaries, Subordinates, and the Practice of Public Health, 1850–1960 (New York: Routledge), p. 2.
However, the following works have addressed workers’ health: Subho Basu (1995), “Emergence of the Mill Towns in Bengal 1880–1920: Migration Pattern and Survival Strategies of Industrial Workers,” The Calcutta Historical Journal, 18: 97–134
Subho Basu (2004), Does Class Matter?: Colonial Capital and Workers’ Resistance in Bengal, 1890–1937 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), pp. 76–83
Nandini Bhattacharya (2012), Contagion and Enclaves: Tropical Medicine in Colonial India (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), pp. 119–148.
George Rosen (1943), The History of Miners’ Diseases: A Medical and Social Interpretation (New York: Schuman’s), pp. 153–423
Ludwig Teleky (1948), History of Factory and Mine Hygiene (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 22–74.
Christopher Sellers (2011), “Health, Work, and Environment: A Hippocratic Turn in Medical History,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine, ed. Mark Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 454.
C. Kondapi (1951), Indians Overseas, 1838–1949 (New Delhi: Indian Council of World Affairs)
Hugh Tinker (1974), A New System, of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London and New York: Oxford University Press)
Marina Carter (1995), Servants, Sirdars, and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834–1874 (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 124–145.
Ashin Das Gupta (1967), Malabar in Asian Trade: 1740–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Ashin Das Gupta (1977), Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat: c. 1700–1750 (Wiesbaden: Steiner)
K. N. Chaudhuri (1985), Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Karen Wigen (2006), “Introduction: AHR Forum Oceans of History,” The American Historical Review, 111(3): 718.
Fernand Braudel (1972), The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (London: Collins).
Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920; Sugata Bose (2006), A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Tony Ballantyne (2003), “Rereading the Archive and Opening Up the Nation State,” in, After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), p. 112
Gwyn Campbell (2006), An Economic History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–1895: The Rise and Fall of an Island Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 16.
See, for example, Rajnarayan Chandavarkar (1998), “Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India, 1896–1914,” Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in India, 1850–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Mark Harrison, Margaret Jones, and Helen Sweet, eds. (2009), From Western Medicine to Global Medicine: The Hospital Beyond the West (New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan).
David Arnold (1991), “The Indian Ocean as a Disease Zone, 1500–1950,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 14(2): 1–21.
Roland Lamusse (1964), “The Economic Development of the Mauritius Sugar Industry—I: Development in Field and Factory,” Revue Agricole et Sucrière de L’île Maurice [organe officiel de la Société de technologie agricole et sucrière de l’île Maurice], 43(1): 22–38.
Noël Deerr (1949), The History of Sugar (London: Chapman & Hall), pp. 203–204.
Richard B. Allen (2008), “Capital, Illegal Slaves, Indentured Labourers and the Creation of a Sugar Plantation Economy in Mauritius, 1810–60,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 36(2): 153–154.
See a discussion of cholera in 1819 in R. Boodhoo (2010), Health, Disease and Indian Immigrants in Nineteenth Century Mauritius (Port Louis, Mauritius: Aapravasi Ghat Trust Fund), p. 60.
S. N. Mukherjee, “Class, Caste and Politics in Calcutta, 1815–38,” in Elites in South Asia, ed. Edmund Leach and S. N. Mukherjee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 76.
Lynn Zastoupil (2010), Rammobun Roy and the Making ofVictorian Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 113.
Mark Harrison (1999), Climates & Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 111–112.
Harrison, Public Health in British India, p. 37. Mauritius was perceived to be healthier during the eighteenth century, as can be seen in travelogues of the time, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1773), Voyage à I’Isle de France, A l’Isle de Bourbon, Au Cap de Bonne Espérance Avec des Observations Nouvelles Sur La Nature et Sur Les Hommes, Bar Un Officier du Roi, Tome II (Amsterdam: Merlin)
George Riley (1790), A New Moral System of Geography: Containing an Account of the Different Nations, Ancient and Modern: Their Situation and Climate, Their Rise and Fall, Their Customs and Manners: Including, a Description of Each Country, and Their Respective Productions, by which Commerce Has Been Established, and Society Cemented for the Good of Mankind: Adorned with the Dresses of Each Country (London: Printed for G. Riley and sold by S. Hazard, Mess. Watson and Elder).
Calomel or mercurious chloride was used to clean the nervous system of any toxins. It is either administered alone or in combination with opium. One Ramburn, 27 years old, traveling from Calcutta to Trinidad, was administered calomel and opium because he had diarrhea, Sarup Leela Gujadhur (2009), “Mortality of the Emigrant Coolies on board the ‘Eliza’ Trinidad to Calcutta,” Colonial Emigration Proceedings, Volume 3 (Kolkata: Aldrich International)
Brij Lai (1998), Crossing the Kala Pani: A Documentary History of Indian Indenture in Fiji (Canberra: Australian National University and Suva, Fiji: Fiji Museum), p. 39.
Ranbir Sinh (1980), Mauritius: The Key to the Indian Ocean (New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann), p. 39.
Saloni Deerpalsingh and Marina Carter (1994), Select Documents on Indian Immigration: Mauritius, 1834–1926. Vol. 1, Organisation and Evaluations of the Indenture System (Moka, Mauritius: Mahatma Gandhi Institute), Document 1.8, p. 74
Albert Pilot (1914), Mauritius Illustrated: Historical and Descriptive, Commercial and IndustrialFacts, Figures, & Resources, ed. Allister Macmillan (London: W. H. & L. Collingridge), p. 55.
Lenore Manderson (2002), Sickness and the State: Health and Illness in Colonial Malaya, 1870–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 72–74.
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Hurgobin, Y. (2016). Making Medical Ideologies: Indentured Labor in Mauritius. In: Winterbottom, A., Tesfaye, F. (eds) Histories of Medicine and Healing in the Indian Ocean World. Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137567581_1
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