Imperial Cleanliness: Governance, Colonialism and Public Health, c.1850-1950
Alison Bashford

In this paper I’m interested in the broadest integrations – theoretical and substantive – between ‘health’ and ‘empire’. My point of departure is a simple one: the idea that both endeavours worked through, and effected, the governance of others. If colonialism is necessarily understood as governance of others, public health is rarely understood thus. Yet once the extraodinarily far-reaching project of public health in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is thought through as biopolitical governance, what becomes evident is the extent to which imperatives of health and hygiene were primary instruments of imperial rule, and the ways in which public health produced raced, colonised and colonising subjects. One early twentieth century health bureaucrat put it perfectly for the purposes of this paper: ‘Imperial cleanliness [is] colonising by the known laws of cleanliness rather than by military force’. I aim, then, to put ‘governmentality’ to work with an emerging historiography of colonial medicine, in order to understand the integrations of health, empire and governance.

Health and Empire: a 1912 publication which aimed to secure ‘the utmost physical efficiency and therefore welfare for the 400,000,000 inhabitants of the British Empire...the health of the people is the supreme law’. But what did the idea of ‘a healthy empire’ really mean? And what were its effects? One effect, I suggest, was an imagining of the British Empire as a cordoned place: that is, not an entity linked by history, law, culture and governing structures, but as a bounded geographic place imagined as integrated and segregated from non-empire territory and populations. When one looks to public health documents, one sees this clearly in operation. For example, the late nineteenth century Imperial Leprosy Fund aimed to eradicate leprosy from the British Empire, as if the Empire was contiguous territory or an island. Hygiene and public health discourses facilitated this imagining of a bounded and integrated empire, because public health itself was a discourse based on spatial governance.

My paper focuses on the administration of the British Empire, its race and health management, in the period between the mid nineteenth century (the moment when sanitary reform/public health emerged as a rationality of government in the British case) and the mid twentieth century (a moment of decolonisation and increasing critique of medical governance on the one hand, yet the emergence of global health governance in the World Health Organisation on the other).

References:
- JHL Cumpston, ‘Cleanliness’ no date, Cumpston Papers, National Library of Australia MS613 Box 7 (i).
- Francis Fremantle, Health and Empire, John Ouseley, London, 1912, pp. pp. 348-9, p. 368.