Contagion and Enclaves: Tropical Medicine in Colonial India
ISBN: 9781846317835
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Liverpool University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Colonialism and Imperialism;

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.


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

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