Imperial Hygiene ― A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health

Now published for the first time in paperback, Alison Bashford's innovative study is a cultural history of borders, hygiene, and race. It is about foreign bodies, from Victorian vaccines to the pathologised interwar immigrants; from smallpox quarantine to the leper colony; from sexual hygiene to national hygiene to racial hygiene. Taking British colonialism and White Australia as case studies, the book examines the enclosures, boundaries and borders which were the objects and means of public health, as well as of colonial, national and racial administration between 1850 and 1950.

If public health was in part about segregation (of the diseases from the clean, the fit from the unfit, the immune from the vulnerable), so was race a segregative practice in the modern period. Imperial Hygiene shows how colonial management of race dovetailed with public health into new boundaries of rule, into racialised cordons sanitaires.

Alison Bashford is the Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge, UK. She is author of many studies that bring world history, environmental history and medical history together. Most recently, she has authored Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (2014) and co-edited Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (with David Armitage). She has taught at Harvard University, the Australian National University, and for many years was Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney.