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.