Introductory description

This final-year undergraduate Advanced Option module explores the fundamental transformation in attitudes about health and the body in the age of European imperial expansion. Focusing on the period 1750 to 1914, it examines how encounters with unfamiliar bodies and diseases led Europeans to rethink both the theory and practice of medicine, and the nature of human diversity.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Autumn Term

1. Overview: Science and Empire
2. The Columbian Exchange
3. First Encounters and the Origins of Anthropology
4. Medicinal Plants I: Exploration
5. Medicinal Plants II: Exploitation
6. Reading Week
7. Disease and the Environment
8. Difference on Display
9. Field Trip: Pitt Rivers Museum
10. Collecting Empire

Spring Term
11. The Control of the Caribbean
12. Colonial Medicine in South Asia
13. Settling Africa
14. Tropical Medicine
15. Depicting the Irish
16. Reading Week
17. Evolution, Anthropology, and Racial Science
18. Theories of Racial 'Extinction'
19. Sexuality, Gender and Empire
20. Medical Colonisation

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a systematic knowledge and understanding of the role of natural knowledge in the production of imperial ideology between 1750 and 1914
• Critically analyse and evaluate a broad range of primary sources (including textual, visual, and material sources) relating to imperial, medical and scientific history.
• Effectively communicate ideas, and make informed, coherent and persuasive arguments about how notions about race, health, and human difference were conceptualized and rationalised against the backdrop of European imperialism
• Critically review and consolidate theoretical, methodological, and historiographical ideas relating to imperial, medical and scientific history

Indicative reading list

Illustrative Bibliography

• Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers (eds.) Biology and Ideology: From Descartes to Dawkins (Chicago, 2010)
• Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia (Durham, 2006)
• David Arnold, Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester, 1988)
• David Arnold (ed.), Warm Climates and Western Medicine (Amsterdam, 1996)
• David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2002)
• Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930 (Ithaca, 2003)
• Alice L. Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950 (Ithaca, 2013)
• Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange (Westport, 1972)
• Pratik Chakrabarti, Medicine and Empire, 1600-1960 (Palgrave, 2013)
• Philip Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989)
• L. Perry Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, Revised Ed. (Washington, 1997)
• James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina, 2013)
• Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge, 1995)
• Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (eds.), Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies (Edinburgh, 1997)
• Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, 1996)
• Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism, 1600-1850 (Oxford, 1999)
• Nicholas Hudson: ‘From “Nation” to “Race”: The Origins of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought,’Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1996), 247-264.
• Eric T. Jennings, Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas (Durham, 2005)
• Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Diseases in the British Empire (London, 2003)
• J. R. McNeil, ‘The Ecological Basis of Warfare in the Caribbean, 1700-1904’ in M. Ultee (ed.) Adapting to Conditions: War and Society in the Eighteenth Century (Alabama, 1986), 26-42.
• Ronald L. Numbers (Ed.) Medicine in the New World: New Spain, New France, and New England (Knoxville, 1987)
• Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys, ‘Science and Imperialism’, Isis 84 (1993), 91-102
• Sadiah Qureshi: Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2011)
• Michael Sappol and Stephen P. Rice (eds.), A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire (London, 2014)
• Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender and the Making of Modern Science (Rutgers, 2003)
• Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (London, 1982)

Sample Primary Source Extracts

• James Johnson, The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions (1827)
• Benjamin Moseley, A Treatise on Tropical Diseases; On Military Operations; and on the Climate of the West Indies (1789)
• Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (1839)
• Charles White, Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables (1799)
• Hannah Augstein, Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760-1850 (Bristol, 1996)
• House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Contagious Diseases: A Bill for the Prevention of Contagious Diseases at Certain Naval and Military Stations (1864)

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.