CORDON SANITAIRE: EMPIRE AND DISEASE PREVENTION IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN OVERSEAS COLONIES IN EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA, 1870-1910

Hsinhsuan Lee

doi:10.7273/000007409

This study explores the progress of medical modernization of British and American colonial territories in East and Southeast Asia, including the British Straits Settlements, British Hong Kong, the American Philippines and treaty ports of Qing China. In doing so, it draws on Epistemic Network, Epidemic Network and Actor Network theories. With the development of understanding of the causation of epidemic diseases, the construction of sanitary works, and the improvement of sanitary measures through statistics collecting and information recording and compiling, the colonial medical experts observed epidemics and provided suggestions to colonial authorities in order to meet the goal of the control of infectious diseases, especially cholera and plague, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century British and American overseas formal and informal territories in East and Southeast Asia. Focusing on the development of the transition from miasma to germ theories of epidemics in formal and informal colonies and their metropoles, this dissertation argues that the developments in Western medicine also affected the colonial and Qing government’s attitudes to epidemic policies and contributed to conflicts between colonists and colonial subjects in late nineteenth and early twentieth century East and Southeast Asia. This study argues that the colonial governments imposed strict sanitary surveillance on local populations in order to meet the goal of disease control. Simultaneously, colonial medical experts used empirical approaches, clinical observation, investigation, field survey, and laboratory works, to develop an epistemic network because the existing sanitary measures were not effective which created a breakthrough in the understanding of epidemics in the early twentieth century European medical world and Asian colonies. Examination of the collaboration between human and non-human agents, such as medical experts, colonial and Qing officials, patients, different ethnic groups, colonial governments, governmental institutions, hospitals, vectors, even microbes reveals that these different agents converged, intertwined to develop the understanding of the nature of epidemics and reached the goal of the control of epidemic diseases. This study indicates that empirical approaches not only developed the understanding of the causation of epidemics but also shaped the colonial civilization and sanitary modernization in the late nineteen and early twentieth century American and British East and Southeast Asian colonies. Behind the development of the understanding of epidemics and sanitary modernization, it reveals the strict social control and sanitary surveillance imposed by colonial governments and colonial sanitary authorities on colonial subjects.

CORDON SANITAIRE: EMPIRE AND DISEASE PREVENTION IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN OVERSEAS COLONIES IN EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA, 1870-1910

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