Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties 9888208446, 9789888208449

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EMPIRES of

PANIC Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties

Edited by Robert

Peckham

Empires of Panic

Empires of Panic

Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties

Edited by Robert Peckham

Hong Kong University Press The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Road Hong Kong www.hkupress.org © 2015 Hong Kong University Press ISBN 978-988-8208-44-9 (Hardback) All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound by Paramount Printing Co., Ltd. in Hong Kong, China

Contents

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix List of Contributors xi Introduction: Panic: Reading the Signs Robert Peckham

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1.

Empire and the Place of Panic Alan Lester

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2.

Slow Burn in China: Factories, Fear, and Fire in Canton John M. Carroll

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3.

Epidemic Opportunities: Panic, Quarantines, and the 1851 International Sanitary Conference João Rangel de Almeida

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4.

Health Panics, Migration, and Ecological Exchange in the Aftermath of the 1857 Uprising: India, New Zealand, and Australia James Beattie

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5.

Disease, Rumor, and Panic in India’s Plague and Influenza Epidemics, 1896–1919 David Arnold

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6.

Panic Encabled: Epidemics and the Telegraphic World Robert Peckham

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7.

Don’t Panic! The “Excited and Terrified” Public Mind from Yellow Fever to Bioterrorism Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns

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8.

Mediating Panic: The Iconography of “New” Infectious Threats, 1936–2009 Nicholas B. King

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Epilogue: Panic’s Past and Global Futures Alison Bashford

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Bibliography 209 Index 229

Illustrations

Cover image: Chart showing temperature and mortality of London for every week of 11 years, 1840–50. William Farr, Report on the Mortality of Cholera in England, 1848–49 (London: W. Clowes and Sons for H.M.S.O., 1852). Courtesy: Wellcome Library, London. Figure 0.1  “Black Friday” at the Vienna Stock Exchange, May 9, 1873.

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Figure 2.1  Canton Fire of 1822.

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Figure 3.1  “Chart Showing the Progress of the Spasmodic Cholera.”

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Figure 3.2  “The Kind of ‘Assisted Emigrant’ We Can Not Afford to Admit.” Illustration by Fritz Graetz showing the cholera personified as a Turkish immigrant arriving in New York.

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Figure 4.1  Location map of places mentioned in the text.

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Figure 4.2  “Group of Veterans Who Served in the Indian Mutiny,” hosted at a Government House Auckland fete held by Lord Ranfurly on April 24, 1900.

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Figure 6.1  “The Eastern Telegraphic System and Its General Connections, 1894.”

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong for generously supporting a workshop on panic and empire with a grant from the Louis Cha Research Fund. My thanks to Kam Louie, Daniel Chua, and my colleagues in the Department of History for their encouragement. I have benefitted greatly from conversations with friends and colleagues, who have helped me to think in new ways about panic’s histories. In particular, I thank David Arnold for his comments and suggestions. I also owe a debt to Alison Bashford, John Carroll, Harald Fischer-Tiné, Alan Lester, Christopher Munn, Kerry Ward, and Christine Whyte. I am grateful to the two anonymous readers who provided helpful comments on the draft manuscript. Clara Ho, Serina Poon, and the production team at Hong Kong University Press were a model of patience and efficiency throughout. Finally, my thanks to Maria Sin at the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine for helping to oversee the panic project from its inception.

Contributors

David Arnold is emeritus professor of Asian and global history in the History Department at the University of Warwick and the author of numerous books on the history of modern South Asia, and beyond, including: Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (1993), The Problem of Nature (1996), Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (2000), Gandhi (2001), The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856 (2006), and Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity (2014). Alison Bashford is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge, and fellow of Jesus College. Her trio of co-edited books— Contagion (2001), Isolation (2003), and Medicine at the Border (2006)—brought together historians and geographers to consider place and disease. Her later work has analyzed population and environmental history, most recently Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (2014). With David Armitage, she has recently edited Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (2014). James Beattie is senior lecturer in history at the University of Waikato. He teaches and writes on environmental history and the history of science, and art collecting. He is especially interested in the exchanges of ideas, people, and plants between East Asia, South Asia, and Australasia facilitated by imperialism. His monograph, Empire and Environmental Anxiety, 1800–1920: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia (2011), explores environmental and health connections between South Asia and Australasia. He is the co-editor of two recent books: Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire (2014) with Edward Mellilo and Emily O’Gorman, and Climate, Science and Colonization: Histories from Australia and New Zealand (2014), with O’Gorman and Matt Henry. John M. Carroll is professor of history and associate dean for outreach in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include modern Chinese history, Hong Kong history, and colonialism and imperialism in Asia. He

xii Contributors

is the author of Edge of Empires: Chinese Elites and British Colonials in Hong Kong (2005) and A Concise History of Hong Kong (2007). His current project, Canton Days, is a social and cultural history of the British community in China before the Opium War. Amy L. Fairchild is professor of sociomedical sciences in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. She is a historian researching the broad social forces that produce disease and shape public health policy, and a public health policy analyst focused on dilemmas in the ethics and politics of contemporary health debates. Her work’s central intellectual theme has been to explore the functions and limits of the state, particularly when it seeks to address health issues that touch on groups marginalized by virtue of disease, class, and race. She is the author of Science at the Borders (2003) and co-author, with Ronald Bayer and James Colgrove, of Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America (2007). David Merritt Johns is a PhD candidate with the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and a fellow with the Data and Society Research Institute, a think tank focused on the social, cultural, and ethical issues arising from data-centric technological development. His research examines the politics of evidence-based decision making and public health policy development in arenas such as nutrition and preventive medicine. His articles have appeared in Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, the American Journal of Public Health, and Global Public Health. He is also a journalist, a contributor to Slate magazine, and a former national public radio reporter. Nicholas B. King is associate professor in the Department of the Social Studies of Medicine, and an associate member in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McGill University. He holds a PhD in the history of science and an MA in medical anthropology from Harvard University. He is the director of the MEDEC Lab (Measurement, Ethics, and Decision-making Collaborative) and has published widely on public health ethics and biosecurity. Alan Lester is professor of historical geography at the University of Sussex. He is the author, amongst other work, of Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in NineteenthCentury South Africa and Britain (2001), and Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (2014) with Fae Dussart, and co-editor, with David Lambert, of Colonial Lives Across the British Empire (2006). Robert Peckham is associate professor in the Department of History and co-director of the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine at the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on histories of infectious disease and medicine, particularly in

Contributors xiii

relation to empire. He is co-editor, with David M. Pomfret, of Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia (2013), and editor of Disease and Crime: A History of Social Pathologies and the New Politics of Health (2014). His book Epidemics in Modern Asia is forthcoming. João Rangel de Almeida is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and is currently preparing a monograph entitled Empires of Health: Diplomats, Doctors and the Standardization of Epidemic Diseases, 1851– 1911. He received his PhD in science and technology studies from the University of Edinburgh and has a keen interest in linking the history of medicine with current international public health affairs. His research projects engage with public health, standardization, the science of the unknown, and international relations.

Introduction Panic: Reading the Signs Robert Peckham

A persistent theme in colonial archives is the anxiety induced by Asia’s immensity: by the scale of its territories and the magnitude and diversity of its populations. For many colonial agents, Asia’s unruly vastness appeared to defy classificatory logic. The nineteenth-century records of the Dutch East Indies, for example, reveal the uncertain knowledge of those who governed, and the unease generated by rumors of local dissent.1 Rather than evincing the operations of a centralized and sagacious colonial state, the documents disclose pervasive doubt and uncertainty. Colonial insecurity prompted the creation of ring-fenced spaces, enclaves of certitude to mitigate the “indefinite and pervasive anxiety about being lost in empire.”2 As Ranajit Guha has observed, “anxiety” rather than “fear” is perhaps more appropriate to describe this colonial response, since it was not justified by a “definite causality.”3 There was frequently no identifiable reason for colonial disquiet, other than an indeterminate foreboding; a sense that something was about to happen. In the crown colony of Hong Kong and in Britain’s quasi-colonial outposts in China (see Chapters 2 and 6 of this volume), where small numbers of colonials presided over much larger Chinese populations, this latent anxiety was often foregrounded by sporadic anti-Western demonstrations. In his report on the 1891 census, Hong Kong’s registrar general noted that European residents were beginning to regard the colony “more as a permanent home, which has led to there being more of what may be called a ‘family life’ than formerly.” Nonetheless, out of a total population of 221,441, there were only 795 British men and 300 women.4 Although unintelligible to the majority of Westerners who had no knowledge of Chinese, indigenous “placards” and the circulating rumors that invariably accompanied them called forth a language of colonial counterinsurgency. This was certainly the case in 1894, when anti-British 1. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 2. Ranajit Guha, “Not at Home in Empire,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 3 (1997): 482–93 (484). 3. Ibid., 485. 4. The number Europeans and Americans in the colony, including military and naval personnel, was 8,545 according to the 1891 census; “Census Report 1891,” Hongkong Sessional Papers (1891), 373–95 (374).

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notices began appearing in Hong Kong and subsequently in the streets of Canton (Guangzhou), even as colonial authorities sought to manage an outbreak of bubonic plague with draconian sanitary interventions, including house-to-house visitations (for an account of the plague in India, see Chapter 5). The colony’s governor, Sir William Robinson, condemned the “literati” who were responsible for producing the “libellous and malicious placards.”5 Rumors circulated amongst the Chinese “that the Government had resolved, in order to stop the plague, to select a few children from each School to excise their livers in order to provide the only remedy which would cure plague patients.” As a consequence, “a panic spread, like wild fire” among the local population.6 Pressure was exerted by the British on the Chinese authorities in Canton to put a stop to the “lying rumours regarding the treatment of the sick in Hongkong,”7 to prevent the “falsifications invented by story spreading,” and to apprehend the “trouble creating scoundrels.”8 Panic was both contagious and circular, produced by and producing rumor. The “panic-stricken” Chinese sparked panic in the colonial authorities who were perennially alert to the possibilities of sedition and rebellion, while the plague itself promoted wild rumors and a panicked flight of Chinese and Europeans alike. On May 31, 1894, European susceptibility to the disease was demonstrated when Captain George Vesey of the Shropshire Regiment contracted the plague, dying a few days later. “The flight from the colony to Japan and home was now almost a panic,” noted Dr. James Lowson, acting superintendent of the Government Civil Hospital, in his diary.9 As Veena Das has observed in her account of rumor in India, such “panic rumors created a kind of screen in which aggressors came to identify themselves and even experience themselves as victims.”10 While seditious placards were being reported in the Hong Kong press, there was intelligence from India of trees being mysteriously daubed with mud.11 In a manner reminiscent of the circulation of chapatis (unleavened Indian bread) by watchmen through the districts of northern India immediately before the 1857 Uprising, the daubed-trees were decoded by mistrustful colonials as an ominous sign of pending

5. “Governor’s Despatch to the Secretary of State with Reference to the Plague,” Hongkong Sessional Papers (1894), 283–92 (285). 6. “Educational Report for 1894,” Hongkong Sessional Papers (1895), 447–63 (450). 7. “Government Notification No. 318,” Hongkong Government Gazette, September 1, 1894, 731. 8. “Government Notification No. 223,” Hongkong Government Gazette, June 9, 1894, 506. 9. G. H. Choa, “The Lowson Diary: A Record of the Early Phase of the Hong Kong Bubonic Plague 1894,” Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 33 (1993): 129–45 (135). 10. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: California University Press, 2007), 111. 11. On the placards, see, for example, “The Hongkong Government and Chinese Traitors,” Hongkong Telegraph, May 24, 1894, 2; on tree daubing, see “Tree Daubing in India,” Hongkong Telegraph, June 30, 1894, 3.

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native insurrection.12 The coincidental enumeration of singular events, namely the posting of malicious placards and the daubing of trees, could suggest spatial and temporal continuities. Signs read as evidence of imminent revolt in one place at one time might provide a key for decrypting similarly inscrutable signs in another setting.13 Rumor and panic, Das writes, “actualize certain regions of the past and create a sense of continuity between events that might otherwise seem unconnected.”14 Colonial responses to such events highlight the uncertain knowledge that structured colonial protocol, the misrecognition that this gave rise to, and the critical role of (mis)communication in producing panic. As Alison Bashford aptly remarks in the epilogue to this book, panic is closely connected “with communication, the touch of words, so close etymologically, to contagion. Communication and its means—its media—are always required for panic to become a phenomenon beyond the individual and beyond the local. This ‘touch’ is how panic spreads, how it is communicated or ‘made common.’” The precise meaning of these communications, however, was often in doubt. As an article entitled “What the Chinese Really Think of Europeans” noted in Fraser’s Magazine in 1871: “Outwardly the Chinese appear to be on friendly terms with foreigners, but in their secret hearts they thoroughly dislike them.”15 Here was the ambiguity of communication in a colonial context, where outward forms and inner intent were invariably assumed to be discrepant, even as society was organized around the black-and-white racial politics of face value. Agents of the colonial state tended to assume that operative governance involved getting beneath “the surface of affairs” in order to anticipate the violent manifestations of native “dislike” in agitation and open revolt. This was a process that called for surveillance, information gathering, and elaborate intelligence-assessment practices—crucial dimensions of what Bernard Cohn has called colonialism’s “investigative modalities.”16 The entangled panics in southern China and India in 1894 illustrate a number of themes explored in this book: first, the ways in which panics across the British Empire were understood to reprise earlier panic events with history providing a critical context for reading the present and anticipating the future; second, the extent to which panics were invariably conceptualized as imperial, transcolonial phenomena, intimating a spatial and temporal continuum; third, the role of technologies, including the telegraph, in the creation of new communication circuits that enabled novel 12. Kim A. Wagner, “‘Treading Upon Fires’: The ‘Mutiny’-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India,” Past & Present, vol. 218, no. 1 (2013): 159–97. 13. Kim A. Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies, and the Making of the Indian Uprising (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 61–77. 14. Das, Life and Words, 108. 15. “What the Chinese Really Think of Europeans,” Fraser’s Magazine. New Series. Vol. III. January to June 1871 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1871), 395–406 (395). 16. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 4–5.

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forms of panic; fourth, the interrelationship between epidemics and panics, and particularly a contagionist model of panic, which accentuated its “pathogenicity” and “infectivity”; and fifth, the complex manner in which indigenous and colonial panics were coproduced. Empires of Panic provides comparative and historical perspectives on panic as an imperial phenomenon, particularly, although not exclusively, in relation to epidemics: of cholera, plague, influenza, and late twentieth-century emerging infectious diseases. Although there is now a considerable literature on the effects of panic, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the nature of panics themselves and to the ways in which they have been historically produced, defined, and managed in different settings. In a series of case studies ranging from East Asia to the twenty-first-century United States, contributors explore attempts made by Western government agencies, policymakers, planners, and other authorities to understand, deal with, and neutralize panics elicited by epidemic episodes and other crises. Empires of Panic examines how technologies—from telegraphy to medical science and public health—served to convey information about and constrain “panicked” bodies; it investigates the relationship between networks of empire and panics; and, finally, it considers disease threats as producing particular sites of anxiety and forms of collective panic. In each of the chapters, the focus is on continuities and discontinuities in responses to panic and its interpretation from the early nineteenth century to the present. As Alan Lester notes in Chapter 1, “Empire and the Place of Panic,” each of the chapters is concerned with panic’s emplacement: from the topography of pre–Opium War Canton to the hill stations of India, the mapping of disease epidemics, and the containment of panic and infection with the imposition of quarantine measures. The emphasis is predominantly on the British Empire and the English-speaking world with chapters on South Africa, Canton, Hong Kong, India, New Zealand, and the United States. While this Anglo-focus is clearly a limitation, the purpose has been to provide a preliminary overview of imperial panics, paving the way for more in-depth, comparative, and inclusive studies in the future.

Primitive or Modern? “The frequency of panic has been over-exaggerated,” the sociologist Enrico Quarantelli asserted in the middle of the twentieth century: “Compared with other reactions panic is a relatively uncommon phenomenon.”17 Since then, many scholars have challenged popular and official representations of panic, arguing that its occurrence is in fact rare in disaster events. Yet, notwithstanding this growing body of evidence and doubts about the value of “panic” as an explanatory category, representations of panic 17. Enrico L. Quarantelli, “The Nature and Conditions of Panic,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 60, no. 3 (1954): 267–75 (275).

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continue to pervade the popular media, even as policymakers persist in strategizing on the assumption that panic is a common, if not typical, response to disaster.18 Today, in part as a result of mass media and digital communication technologies (including the Internet), governments and state agencies around the world are increasingly focused not simply on mitigating the “real” threats posed by natural disasters, pandemics, conflicts, and financial crashes, but equally on handling and allaying virtual anxieties triggered by the potential for such cataclysmic happenings. As Lee Clarke and Caron Chess have commented, “planners and policy makers sometimes act as if the human response to threatening conditions is more dangerous than the threatening conditions themselves.”19 Panic has been defined as a psychological state or an emotionally charged group response—invariably construed as irrational—to some external menace, whether natural or manmade, actual or imagined.20 It connotes “a collective flight based on a hysterical belief.”21 Defined as an emotive response, the history of collective panic should, perhaps, be studied in relation to the history of emotions, opening up the question of what emotions are, and how emotion relates to cognition. For example, is panic a social construction or does collective panic, as a particular kind of emotional arousal, have a basis in biology? What is the relationship between the experience of panic and its expression?22 Panic has been understood, at least from the nineteenth century, as the expression of a “primitive” fear. As the early twentieth-century psychologist William McDougall asserted in his influential analysis of collective psychology, panic was a vestige of man’s animalistic past: “The panic is the crudest and simplest example of collective mental life.”23 A tension has pervaded and continues to pervade definitions of panic. On the one hand, panic is defined as a throwback to prerational (and premodern) responses, an identification underscored by the word’s etymological derivation 18. There is an expansive bibliography on the “problem” of panic. For a useful overview, see Lee Clarke and Caron Chess who cite Quarantelli: “Elites and Panic: More to Fear than Fear Itself,” Social Forces, vol. 87, no. 2 (2008): 993–1014 (994). See also Ben Sheppard, G. James Rubin, Jamie K. Wardman, and Simon Wessely, “Viewpoint: Terrorism and Dispelling the Myth of a Panic Prone Public,” Journal of Public Health Policy, vol. 27, no. 3 (2006): 219–45. 19. Clarke and Chess, “Elites and Panic,” 994. 20. As Clarke and Chess note, definitions of “panic” have been inconsistent; ibid., 996. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “panic” as a “sudden feeling of alarm or fear . . . lead[ing] to extravagant or wildly unthinking behaviour.” 21. Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1962), 131. Original emphasis. 22. See William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For an insightful discussion of key issues in the history of emotions, see the “AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions,” American Historical Review, vol. 117, no. 5 (2012): 1487–531. 23. William McDougall, The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology with Some Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 24. See Jackie Orr who quotes and discusses McDougall in Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 6.

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from the Greek goat-god Pan, associated with the wild, whose presence engendered “panic” in those he moved among. Panic is associated with herd behavior, affecting “collective outbursts” including rumors, crazes, and riots, and viewed in terms of a base animal fight-or-flight instinct or the “intensification of instinctive excitement.”24 As McDougall observed: The panic of a crowd of human beings seems to be generated by the same simple instinctive reactions as the panic of animals. The essence of the panic is the collective intensification of the instinctive excitement, with its emotion of fear and its impulse to flight. The principle of primitive sympathy seems to afford a full and adequate explanation of such collective intensification of instinctive excitement.25

This articulation of panic as a facet of the primitive clearly overlaps with empire’s claim to dominion over “primitive” peoples. As a number of contributors note in this volume, panic has frequently been conflated with the primitive within colonial and imperial discourses. “Orientals,” for example, were viewed as particularly susceptible to panic. In the words of the colonial civil servant and historian William Wilson Hunter: “Panic acts on an Oriental population like drink upon a European mob.”26 The study of panic within a comparative, historical framework may thus help to furnish “a phenomenology of the West’s own representations of other cultures.”27 However, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, panic was also increasingly associated with the modern collective. Accordingly, panic was deemed a preeminently modern condition: one that was produced by new forms of mechanized transportation and communication, by the pressures of urbanization and the dynamics of industrial mass culture. In the 1890s, the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon identified the crowd’s irrational behavior as a feature of modernity, developing a theory of the social that was to influence US military thinking and practice through the Second World War.28 At the same time, the sociologist Gabriel Tarde examined the crowd’s tendency to panic through “affect contagion,” understood as a form of imitation or mimicry.29 Panic was equated with modern life and viewed as the expression of a modern psychopathology. As Anthony Vidler has suggested, the alienating

24. McDougall, The Group Mind, 25. 25. Ibid., 24–25. 26. William Wilson Hunter, A Brief History of the Indian People (London: Trübner & Co., 1884), 217. 27. Christopher B. Steiner, “Travel Engravings and the Construction of the Primitive,” in Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, ed. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 202–25 (203). 28. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1896); J. W. Bendersky, “‘Panic’: The Impact of Le Bon’s Crowd Psychology on U.S. Military Thought,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences, vol. 43, no. 3 (2007): 257–83. 29. Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, trans. Elsie Clews Parsons (New York: Henry Holt, 1903).

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and “paranoiac space of modernism” transmuted into “panic space.”30 It might be argued that this “saturation” of social space with fear remains a feature of contemporary societies, preoccupied with catastrophe and characterized by “high anxieties.”31 Others have argued that panic reflects a “pervasive set of [modern] anxieties about the way technologies, social organizations, and communication systems may have reduced human autonomy and uniqueness.”32 In this context, panic becomes a strategy for conserving “a long-standing model of personhood—a view of the individual as a rational, motivated agent with a protected interior core of beliefs, desires, and memories.”33 Panic is understood as a specifically modern response to the erosion of human agency in a progressively technological and interconnected world. As Alan Blum has suggested, within postmodern approaches panic has continued to be treated “as unreservedly equivalent to the mood of our time.”34 The contemporary emphasis on normalizing and personalizing panic, which coexists with the notion of panic as a collective and exceptional experience, may be related to this anxiety of modern “personhood.” Hence, people are now prone to “panic attacks” and have “panic buttons” fitted by their bedsides in the event of a fall or break-in. Here, panic is construed in terms of “mental operations” with a focus on “perceptions, emotions, and self-discipline.”35 During the Cold War, strategies to deal with private panic coincided with the political handling of collective panic in the face of a potential nuclear crisis. Self-control and the management of mass panic converged. The 1950s saw the development and mass production of antidepressants in the United States, with the claim that an individual’s mental health could be regulated. Concurrently, this period witnessed an elaborate propaganda campaign involving films, literature, town meetings, and educational programs designed to teach Americans to fear the bomb; to 30. Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 1; The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 225. 31. Brian Massumi, “Preface,” in The Politics of Everyday Fear, ed. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), vii–x (viii); Patricia Mellencamp, High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age & Comedy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990). 32. See Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 7; see also Kirsten Drotner, “Dangerous Media? Panic Discourses and Dilemmas of Modernity,” Paedagogica Historica, vol. 35, no. 3 (1999): 593–619. 33. Melley, Empire of Conspiracy, 14. 34. Alan Blum, “Panic and Fear: On the Phenomenology of Desperation,” Sociological Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4 (1996): 673–98 (677). As Blum notes, for Baudrillard “panic” is identified with “the particular character of contemporary life” (674). On postmodernity and panic, see also Arthur Kroker, Marilouise Kroker, and David Cook, “PANIC USA: Hypermodernism as America’s Postmodernism,” Social Problems, vol. 37, no. 4 (1990): 443–59. 35. Joseph Masco, “Atomic Health, or How the Bomb Altered American Notions of Death,” in Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, ed. Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 133–53 (144).

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Robert Peckham define and limit that nuclear fear in ways useful to the Cold War project; and to move responsibility for domestic nuclear crisis from the state to citizens, enabling all citizens to have a role in a new collective form of American militarism.36

Simulated nuclear attacks trained citizens how to react to a future crisis, the aim being to transform the debilitating paralysis and mass panic occasioned by “nuclear terror” into an energizing “nuclear fear.” As the head of the Federal Civil Defense Administration asserted in 1953: “Like the A-bomb, panic is fissionable. It can produce a chain reaction more deeply destructive than any explosive known. If there is an ultimate weapon, it may well be mass panic—not the A-bomb.”37 With this “fissionable panic” in mind, a process of converting panic-prone citizens into “Panic Stoppers” was conceived with a checklist of how to “Make Fear Work For You.”38 Consequently, although civil defense policies aimed to cultivate anti-panic instincts in susceptible US citizens, this panic politics and the language of fear it perpetuated also had its benefits. It functioned as a means of facilitating public cooperation, justifying interventions, and sanctioning extreme measures in the name of security.

Empires, Networks, and Oppositional Knowledge The aim of this book is to historicize this process of securitization further by exploring different species of colonial and postcolonial panic, tracking the interrelationship between panic and changing imperial formations. The continuities and discontinuities of empire provide a major thread throughout the book: from quasi-colonial Canton (Chapter 2) to US “imperialism” in the twenty-first century (Chapters 7 and 8). Particularly following 9/11, scholars across the political spectrum have noted the ways in which inherited imperial models have been reconfigured in US foreign policy. As the cover of the New York Times Magazine pronounced in 2003, immediately before the US invasion of Iraq on March 19, “American Empire: Get Used to It.”39 Given the varieties of empire that have existed in history, observes David Harvey, “we can easily conclude there is considerable room for manoeuvre as to how empire should be construed, administered, and actively constructed. Different and 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 144–45. 39. See Michael Ignatieff, “The Burden,” New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003, 22–54. Cited in David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3. For works that focus on the American “empire,” see Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000); Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004); Andrew J. Basevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004); and Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

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sometimes rival conceptions of empire can even become internalized in the same space.”40 Harvey’s interest is in defining US imperialism in relation to the logics of territorial power and global capitalism. Meanwhile, other scholars have drawn attention to the role of science and technology in the processes of imperial governance. Sheila Jasanoff, for example, has suggested that contemporary biotechnology may be complicit in empire-making by different means, including “bottom-up resistance, top-down ideological imposition, administrative standardization, and consensual constitutionalism.”41 Empires, for Jasanoff, “can be seen as analogous to large technological systems, like electric power grids or civil aviation: so complex, heterogeneous, loosely pinned together, even jerry-built on close inspection that their stability is the thing that needs explanation.”42 As Nicholas King suggests in Chapter 8, tracing the evolution of panic through the history of evolving technologies may provide an invaluable perspective on the operations of a “new” imperialism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Similarly, in Chapter 7, Amy Fairchild and David Merritt Johns delineate an imperial narrative as they trace shifting responses to epidemic panics in the United States: from yellow fever to George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” and the incorporation of epidemic threats into a homeland security agenda via a Cold War politics of disease-invasion.43 Jasanoff is surely right to note that empires are “patchier constructs” than is often assumed, characterized by “diversity rather than homogeneity” and by an often contradictory impulse to integrate and differentiate.44 A critical theme in Empires of Panic is how panic makes visible the discrepancies between the template for a regulated state and the often-improvised policies and scant resources available to meet the social, political, environmental, and biological challenges on the ground. Much has been written about the extent to which transnational networks underpinned the creation, expansion, and entrenchment of Western empires in the modern era. Global conduits, enabled by new technologies such as the railway, steam-powered shipping, and telegraphy, facilitated transnational flows of people, animals, commodities, capital, and information.45 While these novel pathways helped to knit diverse dominions together, supporting global governance and a system of incipient global

40. Harvey, The New Imperialism, 5. 41. Sheila Jasanoff, “Biotechnology and Empire: The Global Power of Seeds and Science,” Osiris, vol. 21, no. 1 (2006): 273–92 (292). 42. Ibid., 275. 43. On the colonial context of the yellow fever epidemics, see, for example, Mariola Espinosa, Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). See also Alejandro Colás and Richard Saull, eds., The War on Terrorism and American ‘Empire’ after the Cold War (Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge, 2006). 44. Jasanoff, “Biotechnology and Empire,” 274. 45. See, for example, Alan Lester, “Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire,” History Compass, vol. 4, no. 1 (2006): 124–41.

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surveillance, the complexity of these selfsame networks also acted as a destabilizing influence working to undermine empire.46 The interconnectedness of national markets, and in particular the importance of the United States to the world economy, had become evident in a series of crises from the 1850s. Writing in the wake of the 1873 financial panic, which had precipitated a global economic recession, the economist Walter Bagehot was struck by the fragility of the global financial system and by the contagious nature of market crises. Panic had begun with the collapse of the Vienna Stock Exchange in May, and then spread to North America in September before returning to Europe (Figure 0.1). London, the imperial capital, for all its size, wealth, and power, was nonetheless patently susceptible to the vicissitudes of such “panics”: In exact proportion to the power of this system, is its delicacy—I should hardly say too much if I said its danger . . . even at the last instant of prosperity, the whole structure is delicate. The peculiar essence of our financial system is an unprecedented trust between man and man; and when that trust is much weakened by hidden causes, a small accident may greatly hurt it, and a great accident for a moment may almost destroy it.47

Like the global money markets (Lombard Street), which empire helped to produce, the imperial system was perceived as being at once “powerful” and “delicate,” prone to contagious panics: global networks could be “weakened by hidden causes” and “greatly hurt” by untoward occurrences, including wars, famines, and epidemics. As the British geographer Halford Mackinder observed in 1899: The dispersion of economic and commercial activity will tend to give a whole world character to every considerable problem of the future, and to every considerable economic problem underlying politics.48

In this new interconnected world, Mackinder suggested that local occurrences had a tendency to escalate into global crises. As he noted tersely: “We are now a closed circuit—a machine complete and balanced in all its parts. Touch one and you influence all.”49 46. As Warwick Anderson has noted, “in imagining the ‘global’ as the product of unprecedented flows and circulations,” there has been a tendency “to ignore its uneven terrain, heterogeneity, and contestation”; see “Making Global Health History: The Postcolonial Worldliness of Biomedicine,” Social History of Medicine, vol. 27, no. 2 (2014): 372–84. 47. Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1896 [1873]), 17. 48. Halford Mackinder, “The Great Trade Routes: Lecture II,” Journal of the Institute of Bankers, vol. 21, no. 3 (1900): 137–55 (151–52). See also Robert Peckham, “Infective Economies: Empire, Panic and the Business of Disease,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 41, no. 2 (2013): 211–37 (216–17). 49. Halford Mackinder, “The Great Trade Routes: Lecture V,” Journal of the Institute of Bankers, vol. 21, no. 5 (1900): 266–73 (271).

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Figure 0.1 “Black Friday” at the Vienna Stock Exchange, May 9, 1873.

Bagehot had earlier observed how panics spread through the ramifying capillarylike networks of an increasingly global, intra-institutional system; beginning as “incipient panic,” which amounted “to a kind of vague conversation,” it intensified as the network of actors grew, becoming proportionately more “diffused” and attacking “more virulently than at first.” “A panic,” he asserted in what was to become a characteristic pathological analogy by the end of the century, “is a species of neuralgia, and according to the rules of science you must not starve it.”50 Here, then, was an irony not lost on Bagehot: transnational networks, which underpinned imperial power and wealth, coincidentally produced the conditions for disequilibration through contagious panics. According to such formulations, the history of panic is closely related to the history of crisis. As Janet Roitman has recently argued, building on the work of Reinhart Koselleck and others, “crisis serves as the noun-formation of contemporary historical narrative; it is a non-locus from which to claim access to both history and knowledge of history.” According to Roitman, “crisis moments are defined as instances when normativity is laid bare, such as when the contingent or partial quality of knowledge claims—principles, suppositions, premises, criteria, and logical or causal relations— are disputed, critiqued, challenged, or disclosed.”51 Understood as the laying bare of 50. Bagehot, Lombard Street, 53. 51. Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 3–4.

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partial knowledge claims, crisis has clear affinities with the uncertain knowledge and consequential “epistemic anxiety” revealed by Ann Laura Stoler in her readings of the colonial archive.52 Indeed, as many of the contributors argue in this book, panic, like crisis, may function as a device “permitting and enabling certain narrations and giving rise to certain questions, but not to others.”53 Panic is both a reflection of—and a response to—uncertain knowledge, while functioning in conjunction with crisis as “an enabling blind spot for the production of knowledge.”54 As the chapters in this volume make clear, state agencies, policymakers, and planners, as well as emergency responders, often evoke panic in formulating and implementing policy. “Panic” has invariably been employed by an elite to categorize the irrational reactions of those deemed to be in some way subordinate. As Clarke has argued, a top-down approach persists in the association of panic with an undifferentiated “general public,” or more precisely, with a populace lacking authority.55 Panic, in other words, reflects a fundamental social asymmetry: it is what others do. In the past, studies of panic have tended to be superior accounts of popular ignorance and naivety, with a focus on the psychology of “irrational” crowds.56 Although the social anthropology and history of the 1960s and 1970s—including the work of E. P. Thompson, George Rudé, and Eric Hobsbawm—encouraged scholars to rethink “the masses,” today it might be argued, the emphasis is turning back to panic as the demonstration of a collective and often violent irrationality.57 Panic is rarely attributed to those in power. Yet, as the contributors to this book show in their accounts of specific historical panics, “public” or popular responses have always been entangled with “elite” responses. In his discussion of outbreaks of bubonic plague and influenza in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India, David Arnold illustrates the extent to which panics are compounded reactions: that is to say, multiple panics are intertwined, each coproducing the other. The influenza epidemic did not provoke panic in India, despite the high mortality figures (over 12 million), because agents of the colonial state did not panic in their response.58 52. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain. 53. Roitman, Anti-Crisis, 5. 54. Ibid., 13. 55. Lee Clarke, Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 56. See, for example, Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984 [1960]); Le Bon, The Crowd. 57. See, for example, E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 2002 [1963]); works by George Rudé, including, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848 (New York: New York University Press, 1981); George Rudé and Eric Hobsbawm, Captain Swing: A Social History of the Great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830 (New York: Pantheon, 1968). For a contemporary interpretation of Canetti’s notion of a “universal fear” that drives the human psyche and its impulse to come together into crowds, see Lesley Brill, “Terrorism, Crowds and Power, and the Dogs of War,” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 1 (2003): 87–94. 58. On statistics, postmodernity, and panic, see Kathleen Woodward, “Statistical Panic,” differences: A

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Conversely, in the case of the plague, the institutional panic triggered by agents of the colonial state resulted in draconian public health interventions that sparked another species of panic amongst native communities. Those defined by the authorities as “panicked” bodies invariably interpreted the implementation of quarantines and other coercive state measures as a cover for more sinister designs. Thus, on the one hand, the “panic” of an indigenous population functioned as a “tool” against empire and a way of contesting imperial knowledge. On the other hand, this very panic fueled an institutional overreaction driven by elements within the state who responded in a “moral panic,” which, as Stanley Cohen has noted, may be defined as a situation in which “[a] condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.”59 Panicked interventions by an elite to prevent the spread of popular panic often produce other (and different) forms of panic. From this perspective, it may be more useful to think of compounded “panics” than of “panic” as a singular reaction to a specific event. Arguably, the advent of modern technologies helped to shift panic from the plane of the oral (the whispered rumor) to a panic that operated across different levels of communication simultaneously with unprecedented speed: panic became visual, legible, and telecommunicated. Conversely, the inability to visualize threats triggered panic, as Kirsten Ostherr notes in her reading of Panic in the Streets, a 1950 movie about a potential epidemic of pneumonic plague in New Orleans. There, the authorities panic in the face of the quandary about “how to conduct a search for contagious individuals whose symptoms will be internal and, therefore, invisible until it is too late.”60 Furthermore, as several contributors to this volume argue, panic has often been prompted, not by disease threats per se, but by the social, political, and economic forces that these threats exposed and sometimes unleashed. Grappling with histories of panic may consequently help to shed light on competing understandings of the world: on oftenobscured but formative tensions, struggles, and conflicts within a given society, as well as on processes of social control and claims-making in relation to perceived risk and public safety.

Panic-Crisis as Disease Historically, panic has long been associated with infectious disease. The panic sparked by the spread of cholera in India from 1817 is a case in point, and particularly the way in which native suspicions of the British gave rise to conspiracy theories about the Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 11, no. 2 (1999): 177–203. 59. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and the Rockers (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972), 9. 60. Kirsten Ostherr, Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 20.

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origins of the epidemic, creating a critical context for the 1857 Uprising (discussed in Chapter 4). As Arnold has observed, Indians “saw a connection between cholera and conquest,” and attributed the disease to the British.61 Native suspicions created a breeding ground for subsequent rumors and panics.62 If the prospect of epidemic disease could instigate panic, panic itself has often been conceived as a virulent infection. In her epilogue to this collection, Bashford notes the connection between communication and contagion inscribed in the very terminology used to designate the communicability of disease. The essential feature of “rumor,” Das observes, is that it is conceived to spread. Thus while images of contagion and infection are used to represent rumor in elite discourse, this is not simply a matter of noncomprehension, on the part of elites, of subaltern forms of communication: it also speaks to the transformation of language, namely, that instead of a medium of communication, language becomes communicable, infectious, causing things to happen almost as if they had happened in nature.63

In his history of crisis, Koselleck draws attention to the term’s medical associations, which overlie its earlier judicial meanings. From the time of the Greek physician Galen under the Roman Empire, crisis came to refer to an illness’s “observable condition and to the judgment (judicium) about the course of the illness” when it could be decided whether the patient would live or die.64 Pathological analogies are similarly invoked to describe panic. Bagehot, as we have seen, likened panic to a neural affliction and called it “a species of neuralgia.” Le Bon, in his account of modern crowd psychology, characteristically observed: Ideas, sentiments, emotions, and beliefs possess in crowds a contagious power as intense as that of microbes . . . In the case of men collected in a crowd all emotions are very rapidly contagious, which explains the suddenness of panics. Brain disorders, like madness, are themselves contagious.65

Emotions spread like infective microorganisms. The analogy of panic with contagion is progressively literalized so that panic, as a form of contagious connectivity, comes to be equated not only with social disorder but also with madness. Panic-as-disease belongs, in this sense, to a class of newly identified psychopathologies (along with neurasthenia, hysteria, and agoraphobia), which were construed as the degenerative,

61. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Ninteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 171. 62. Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857, 61. 63. Das, Life and Words, 119. 64. Reinhart Koselleck, trans. Michaela W. Richter, “Crisis,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 67, no. 2 (2006): 357–400 (360). 65. Le Bon, The Crowd, 128.

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“warping” effects of modernity.66 These disorders were associated with the enervating and disorientating influences of technology, flows of information, and capital.67 This elision between “real” infection and metaphoric infection is a key focus of Empires of Panic, since many of the contributors explore the tensions between panic as a “normal” and “extraordinary” condition. As Blum notes, panic is often construed “as a normal social phenomenon,” even though it is applied to explain “extraordinary departures from routine.”68 Its identification as a form of “hysteria,” or as a “contagious” or “toxic” phenomenon that spreads in a process akin to communicable disease, frames panic as a specific kind of pseudobiological aberration or distortion of the typical.69

The Chapters The first six chapters of the book explore imperial and colonial panics from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. Chapters 7 and 8 are concerned with postcolonial panics and how a prehistory of panics has been reconfigured in the light of “new” threats and technological innovations. A key theme, here, is the extent to which contemporary panics, which center on global interconnectedness, overlap with a postcolonial cartography. In different ways, each of the chapters investigates panic in relation to crisis, anxiety, communication, as well as the interrelationship between partial knowledge and panic. Alan Lester opens the book with an overview of different kinds of panic produced in different colonial settings of the British Empire. In particular, his interest in “Empire and the Place of Panic” (Chapter 1) is in panics affecting settler societies and how the panicked reactions of frontier communities to tales of isolated indigenous attacks often called forth more organized, violent, and “blanket” responses from colonial states or militia-type bodies of settlers. The chapter also considers white “moral panics,” where isolated instances of interracial sex—and especially rumors of the black rape of white women—spurred hugely disproportionate state and civil responses. Although these panics are less overtly to do with disease, Lester’s examples suggest how colonial panics were often both the triggers for and product of crises. Or, expressed somewhat differently, how one panic produced another in a 66. On the psychopathologies of modern urban space, see Vidler, Warped Space, 24–50. 67. George Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 [2007]), 103–10. 68. Blum, “Panic and Fear,” 674. 69. Elaine Showalter notes how fears of alien abduction, chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome, and the resurgence of repressed memories in psychotherapy are instances of “hysterical syndromes.” She identifies “rumor panics” as a key feature of these contemporary “epidemics” that are spread by “stories” and “narratives” diffused through popular culture; see Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

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self-perpetuating and reinforcing coproductive looping effect. The chapter concludes by considering the interplay between scales of panic—from micro-level instantiations to the transnational and global—arguing that the study of panic may help to reframe ongoing debates in imperial and global history about the extent and importance of transnational interactions in shaping colonial and imperial identities. Panic, of course, is defined by its opposite: non-panic. In Chapter 2, “Slow Burn in China: Factories, Fear, and Fire in Canton,” John Carroll argues that considering instances of near panic, missed panic, or panic manqué, may illuminate the conditions needed to produce panic. Carroll is concerned with Western preoccupations about fire in pre–Opium War Canton: worries that extended to anxieties—perhaps even to periodic fear—but failed to ignite into full-blown mass panic of the variety examined by other contributors in the volume. Fire has a long history of conceptual intertwinement with panic, as it does with disease.70 Conflagration, disease, and panic were certainly conflated in Hong Kong in 1894, when the panic triggered by bubonic plague “spread like wild fire.” As Fairchild and Johns note in Chapter 7, Dr. Israel Weinstein, commissioner for the New York City Department of Health, warned in a radio broadcast of 1947 that smallpox could spread like wildfire through the population. In the mid-twentieth century analogies of “fire, flood and red fever” were central to the post–Second World War Truman Doctrine, where US insecurity was emphasized and the spread of world communism imagined as a metaphoric convergence of infectious disease and raging fire.71 A major theme in Chapter 2 (as well as in Chapter 5) is the way in which localized crises served to heighten cultural and racial differences. In the context of quasi-colonial Canton, fires raised questions about the nature of Chinese state and society, the use of public and private spaces, and the compatibility of East and West. Crises are not always unmitigated catastrophes: they may also offer opportunities, serving as alibis for political ends, and providing a rationale for state and private interventions. As Priscilla Wald has noted, the “panic” provoked by popular representations of disasters may serve expedient public health ends. In the early 1990s, the molecular biologist Joshua Lederberg welcomed the melodramatic portrayal of pandemic crises in fiction. “Even at their most sensational,” Wald remarks, “fiction and film provided a way to educate the public about the threat and the science of these deadly infections.”72 The “controlled” panic produced by such fictional 70. For example, Gregory of Tours described the spread of plague in Marseille as being “like a wheat field set on fire, the entire town was suddenly ablaze with pestilence”; see Lester K. Little, “Introduction: Life and Afterlife of the First Plague Pandemic,” in Plague and the End of Antiquity, ed. Lester K. Little (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3–32 (11). 71. Robert L. Ivie, “Fire, Flood, and Red Fever: Motivating Metaphors of Global Emergency in the Truman Doctrine Speech,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 3 (1999): 570–91. 72. Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 31.

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repre­sentations could function as a way of forestalling “real” panic, prompting the viewing public to change their outlook and behavior. In Chapter 3, “Epidemic Opportunities: Panic, Quarantines, and the 1851 International Sanitary Conference,” João Rangel de Almeida takes up this theme to explore the political exploitation of infectious disease “shocks.” More specifically, his focus is on the opportunities furnished by cholera epidemics and the panics they incited. The chapter argues that European delegates to the 1851 International Sanitary Conference in Paris used the cholera crisis as a way of negotiating new ways of conducting diplomacy and settling scientific controversies while putting in place a modern program of international epidemic governance. Rangel de Almeida suggests, here, that institutional responses developed to deal with a particular crisis—that of cholera—legitimated Western “health” interventions in the non-Western world, creating a broader context for diplomatic relations and foreign interventions that reverberates in the present. An issue explored by a number of contributors to the book is the compounded nature of panic touched upon earlier: in effect, the plurality of panics that are subsumed within a single “panic.” In Chapter 5, “Health Panics, Migration, and Ecological Exchange in the Aftermath of the 1857 Uprising: India, New Zealand, and Australia,” James Beattie considers the ways in which two panics overlapped to an extent that they became inseparable. While the Uprising of 1857 in India fuelled a panic about the murderous intentions of the indigenous population, it also triggered a health panic as the British worried about the pathological effects of the land and its climate on their constitution. Beattie tracks unexpected and surprisingly overlooked connections between Australia, New Zealand, and India. The chapter demonstrates how fears of India’s tropical climate after the events of 1857 precipitated a flurry of Australasian proposals for the health migration of British troops and officials from India to the Antipodes. The chapter also shows how such fears led to the introduction of Australian trees into India for perceived health benefits, as well as the development of hill stations in Australasia. Beattie invites us to rethink panic as an environmental predicament. India was invariably viewed by the British as a country prone to panic. Historical accounts tended to emphasize how native “mobs” were “seized by panic,” with panic understood as a condition with dangerous contagious properties. According to these quasimiasmic and racial theories, panic emerged from an unhealthy Oriental environment. Panic was construed as an Indian condition attributable to the enervating effects of tropical climes and to mass urban living. At the same time, colonials revealed their own panicked responses to the Indian environment after 1857. The severity of a crisis and the magnitude of the panicked reactions it triggers are not always commensurate. This is an insight developed by Arnold in Chapter 5, “Disease, Rumor, and Panic in India’s Plague and Influenza Epidemics, 1896–1919.”

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While the epidemic of bubonic plague resulted in an estimated 8.5 million deaths and 10 million by 1921, the influenza pandemic of 1918–19 caused a further 12 million deaths in India in the space of only a few months. But, where plague provoked a major “panic” that affected both the colonial regime and the Indian population, sparking rumor, riots, repression, and mass migration from urban centers, the greater and more abrupt mortality of the influenza episode passed without any apparent crisis. Clearly, the scale of mortality alone does not explain the onset of a deep sense of crisis in 1896–97 and its relative absence in 1918–19. So why, Arnold enquires, was the influenza epidemic the “dog that did not bark”? In addressing this question, the chapter looks at the contrasting epidemiology of the diseases and their cultural construction, the very different governmental and public health responses to them, the timing of the epidemics in relation to internal political and economic developments, and the international situation surrounding them. In Chapter 6, “Panic Encabled: Epidemics and the Telegraphic World,” Robert Peckham considers how telegraphy shaped responses to and influenced the management of epidemics in the 1890s, a period that saw the institutionalization of laboratory science, the development of an epidemiologically based public health, as well as the “unification” of the globe by cable. Although the transformative roles of new technologies (such as steam-powered ships, railways, and the telegraph) are often cited in relation to transnational mobility and the proliferating networks that characterized empire, to date there has been little study made of the telegraph as a tool in the surveillance of infectious disease, and to its role in “empire’s reterritorializing power.”73 Focusing on outbreaks of influenza in the metropole and the bubonic plague in the crown colony of Hong Kong, Peckham investigates the uses made of the telegraph as a means of collecting and disseminating information about infectious disease, as well as the impact of condensed “telegraphic speech” on official discourse. The focus is on the agency of language; on its role in the shaping of panic events. As Das has observed in the context of panic-rumors, a characteristic in such situations is “the perlocutionary force of words, their capacity to do something by saying something, through which words come to be transformed from being a medium of communication to becoming bearers of force.”74 Peckham argues, first, that the telegraph functioned as a means of “pinpointing” epidemics, not only tracking them as definable events in space and time, but also fixing them in an apparently objective and technological language; second, that by suggesting connections between disparate data, the telegraph served to amplify anxieties. As Peckham puts it, telegraphic technology tended to exacerbate panics in the very process of containing them. 73. See Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, Empires and the Reach of the Global, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), 65. 74. Das, Life and Words, 119.

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Chapters 7 and 8 extend the scope of the book into the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries to explore the afterlife of nineteenth-century epidemic panics in the contemporary world. Fairchild and Johns undertake a theoretical and empirical consideration of mass infectious disease panics in the United States. They argue that contemporary concerns about panic rehearse earlier experiences of panic. Adapting the notion of the “social drama” developed by the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner, they propose the “panic drama” as a means of elucidating the “script” that underlies late nineteenth and twentieth-century panic responses. Through the lenses of yellow fever, influenza, smallpox, swine flu, and biowarfare (later called bioterrorism), they show how panic has been bound “into the very construction of epidemics.” Their purpose is to trace how the “panic drama” has been modified over more than a century, with dramatic components reconfigured—as well as examining the shifting role that institutions and authority have played in this process—while the basic panic narrative has been maintained. The persistent but specific adaptations of the panic narrative are also the focus of Chapter 8, which examines the iconography of infectious threats from the mid-1930s to the H1N1 pandemic of 2009. Outbreaks of novel infectious diseases, Nicholas King argues, are highly visceral, despite the fact that many of their constitutive elements are imperceptible: pathogens are invisible to the naked eye, vectors are vanishingly small or incomprehensibly diffuse, and many symptoms are invisible to all but trained specialists. The chapter considers the processes and technologies by which these invisible elements are rendered visible, emphasizing the ways in which the visual field has been privileged in the panic narrative. As King reminds us, graphic forms of representation such as maps and statistical graphs (including William Farr’s cholera chart reproduced on the cover of this book) have been vital in shaping public responses to epidemics. Through analyses of films, photography, and news media, King identifies a repertoire of images and associations—what he calls an “iconography” of new infectious threats—that has been reworked to represent disease outbreaks over the past 80 years, with consequences for the evolving nature of “panic” itself. King shows how a discourse of “newness,” shaped in part by the visual language of consumer culture, connects “novel” pathogenic threats to a “new” global interconnectedness, obscuring continuities. In so doing, King intimates connections between the ubiquity of fearinducing images in the media, the consumption of fear-mitigating products, and the novelty of emerging diseases.75 The chapter concludes with a reflection on the relationship between this iconography of disease emergence “and Western, particularly American, ambivalence towards modernity and the apparent dissolution of imperial orders in the face of globalization.” Chapters 7 and 8 indicate the central role of the United States and its politics in the production of global disease panics; they further point to continuities between a 75. On “the saturation of social space by fear,” see Massumi, “Preface,” ix.

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contemporary, postcolonial (United States-led) world and the ways in which colonial spaces and histories continue to shape the viral imaginaries of the present. Finally, in the epilogue, Bashford reflects on these underlying continuities but also considers the pitfalls of excessively “presentist” approaches to panic, recapitulating the book’s major themes with a backward glance and a projection into the future of pandemic panics to come.

Thinking in Time Empires of Panic explores panic both as a social condition and as the particular instantiation of a crisis condition; it is concerned with panic as a sustained “slowburning,” an immanent structural phenomenon, and as a singular, explosive event; with chronic “panics” and acute “panics”—and the in-betweenness of panics that are neither wholly one nor the other. The book seeks to open up critical debate on what panics are, how they have been understood, and the ways they have been managed and deployed in a global world produced by empire. But the question remains: how useful is “panic” in elucidating collective reactions to disasters?76 Today, it is often claimed that we are living in a “risk society.” Certainly, contemporary life is characterized by a sense of perceived uncertainty in which current catastrophes are compared and contrasted with former catastrophes: the financial crisis of 2008 and the H1N1 swine flu pandemic of 2009, for example, with the 1929 stock market crash and the 1918 flu pandemic, respectively; or the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. What are the bases for such analogies? What can past panics tell us about the contemporary world, about today’s panics?77 As Sheldon Ungar has argued, social anxieties are increasingly being articulated in relation to nuclear, medical, environmental, and chemical threats.78 Yet, as the contributors to Empires of Panic also suggest, contemporary panics continue to draw on the assumptions of an imperial order and on inherited sites of anxiety centered on race, class, and difference, to reveal the often-obscured postcolonial cartographies of a deeply unequal and racialized world. As several contributors argue in this collection, racial difference and cultural distance have a capacity to amplify and generalize 76. Dirk Helbing, Illés Farkas, and Tamas Vicsek, “Simulating Dynamical Features of Escape Panic,” Nature, vol. 407, no. 6803 (September 28, 2000): 487–90. 77. As Clarke has argued, the emphasis in thinking about and planning for disaster tends to focus on probability and risk, rather than on possibility; see Worst Cases. 78. Ungar focuses on the “scares” precipitated by the nuclear arms race, emerging diseases such as Ebola and avian flu, and global climate change. He suggests that these novel sites of anxiety call for a rethinking of “moral panic” research agendas; see Sheldon Ungar, “Global Bird Flu Communication,” Science Communication, vol. 29, no. 4 (2008): 472–97 (472); “Moral Panic Versus the Risk Society: The Implications of the Changing Sites of Social Anxiety,” British Journal of Sociology, vol. 52, no. 2 (2001): 271–91. For a critique of Ungar, see Sean P. Hier, “Risk and Panic in Late Modernity: Implications of the Converging Sites of Social Anxiety,” British Journal of Sociology, vol. 54, no. 1 (2003): 3–20.

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preexisting anxieties to produce different species of panic—a suggestion made by C. A. Bayly in his account of the evolution of British intelligence gathering in colonial India, and the misinterpretation of this intelligence by authorities with consequences for their panicked response to the Uprising of 1857.79 It might be further argued that today globalized financial and pandemic panics, and the panics induced by global networks of terrorism, continue to feed on fears that reverberate from earlier (broadly speaking colonial) times about the dangers and capriciousness of other races and cultures. Panic, in other words, is always produced from a repertoire of former fears: about oceans that might cause tsunamis, diseases that might one day become pandemics, and wars that could escalate into holocausts. Panicked conditions may serve as a justification for ratifying sweeping political reforms and acceding to radical state interventions. A case in point being the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act (MSEHPA) that followed the Al Qaeda attacks on Washington and New York in September 11, 2001. Understanding how panics have been produced and understood in history, as well as the uses to which they have been put, may help to foster a more critical engagement with the present.80 As recent events have also shown, panic and anxiety can serve to highlight the need for longer-term social action and act as catalysts for new modes of enquiry into emerging diseases or banking practices. In this sense, panic may have its uses beyond the controlling calculations of the state.

79. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780– 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 80. Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986).

1 Empire and the Place of Panic Alan Lester

Many of the chapters in this book demonstrate how well-developed imperial systems of communication not only enabled the dissemination of information and power but also facilitated the diffusion of disease and panic during the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Implicitly or explicitly, they contribute to a recent “spatial turn” in colonial studies, in which the geographies of empire are taken as seriously as its histories, and through which the essence of empire—encounter and engagement between previously disconnected polities through new forms of transglobal connectivity—is foregrounded.1 In this exploratory chapter, I use two brief examples to suggest that panic was also an intrinsic accompaniment to the very establishment of imperialism, particularly on settler frontiers. Panic, or rather the politics and, perhaps, the semblance of panic, were fundamental to the establishment and maintenance of those networks that sustained colonial power relations across an unevenly integrated imperial terrain. Panic may be the result of the fear of lives at risk. However, the question of which lives, what or whom they are at risk from, and how that risk may be manifested remains problematic. As David Arnold suggests in Chapter 5 of this volume, the socially constructed nature of panic is demonstrated by the asymmetry between actual mortality figures and the fear elicited by the threat.2 Although, in colonial contexts, as Robert Peckham has noted, unreasonable beliefs and their “contagion” were often ascribed by colonial observers to irrational non-Europeans, the emphasis in my two examples—drawn from the eastern Cape Colony in the 1830s and 1840s and Natal in the 1860s and 1870s—is on the panics reproduced by British colonizers themselves; panics that both crystallized the insecurities occasioned by the forceful domination of radicalized others, and strategically enabled such domination. Of 1. Antoinette Burton, Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British Imperialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 14–15. 2. See also Philip Alcabes who notes: “More than 100,000 Americans die every year from unintentional injuries, including about 40,000 fatalities associated with motor-vehicle crashes.” Conversely, there are “seven- or eightfold fewer deaths from AIDS in the United States.” And yet the moral panic prompted by AIDS far outweighed the force of campaigns for road safety; Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 2–3.

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course, in reality, settler and “native” panics were by no means disconnected. As both Luise White and Ranajit Guha have shown, in different ways, indigenous and colonial panics were coproduced by the very encounters, engagements, and reformulations of subjectivity that constituted colonialism, and as we will see in the case of Natal, the prospective revision of African practices of polygamy was entangled with a white settler panic over rape.3 The two panics that I introduce to make these points are seemingly geographically self-contained and isolated instances. But, having introduced them, I then want to suggest that they need to be seen as instances both calling upon, and calling forth, new forms of networked communication. Each had causes and effects that extended beyond their immediate locales. They were manifestations of imperial power precisely because of these translocal connections. Secondly, I want to move beyond panics, which can be considered to belong entirely within the realm of the human, to highlight the ways in which panics are networked not just across space, but also across human-nonhuman boundaries. As Daniel Headrick has demonstrated, imperial expansion was thoroughly dependent upon technologies both connecting and expediting uneven power relations across space. But colonial relations consisted of nonhuman actants that were more subtle than steamships, guns, canals, cables, and railroads, and that ranged beyond even quinine as a penetrative medical technology.4 The concluding section of my chapter is intended to serve as something of a preface to the ways in which this book, with its focus on the dissemination of panic, develops a more broad-ranging agenda for more-than-human networks in imperial history.

Two Panics Colonization was, as one might expect, fraught with danger. Resistance was expected, but what form it would take, and where and when it would occur were never certain. Rumor could easily shade into panic, and it was often panic within settler communities that did most to invoke intervention by colonial governments. Panic could be the phenomenon that turned the private “enterprise” of settlers encroaching illicitly onto indigenous peoples’ lands into the formal extension of colonial government. It called forth governmental responses to insecurity more effectively than individual advocacy or petitions, and those responses could render uncertain zones of sovereignty 3. Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). See also Homi K. Bhabha, “In a Spirit of Calm Violence,” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 326–43. 4. Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

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on colonial frontiers more solid, changing the status of indigenous inhabitants from independent to subject people in the process.5 Panics could also have the effect of racialization. While both Xhosa speakers in the eastern Cape and Zulu speakers in Natal had been constructed by humanitarians and settlers as variably “civilizable” according to humanitarian precepts of human universality through the 1830s and early 1840s, the instances of panic and its articulation recounted here helped settlers to solidify and communicate antihumanitarian representations of indigenous irreclaimability. Through representations of the anxiety that black neighbors aroused, settler communities were able to concretize their own notions of racial difference and communicate them across a broader colonial terrain.6 My first example of what was a fairly widespread process is the way in which a particular British settler panic about Xhosa raiding on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony in the 1840s prompted the more effective colonization and racialization of the Xhosa. Some 4,000 British settlers had been induced to emigrate to the eastern Cape Colony by the promise of land and opportunity during the post–Napoleonic War depression. Precariously established on a frontier with Xhosa-speaking chiefdoms, many of whom had been displaced but not defeated in previous frontier wars, this community became the first target when an alliance of Xhosa chiefs attacked the colony in 1834 seeking the return of lost land. Twenty-four settlers were killed in the first onslaught. By the end of 1836, a scorched earth campaign by colonial forces had forced the Xhosa to surrender. The Cape’s governor, Sir Benjamin D’Urban, declared that, as an act of punishment and a deterrent to future attacks, further Xhosa lands adjoining those claimed by the settlers would be annexed by the colony, renamed Queen Adelaide Province, and the Xhosa expelled from them. The settler community’s relief, represented most vocally by Robert Godlonton, editor of the settler’s newspaper, the Grahamstown Journal (GTJ), was, however, short-lived. Godlonton expressed the widespread outrage felt by the settlers when the influence of missionaries and humanitarians, riding high on the triumph of the abolition of the slave trade, persuaded the British government to hand back the appropriated land. The attack on the settlers was understood by metropolitan liberals as a last, desperate resort, rather than a manifestation of the Xhosa’s inherent savagery. Instead of forcing all the frontier Xhosa away from the settlers, the colonial government 5. Settler panics did not always produce such results. As the example of South Carolinian panic about Cherokee attacks in 1751 shows, wars of conquest did not always eventuate and some panics would subside without military intervention; see Gregory Evans Dowd, “The Panic of 1751: The Significance of Rumors on the South Carolina-Cherokee Frontier,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 3 (1996): 527–60. 6. For the concurrent racialization of Khoesan in the eastern Cape, see Robert Ross, The Borders of Race in Colonial South Africa: The Kat River Settlement, 1829–1856 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), and, for an argument that the humanitarian project of emancipation itself spurred racialization in the colony as a whole, see R. L. Watson, Slave Emancipation and Racial Attitudes in NineteenthCentury South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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would (reluctantly) have to treat them as an independent people to be “managed” through treaties and diplomacy overseen by a new lieutenant governor, Andries Stockenström.7 Through the late 1830s and 1840s, the GTJ enunciated and, to a great extent, orchestrated, a mounting panic among the settlers. It published a litany of accounts of stock losses, robberies, and murders committed by the Xhosa against unoffending colonists. The “plunder” of the colonial margins was represented as proof that humanitarian endeavors to deal with the Xhosa were not only misguided, but fundamentally dangerous. Through its steady stream of complaints about the lack of security under Stockenström’s treaty system and its alarmist reporting of specific incidents of danger to which colonists along the frontier were exposed on an apparently daily basis (although none were actually killed), the GTJ established that the frontier was a “space of terror” inflicted by the “irreclaimable” Xhosa.8 Even D’Urban, as John S. Galbraith notes, “considered the Grahamstown Journal a purveyor of rumors that poisoned the atmosphere and made peace difficult, if not impossible.” In 1835, D’Urban observed: “The atmosphere of Graham’s Town is charged with Panic, and it explodes on every sort of improbable fancy from time to time, and these stories once set agoing multiply and grow as they run.”9 I will return to this eastern Cape panic below, but first I want to move across a nearly adjacent colonial frontier to Natal, some 30 years later and, at first glance, a rather different kind of settler panic. The panic in Natal began during the late 1860s, when the colony’s newspapers started to report widespread fear of assaults on white women from African men in Pietermaritzburg and Durban.10 Despite a lack of evidence and convictions, the scare continued to mount until 1872, after which it subsided. As Norman Etherington notes, “testimony about the threat” came predominantly “from white men who claimed to speak on behalf of white women whom, they alleged, were unable to speak for themselves without transgressing the accepted bounds of female decency.”11 Aside

7. For more details, see Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001). 8. Michael Taussig, “Culture of Terror—Space of Death: Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 135–73. 9. Quoted in John S. Galbraith, Reluctant Empire: British Policy on the South African Frontier, 1834–1854 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 42. 10. As Pamela Scully notes, the emphasis in the literature has tended to be on the rape of white women by African men, rather than the much more prevalent rape of African women by white men: “Rape, Race, and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South Africa,” American Historical Review, vol. 100, no. 2 (1995): 335–59. 11. Norman Etherington, “Natal’s Black Rape Scare of the 1870s,” Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 15, no. 1 (1988): 36–53 (37).

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from one case, which itself was far from clear-cut, the evidence that these men drew upon was hardly overwhelming: In May 1872 women of Pietermaritzburg reported dark figures lurking about who vanished when chased. In February of the following year a storekeeper working late thought he heard a noise in his daughter’s bedroom and went to investigate. He found a previously locked window open and later saw what appeared to be a nude black man sprinting away into the bush. In May 1874 a women was touched by a man on the street who then ran off—reason enough thought the editor of the Witness to form a Vigilance Committee to supplement the official police.12

Each of these southern African panics has conventionally been thought of as a spatially delimited episode—something prompted by the particular circumstances of each settler community and its relationship with local indigenous people at a given time. But I would suggest that, as with other instances of panic, the two episodes might more fruitfully be conceived as inherently trans-imperial. The foundations for such a conception have been laid in much of the recent literature on empire, informed by a “spatial turn.” Recent scholarship on empire has seen multiple boundary crossings. Geographical units have been traversed as the previously separate domains of British history, imperial history, area studies, and the histories of former colonies have all become interconnected. Where to limit certain avenues of imperial historical enquiry has become as significant as when. The conventional way of escaping the confines of a singular spatial unit in order to gain broader perspective in the writing of history has been the comparative method. Whereas this might enable us to identify certain parallels and differences between places, interest more recently has focused instead on the mutually transformative connections that helped to constitute places relationally.13 Attention has come to be focused on the “weight of positive, concrete and precisely historical connections” rather than resemblance or discrepancy.14 Comparative histories tend to adopt a view of space and place that has recently been critiqued by Doreen Massey. In this view, places are seen as discrete, bounded entities, like billiard balls placed upon a table, which represents space as a whole.15 The “table” is an analytically discrete entity from the specific places—the “billiard balls”—ranged upon it. Within Massey’s more relative conception of space and place, the distinction between “billiard ball” and “table,” between place and space, becomes blurred. Specific places are seen as emergent from the very same mobilities and relations that constitute space in general. 12. Ibid., 37–38. 13. Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). 14. Gillian Whitlock, “A ‘White-Souled State’: Across the ‘South’ With Lady Barker,” in Text, Theory, Space: Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner, and Sarah Nuttall (London: Routledge, 1996), 65–80 (68, citing Robert Wilson). 15. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 1995).

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Networked approaches have been one way in which this more relative conception of space and place has infiltrated imperial history. The network, as both a descriptive and an analytical device, allowed nodal points to exist at a variety of scales, from individual people through institutional spaces such as the mission station or the laboratory, to agglomerations such as towns, cities, regions, and countries. The phenomena that the historian is interested in can be seen as constituted by flows of capital, movements of people, objects or organisms, and the communication of ideas in textual or visual form, between these nodes, via the physical and imaginative routes connecting them.16 The panics in the eastern Cape and Natal can both be seen in a different light if their networks of causation and transmission, spilling beyond their immediate colonial confines, are traced. The imperial circuits of communication, constituted at this stage by the regular passage of ships between the Cape and Britain, enabled bundles of the GTJ to be taken to London, where metropolitan newspapers such as The Times extracted them (often without acknowledgement) to constitute their own reports on colonial affairs. Editors, like Godlonton and the settlers who corresponded and spoke with him to convey the panic sparked by their apparent abandonment to the whim of the “savages” upon their border, were well aware of the uses to which their words were put in shaping metropolitan opinion. They utilized this channel of communication to try to sway domestic opinion and policy in their favor.17 In conveying representations of settler panic and Xhosa savagery, however, the British emigrants had to tread a difficult path. On the one hand, they needed to convince metropolitan observers of the need for greater military protection and the eventual conquest of the Xhosa. On the other hand, if they were to attract further emigration and British investment to the region, and thus secure their own material wellbeing, they needed to provide assurances of its safety. In 1841, The Frontier Times attacked “those who would lead by exaggeration or ill-grounded statements all distant persons to suppose that we are constantly in a state of danger and terror” on the grounds that such representations would deter “capital and emigrants” from the Cape’s shores.18 The problem that settlers were creating for themselves through their communicated panic was made clear in comparative guidebooks for intending British emigrants. Whereas the Australian Aborigines were represented in the Colonial Magazine and East India Review as “fortunately for us . . . the greatest cowards on the face of the earth,” the Xhosa would have to be met by a “stern exterminating system,” 16. Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race. 17. See Alan Lester, “British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire,” History Workshop Journal, vol. 54, no. 1 (2002): 24–48. 18. Quoted in John Mitford Bowker, Speeches, Letters and Selections from Important Papers (Grahamstown: Godlonton and Richards, 1864), 104. See also Tony E. Kirk, “Self-government and Self-defence in South Africa: The Inter-relations between British and Cape Politics, 1846–1854” (unpublished PhD thesis, Oxford University, 1972), 61, 63–64.

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which few potential emigrants were likely to relish encountering upon their arrival in a new home.19 In the 1840s, however, most settlers’ priority was to reverse the treaty system, reclaim Queen Adelaide Province, and call forth a greater British military presence. In any case, many settlers were well aware that a larger garrison brought material benefits of its own that compensated for any deferral of immigration.20 In 1838, The Times published “information” received from the GTJ on the disastrous effect that Stockenström’s treaties were having on the transfrontier trade, let alone the security of emigrant Britons, using the Cape to make a broader point about the “supineness of the Ministry in all that relates to the trading interest of the Country.”21 With London merchants who traded with frontier farmers joining in the clamor, the new colonial secretary was persuaded to suspend Stockenström, a strong defender of the treaty system, from his post, citing his “unpopularity” as the main reason. Although the new lieutenant governor distrusted the Grahamstown settlers (he described them as “longing after the lands of the Kaffirs”), Stockenström’s treaties with the Xhosa were breached in 1840, when colonists were allowed once more to cross the frontier and retrieve “stolen cattle.” Then, in 1844, the new governor, Sir Peregrine Maitland arrived with fresh instructions from London. He scrapped the treaties altogether. Maitland agreed with Godlonton that the settlers were living in a “sea of troubles,” with “murder and robbery of frequent occurrence within the Colonial Border.”22 Urged on by the settlers, he responded to a minor incident by formulating an ultimatum which initiated the 1846–47 frontier war. It was this war that would lead to the more permanent annexation of Queen Adelaide Province, this time as British Kaffraria, and the subjection of the Ciskeian Xhosa to British colonial rule.23 In Natal’s case, rather than prompting a realignment of colonial and metropolitan interests so as to allow for further colonial expansion, the rape panic created opportunities to consolidate the nascent colonial state. The political effect of periodic moral panics about the sexual threat of black and Asian men to white women in colonial 19. Quoted in Simon Dagut, “The Migrant Voyage as Initiation School: Sailing from Britain to South Africa, 1850s–1890s,” paper presented at the international conference on “New African Perspectives: Africa, Australasia and the Wider World at the End of the Twentieth Century,” University of Western Australia, Perth, November, 26–29, 1999, 11. Australian frontiers were also actually the sites of panics which called forth the extension of colonial sovereignty; see Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines Across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 20. Anthonie E. Du Toit, The Cape Frontier: A Study of Native Policy With Special Reference to the Years 1847–1866 (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1954), 52–53. 21. Times [London] (February 7, 1838), 5. 22. GTJ (January 9, 1847), reprinted in Robert Godlonton, Case of the Colonists (Grahamstown: Richards, Slater and Co., 1879), 103. 23. For the devastating consequences for the Xhosa, see Lester, Imperial Networks and Jeffrey B. Peires, The Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle Killing Movement of 1856–7 (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1989).

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societies has been written about extensively.24 As Jock McCulloch has shown in the case of Rhodesia, panics over the rape of white women by African men invoked state responses that consolidated the specific boundaries of race, class, and gender upholding settler men’s privilege. They served to reiterate the legitimate claims of men both to property in the bodies of women and to the rights of citizenship. During the first decades of the twentieth century, such “panics were both an expression of the problems of constructing a white identity and a means by which it was achieved.”25 In Etherington’s analysis, the Natal panic was induced by both an emerging threat to the tenuous grip on power that the relatively small white population of the colony had established and a more immediate trigger. The trigger may have been a tax on polygamous African marriages. Discussion of the tax, in the newspapers and in the Legislative Assembly, publicized the notion that African men, their “outsized lusts” thwarted through the inability to marry, might now be expected to find an outlet within the white community. “At the same time that it enacted the new marriage regulations,” the Assembly “passed a law imposing dire penalties on black men found guilty of raping white females.” As Etherington writes, “because this act preceded the period of greatest anxiety about sexual assault it is possible to speculate that the discussion in the press and in the council was the cause rather than the consequence of panic among the colonists.”26 But, as Etherington also notes, the context for this trigger was a set of more profound developments that reoriented Natal in relation to other sites across and beyond the region. The rape scare occurred at a time when the diamond mines of Kimberley were attracting not only significant capital investment, raised by men like Cecil Rhodes through contacts forged in places like the Athenaeum Club in London, but also vast numbers of migrant laborers, many of them sent by their chiefs to earn the wages to buy guns. As extensive migrant labor networks started to integrate the pastoral economy of Natal more fully with the new industrial economy of the Kimberley region, so local settler employers found that their dependence on local African men’s labor became more acute. Not only that, but large numbers of “Kholwa,” Christian 24. The phrase “moral panic” is used by Stanley Cohen to describe situations in which a section of the community is gripped by fear out of proportion to any existing threat. Cohen’s analysis ascribes such panics to fears about property and social control; see Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972). In the settler colonial context, where race figures more obviously, see, for example, David M. Anderson, “Sexual Threat and Settler Society: ‘Black Perils’ in Kenya, c.  1907–30,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 38, no. 1 (2010): 47–74; Henriëtte J. Lubbe, “The Myth of ‘Black Peril’: Die Burger and the 1929 Election,” South African Historical Journal, vol. 37, no. 1 (1997): 107–32, and, in fiction, Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown (The Raj Quartet) (London: Arrow, 1996). 25. Jock McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935 (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2000), back cover. 26. Etherington, “Natal’s Black Rape Scare,” 39. The rape law was disallowed in London the next year because it meted out penalties according to the race of the criminal, not the nature of the crime.

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converts who sought assimilation within the new colonial society, were becoming efficient competitors in commercial agriculture. It was these realigning, spatially extensive networks of industrial capital and migrant labor, repositioning Natal’s political economy and bringing new threats to the privileges and control enjoyed by settlers in the colony, that underpinned the rape panic of the late 1860s and early 1870s. The effect of the panic was greater settler support for the consolidation of a colonial state, which many settlers had preferred to hold at arm’s length beforehand. The panic helped to render colonial government into a vehicle capable of reassuring the settler community of its security. Theophilus Shepstone, secretary for native affairs and, in Natal’s “Shepstonian system,” also its supreme chief, argued that the only remedy was to create a police force whose duty “it should be to patrol among the estates and on the main roads, so as to check and regulate the movements of . . . [African] men, to prevent their wandering about the country without the knowledge of their employers, to curtail the temptation as well as the opportunity to commit the outrages of which so much has of late been heard, and to contribute generally to the suppression of all kinds of crime outside the boundaries of boroughs and townships.”27 In many respects, Natal’s rape panic paralleled the rape scares and ensuing lynchings of the southern United States during the Reconstruction period. These, too, reflected the particular circumstances of an apparently weakened white grip on a subordinated African American population. Natal’s panic subsided after the excessively brutal, public punishment and humiliation inflicted on the chief Langalibalele who had refused to hand over guns earned by migrant laborers on the mines. Etherington argues that, “although it is virtually impossible to prove that the Langalibalele campaign had the cathartic effect of a lynching party in Dixie, the rape scare did abate rapidly after 1874.”28 The effect of a panic over African men’s assaults on white women was the same: the calling forth of a more interventionist, surveillance-prone colonial state; one with a license to intervene where required in order to shore up white privilege even if that meant limiting the freedoms that white settlers had grown accustomed to exercising. But that effect—and, one might suggest, the causes of the panic too—was the product of realigning trans-imperial and transregional networks of capital and labor mobility, as much as they were the outcome of purely local forces. Panic, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, had scalar causes and repercussions well beyond its sites of origin.

27. Ibid., 46. 28. Ibid., 51.

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Panics and the Nonhuman If spatial boundaries have been crossed promiscuously in recent writing on empire, so too have disciplinary boundaries. Social, economic, and cultural historians have engaged more readily with historians of science and technology, and historians, anthropologists, geographers, and environmental scientists have all started to conceive of empires in similar ways: as assemblages comprised of networks including both human and nonhuman actors. Much of this disciplinary boundary crossing hints at the desire for a more syncretic approach to the past and present, to society and nature, to the individual and the collective. With the struggle of some imperial historians to draw hermetic boundaries around their subdiscipline receding, incipient trajectories in imperial history writing will continue to be most productive when positioned within such broader interdisciplinary endeavors.29 The impetus for a syncretic approach to human and nonhuman (or “more than human”) agency can be ascribed in no small measure to the work of Bruno Latour. His work brings nonhuman actors into history in two ways; first, by showing how they facilitate human agency, and second, by asserting their own active agency. Although the things that imperial historians may want to track are usually phenomena seen as intrinsically and exclusively human, such as political influence, debates over identity, and contests over trade—things that people propel through networks—as Latour notes, “we must be careful not to confuse what circulates once everything is in place with the setups involving the heterogeneous set of elements that allow circulation to occur.” Latour uses the example of the “natural gas that lets the Russians keep their empire going.” In order for gas to circulate between the Caucasus and France, nonhuman elements—such as steel tubing, pumping stations, and pylons anchored in the permafrost—must continually be brought into alignment with human elements, such as international treaties, Russian mafiosi, willing Ukrainian politicians, and “frostbitten technicians,” not to mention the millions of French consumers who are generally oblivious of these elements unless a crisis of “network interruption” occurs.30 Networks of imperial influence and colonial power relations were just as 29. There is now a strong tradition of specifically imperial environmental history, but I am thinking here more of the merging of sociopolitical and environmental histories of empire in line with attempts to rethink the boundaries between humanity and “nature” at large. Imperial historians might come more instinctively to see human and nonhuman mobilities combining to reshape colonial place, space, and experience. Some examples include Richard Drayton, “Maritime Networks and the Making of Knowledge,” in Empire, the Sea and Global History: Britain’s Maritime World, c. 1760–c. 1840, ed. David Cannadine (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 72–82; and Kirsten Greer, “Red Coats and Wild Birds: Military Culture and Ornithology across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire” (unpublished PhD thesis, Queen’s University, 2011). 30. Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 33. The Ukrainian crisis in 2014 and tensions between Russia and Europe over energy supply served to focus attention on these networks.

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reliant on nonhuman elements such as ships, ocean currents, trade winds, botanical specimens, animals, printing presses, paper, and guns repeatedly being brought into alignment to enable their circulations. As things flow or circulate through the points of connection and transmission enabled by these alignments of more than human elements, so certain minor thresholds or gaps have continually to be overcome. This happens in different ways in different kinds of network. Latour’s examples include the ways in which lawyers learn how to achieve a trajectory from incident to court case through legal means, and scientists learn how to effect proof of experimental results, taking findings from the laboratory to the published paper. Similarly, colonial officials learned how to persuade at a distance through the art of dispatch writing, and close at hand through the personal embodiment of virtue.31 Capacity within networks, or what we might define as power, can be gained by individuals as they acquire the ability to cross these gaps between the segments and stages of connectivity. But it is not only human agents who are able to operate across these thresholds. Previous work by the editor of this volume and many of its contributors has shown that particularly significant “network interruptions” within empire occurred when imperial channels of mobility carried disease alongside the personnel, commodities, ideas, and capital that imperial communications systems were constructed to carry.32 Following Latour, we can see that bacteria, as “agents of identifiable diseases . . . equipped with a capacity and volition to infect,” have an agency of their own within such vast interconnecting “chains.”33 The agency of bacteria could interact with the panicked agency of the people who maintained trans-imperial circuits of communication. Bubonic plague—which spread from mainland China to Hong Kong in 1894, to Bombay in 1896, via the railway to Calcutta (killing seven million people in India in the period 1896–1914), to Cape Town with the movement of personnel during the South African War in 1900, Nairobi in 1902, and West Africa in 1908— for instance, led to “extreme and drastic reactions” across and beyond the British empire.34 Improvement boards and trusts were rapidly established in nearly every 31. See, for example, Alan Lester, “Personifying Colonial Governance: George Arthur and the Transition from Humanitarian to Development Discourse,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 102, no. 6 (2012): 1468–88. 32. Robert Peckham, “Infective Economies: Empire, Panic and the Business of Disease,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 41, no. 2 (2013): 211–37; Robert Peckham and David M. Pomfret, eds., Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013). 33. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), quoted in Robert Peckham and David M. Pomfret, “Introduction: Medicine, Hygiene, and the Re-ordering of Empire,” in Peckham and Pomfret, Imperial Contagions, 1–14 (3–4). 34. Home, Of Planning and Planting, 87; Peckham, “Infective Economies.” On the global spread of plague during the “Third Plague Pandemic,” see Myron Echenberg, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901 (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

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major city, and they were responsible for unprecedented demolition, slum clearance, and racial segregation. Within colonial discourse, of course, the nonhuman cause of the disease was rapidly both humanized and racialized. The blame was placed squarely on “the insanitary and immoral lives of the Asiatic races” rather than the imperial networks of transmission that both sustained empire and enabled bacterial mobility. Aside from new measures to displace local and immigrant South Asian and Chinese people from areas adjacent to European quarters in most of the empire’s Asian and southern African port cities, “indigenous customary practices were subjected to inspection, regulation and disciplinary action by an army of sanitary inspectors.”35 It is this volume’s innovation to link in particular the political, cultural, and social manifestations of panic to the mobility of diseases, fires, and other physical threats. As its contributors do so, they are reconceiving imperial history as properly the study of the nonhuman as well as the human, and of the trans-imperial as well as the local. Panic, as the diffusion and amplification of small-scale events through networks and across space, serves as a specific instance of nonhuman and human mobilities combining and being juxtaposed so as to reshape identities, ideas, and practices across the intricate webs of empire. From scares and rumors of slave revolts in the eighteenth century to settler canards about the threat posed by indigenous people in the 1830s, to moral panics about white women’s endangered virtue at the hands of a “black peril,” to fears of contagious diseases in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, panic was woven into the fabric of everyday life for colonizers on multiple frontiers of the British Empire. It was disseminated by personal encounters taking the form of talk and gossip, and by newspapers. It was communicated between colonies on sail and steam ships, and then by telegraph and air travel. It was frequently the catalyst for turning colonizing intent into action; for rendering autonomous indigenous peoples into subjects of empire, for tightening the governmental grip on such peoples, and for effecting greater segregation between them and their more privileged colonizers.

35. Home, Of Planning and Planting, 87.

2 Slow Burn in China: Factories, Fear, and Fire in Canton John M. Carroll

From the mid-1700s until the Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing) in 1842, Westerners in China were restricted to a tiny section of the city of Canton (Guangzhou). Here, trade between China and the West was conducted according to the Canton System through a group of Hongs, Chinese merchant houses specially licensed by the Qing government and organized into the Cohong (Gonghang). According to the Qing government’s “Eight Regulations,” foreigners were allowed to participate in trade only from October to March, and were confined to their “factories” without their women and families. Although foreigners in Canton rarely had to worry about personal safety, fire was a particular scourge, claiming lives but above all threatening trade. Foreigners frequently worried about fire, particularly after the great conflagration of 1822 and during the dry autumn and winter months when fires broke out more easily. In November 1836, the Canton Press reported a fire in which many people had been killed, either in the fire or in the river while trying to escape. To make matters worse, “a great many” young women from brothels destroyed by the fire had been kidnapped in the chaos.1 Even in cases where a fire did not take many human lives, it damaged property. After a fire in December 1807, the missionary Robert Morrison reported that some 300 houses were “reduced to ashes” and three fires in as many nights had “consumed in all about 1000 houses.”2 In a fire in January 1832 that originated in a timber yard, some 4,000 bales of cotton belonging to a “highly deserving and thriving

1. “Fires in Canton,” Canton Press, vol. 2, no. 12 (November 26, 1836): n.p. Kidnapping young women from burning brothels appears to have been a common occurrence. In November 1832, a fire struck Shameen (Shamian), an area one mile west of the factories and known for “its innumerable gambling houses and others of still worse repute.” According to the Canton Register: “Large bands of robbers resort, on these occasions, to the scene of destruction and are said to find their most valuable booty in the seizure of the unhappy inmates of these dens of vice, whom they remove for subsequent sale. The number of these banditti is sometimes so great as to overawe the police”; Canton Register, vol. 5, no. 17 (November 3, 1832): 122. After two fires occurred within three days in Shameen in February 1830, some forty women were kidnapped from the ruins; Canton Register, vol. 3, no. 3 (February 3, 1832): 9. 2. Robert Morrison, Canton, December 18, 1807, CWM South China Journals, 1807–42, Folder 4, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

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young” Hong merchant were destroyed.3 Following a fire in November 1835, the Canton Register reported how only one person had been killed (a man crushed by a falling wall), but one pawnbroker’s shop had been burnt, and one of the grandsons of Howqua, the richest and most powerful of the Hong merchants, had lost several shops.4 In November 1835, the Press described the “prodigious” destruction of property in a fire which had not led to any loss of life: “by this devastation, property to an incalculable value, in goods, houses, and chattels, has been consumed and swept away in the dreadful conflagration, leaving innumerable individuals bereft of a home, and reduced to most unhappy circumstances.”5 In January 1836, a less destructive fire nevertheless destroyed Carpenters’ Square, some 80 houses, and property estimated at 60,000 to 70,000 dollars.6 A fire in September 1836 ruined approximately 30 houses and “a good deal of property.”7 When fires broke out in Canton they triggered localized panics, although hardly on the scale of panics induced, say, by epidemics or natural disasters. Nonetheless, the “slow burning” anxiety about fire in Canton provides a useful perspective on residual Western concerns and anxieties that threatened to tip over into a more generalized, collective mass response. “Panics and anxieties, as conceptual frameworks,” writes Kim Wagner, “are not incompatible but stand in the same relation as event and structure.”8 And as David Arnold suggests in his discussion of the plague and influenza epidemics in colonial India in Chapter 5 of this volume, there is merit in exploring why certain events escalate into mass panics, in contrast to others that may be equally catastrophic but fail to ignite to the same degree. As Arnold puts it, the question is why some dogs bark, while others do not. In short, the study of nonpanics, near-panics, or panics-manqué may help us to understand what panic is and under what conditions it is produced. An examination of Western concerns about fire in Canton also points to the pervasiveness of colonial anxieties in empire that lurked behind official discourse: anxieties about being isolated, lost, or overwhelmed in a foreign place and diminished by the scale and unfamiliarity of the land and its crowds. As Ranajit Guha has argued, there has been a tendency in the historiography of empire to assimilate these unfocused and indeterminate anxieties into fears that are attributable to discernible causes. “The result has been,” Guha writes, “to promote an image of the empire as a sort of machine operated by a crew who know only how to decide but not to doubt, who know only Canton Register, vol. 5, no. 2 (January 16, 1832): 10. Canton Register, vol. 8, no. 48 (December 1, 1835): 190. “Destructive Fire in Canton!” Canton Press, vol. 1, no. 11 (November 21, 1835): 89. Canton Press, vol. 1, no. 21 (January 30, 1836): 161; “Fire: Carpenter Square Burnt Down,” Canton Register, vol. 9, no. 4 (January 26, 1836): 13. 7. Canton Press, vol. 2, no. 1 (September 10, 1836): n. p. 8. Kim A. Wagner, “ ‘Treading upon Fires’: The ‘Mutiny’-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India,” Past and Present, vol. 218, no. 1 (2013): 159–97 (161). 3. 4. 5. 6.

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action but no circumspection, and, in the event of a breakdown, only fear and no anxiety.”9 Although, as Ulrike Hillemann has recently argued, neither “imperialism” nor “informal empire” adequately explains the British presence in Canton before the Opium War, unfocused and unsettling anxieties were pervasive there, too.10 As this chapter suggests, Western reactions to fire in pre–Opium War China made such anxieties visible, underscoring latent feelings of vulnerability. Fire and panic, of course, have intertwined histories. As Robert Peckham notes in his introduction, fire often functions as a metaphor for other species of crises. The incendiary language of ignition, combustibility, firefighting, and containment lend themselves readily to other crisis situations. Epidemics, for example, are often imagined as “spreading like wildfire.” A recurrent trope during the 2003 SARS crisis was that of infection as a fire “dying out.”11 Although fire in Canton may not have sparked the kinds of colonial (and postcolonial) panics considered elsewhere in this volume, fire became a critical site—a tinderbox, so to speak—that threw into relief cultural values, aspirations, and assumptions. Fires amplified latent tensions, reflecting concerns and frustrations that extended well beyond the material threat posed to person and property by flames. This was particularly the case in a society where Westerners often felt under siege. In February 1838, the Canton Press wrote that “our residence here more resembles perhaps that of the garrison in a fortress beleaguered by enemies than the existence of visitors come to a friendly country to follow a peaceable and, to the country they visit, a profitable calling.”12 As Tyler Dennett noted almost a century ago, “the foreigners were, in fact, voluntary prisoners.”13 Gideon Nye, a trader who later became the American vice consul at Canton, recalled more playfully how the situation of foreigners in Canton had once been “aptly likened to the condition of the Animals in the Zoological Gardens of London.” The inmates were “free to play what pranks they pleased, so that they made no uproar, nor escaped from confinement.”14 The list of restrictions imposed upon Westerns by the Chinese could seem endless. C. Toogood Downing, a British surgeon who spent two years in Canton, though mostly 9. Ranajit Guha, “Not at Home in Empire,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 3 (1997): 482–93 (487–88). On the relationship between anxiety and vulnerability in empire, see also Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 10. Ulrike Hillemann, Asian Empire and British Knowledge: China and the Networks of British Imperial Expansion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 46. 11. Patrick Wallis and Brigitte Nerlich, “Disease Metaphors in New Epidemics: The UK Media Framing of the 2003 SARS Epidemic,” Social Science & Medicine, vol. 60, no. 11 (2005): 2629–39. 12. “British and Chinese Relations,” Canton Press, vol. 3, no. 22 (February 3, 1838): n.p. 13. Tyler Dennett, Americans in Eastern Asia: A Critical Study of the Policy of the United States with Reference to China, Japan and Korea in the 19th Century (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 48. 14. Gideon Nye, Jr., Morning of My Life in China: Comprising an Outline of the History of Foreign Intercourse from the Last Year of the Regime of the Honorable East India Company, 1833, to the Imprisonment of the Foreign Community in 1839 (Canton: n.p., 1873), 15.

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downriver in Whampoa (Huangpu) where the foreign ships were moored, and in 1838 published three volumes on his time in China, observed how “not even the slightest outhouse may be built, before the object and effect of its erection have been thoroughly scrutinized, and the proper leave obtained from the authorities.”15 In the setting of the Canton System, fire took on particular significance. As Cathy Frierson has argued in her cultural history of fire and arson in late imperial Russia, while the economic toll of fires was considerable, conflagrations in nineteenthcentury Russia often took on a symbolic significance. For “progressives” advocating reform, fires were a sign of the nation’s backwardness and an impediment to its transformation into a rational, modern society. In other words, the history of fire here becomes a history of contested cultural meanings in the drive for modernity.16 In this chapter, the aim is similarly to examine the underlying social and cultural processes revealed by fire, and in so doing to suggest that an analysis of specific fire-crises may provide fresh perspectives on the reciprocal construction of “Western” and “Chinese” identities. For Westerners in Canton, fire said much about China and, more importantly, about their own position within this tiny enclave. It showed the inadequacy of fire prevention and firefighting in China. The reluctance to adopt proactive measures to mitigate risks and effects of fire represented the incomprehensibility of Chinese behavior and the irrationality and inhumanity of Chinese culture. Differences between Western and Chinese attitudes toward fire raised questions about the nature of Chinese state and society, about the use of public and private space, and about the compatibility of East and West. These concerns were especially acute among the British, who comprised the majority of foreigners in Canton, and whose East India Company had incurred the most damages during the great fire of 1822. A slow burn or a simmer, rather than a panic-inducing blaze or inferno, fire came to represent the frustration and helplessness that many foreigners in Canton felt—especially after the end of the East India Company’s monopoly on the China trade in 1833, which led British merchants to demand better trading conditions and a more aggressive British policy toward China.

Combustible Canton Fire was a common feature of preindustrial urban life. “Uncontrolled fires,” write Greg Bankoff, Uwe Lübken, and Jordan Sand, “affected every aspect of society in these flammable cities, including the shape of the city itself.”17 The almost universal prevalence 15. C. Toogood Downing, The Fan Qui in China in 1836–1837, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1838), I, 298. 16. Cathy A. Frierson, All Russia Is Burning: A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). 17. Greg Bankoff, Uwe Lübken, and Jordan Sand, “Introduction,” in Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration

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of wooden structures, often containing flammable substances such as alcohol, animal fat, and sometimes even gunpowder, meant that uncontrollable blazes could destroy everything in their paths and put entire communities at risk. “Tinderbox” cities such as Edo (later Tokyo), Hankou in central China, and Istanbul were especially notorious for their flammability.18 In the young United States, fires broke out frequently, not only in the newer settlements of arid California but even in cities on the wetter East Coast. As Margaret Hazen and Robert Hazen observe, California and New York were like “giant andirons flanking an entire nation that threatened to go up in smoke.”19 Many foreigners believed that fires were more common in Canton than elsewhere, or at least that the effects were more devastating. According to Hosea Morse, who lived in China for more than 30 years and later wrote a five-volume history of the East India Company in China, “the danger of a conflagration was always present in Canton, with its numerous fires for cooking in open pots.”20 In February 1828, the Canton Register reported that another “very dangerous fire” had started in the timber yards on the north bank of the Pearl River “at no great distance” from the factories, destroying warehouses containing oil, rattan, fire crackers, and other combustible materials.”21 The American trader William Hunter recalled how “during the northeast monsoon fires were quite frequent in the densely populated suburbs lying north of the factories.”22 Downing noted that fires “are very frequent in Canton, and are sometimes so extensive as to threaten the total destruction of the town.” Houses were “almost invariably built of wood, and as there is always a great quantity of even more combustible materials about the premises, there is no telling to what extent the conflagration may be carried when once it is excited.”23 “The sight of a burning city is dreadful any where,” explained the Canton Register in November 1835, “but its horrors are multiplied in China.” Part of the problem was the layout of the traditional Chinese city, with its wooden houses and narrow streets, surrounded by city walls up to 40 feet high and some 20 feet thick: and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Greg Bankoff, Uwe Lübken, and Jordan Sand (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 3. 18. Lionel Frost, “Coping in Their Own Way: Asian Cities and the Problem of Fires,” Urban History, vol. 24, no. 1 (1997): 5–16; L. E. Frost and E. L. Jones, “The Fire Gap and the Greater Durability of NineteenthCentury Cities,” Planning Perspectives, vol. 4, no. 3 (1989): 333–47. Cf. Jordan Sand and Steven Wills, “Governance, Arson, and Firefighting in Edo, 1600–1868,” and Cornel Zwierlein, “The Burning of a Modern City? Istanbul as Perceived by the Agents of the Sun Fire Office, 1865–1870,” in Flammable Cities, 44–62, 82–102. 19. Margaret Hindel Hazen and Robert M. Hazen, Keepers of the Flame: The Role of Fire in American Culture, 1775–1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 72. 20. Hosea Ballou Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, 1635–1834, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), V, 173. 21. Canton Register, vol. 1, no. 6 (February 4, 1828): 22. 22. William C. Hunter, The ‘Fan Kwae’ at Canton before Treaty Days, 1825–1844, By an Old Resident (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1882), 27. 23. Downing, Fan Qui, vol. 2, 225–26.

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John M. Carroll The rapid and uncontrollable spread and destructive effects of a fire raging in a well thus closely walled in, the egress from which is through narrow gateways— the terror of the women and children, driven out from their retired apartments— the difficulty of escape to those who are, by a refinement in fashionable cruelty, crippled in their feet—the beat and clamour—the shoutings of the firemen, the falling in of roofs and burning rafters, the toppling down of walls, the hollow murmuring sounds of the spreading devouring flames in the narrow avenues— hope lost and ruin, despair, and a painful and horrible death approaching with rapid and irresistible strides—are more easily conceived than described.24

John Davis, who had worked in Canton for 20 years with the East India Company, described how in congested Chinese cities like Canton, most houses and shops had a story above the ground floor with a “wooden stage or platform for drying goods, or for taking the air in hot evenings. This custom contributes to make their houses very liable to catch and to spread fires during a conflagration.”25 As in other cities (including in Hong Kong after the British occupied it in January 1841), fires in Canton were often caused by arson.26 Somewhat surprisingly given how often arson can both reflect and fuel interethnic tensions, foreigners in Canton rarely mentioned arson committed by Chinese against foreigners.27 They did, however, note the prevalence of arson in Canton and the measures taken to prevent it. In February 1828, the Canton Register observed that the “numerous fires which have of late occurred in Canton, have made it necessary to be severe to the utmost extent of the law in punishing incendiaries.”28 In December 1831, the Register reported that a poor woman, her daughter, and two young children had been burnt to death in a fire purportedly started by someone trying to burn down a rich neighbor’s house. Such cases of arson were “very frequent,” despite the vigilance of the police, strict night curfews, and rewards for informing on arsonists.29 Fires that local authorities “invariably” blamed on “neglected embers under the Tea-kettle,” explained the Canton Register in January 1832, were often caused by incendiaries.30 Downing explained that arson was “supposed to be committed much oftener than it can be detected. The city abounds with vagabonds, who set fire to the houses in order that they may profit by the confusion, to commit their depredations.”31 Arson was so common in the cool, dry, winter months, observed Davis, that each year the governor issued a 24. “Dreadful Fire: Destruction of the New City of Canton,” Canton Register, vol. 8, no. 47 (November 24, 1835): 86. Original emphasis. 25. John Francis Davis, The Chinese: A General Description of the Empire and Its Inhabitants, vol. 1 (London: Charles Knight & Co., 1836), 344. 26. “Hongkong,” Canton Register, vol. 15, no. 7 (February 15, 1842): 34. 27. Hazen and Hazen, Keepers of the Flame, 101–2. 28. Canton Register, vol. 1, no. 6 (February 4, 1828): 22. 29. Canton Register, vol. 4, no. 24 (December 19, 1831): 129. 30. Canton Register, vol. 5, no. 2 (January 16, 1832): 10. 31. Downing, Fan Qui, vol. 2, 225.

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notice reminding people to “beware of the acts of incendiaries, who purposely set fire to buildings with a view to rob and plunder in the confusion.”32 Morrison reported how after the great fire of 1822 six Chinese were decapitated after being convicted of arson.33 The fact that foreigners wrote so matter-of-factly about these punishments, especially when they often commented on the cruelty of Chinese justice, reveals the extent and severity of arson. Whether or not fires occurred more often in Canton than in cities of similar size elsewhere is difficult to determine. Based mainly on foreign records, Paul Van Dyke has identified some 100 fires in Canton from 1763 to 1843, cautioning that the actual number may have been 150 or higher since foreigners were in China for only part of each year and may not have mentioned fires that did not affect them or their trade.34 But even 150 would be low compared, for example, to New York, where in 1830 fires occurred three or four times per day and were so common that the city’s firefighters became popular tourist attractions.35 In May 1835, a writer who argued in the Chinese Repository against fire insurance claimed that the instance of fires in Chinese houses was “but periodical” and that the “combustible appearance” of Chinese houses made foreigners fear fire more than was necessary. The “sources of danger” were “much less” than in Europe, houses and roofs were made from bricks and tiles as often as they were in Europe, and wood was not used any more than elsewhere. Chinese homes lacked chimneys and their inhabitants lit fires only twice per day and for only a short period.36 For the most part, the foreign factories and their contents were less vulnerable to fire than the rest of Canton and its suburbs. They were close to the river, so goods could be moved relatively quickly to moored boats. Still, foreign merchants worried about their investments. Foreigners kept fire engines in their factories, as did the Hong merchants, with engines purchased from the foreigners.37 Such a fire occurred on the evening of February 7, 1773, spreading to the factories and continuing until almost daylight of the following morning. According to one account by the East India Company, which by this time had fully occupied two of the 13 factories, the fire, 32. Davis, Chinese, vol. 2, 12. 33. Robert Morrison, “An Account of the Fire of Canton, in 1822,” in Memoirs of the Life and Labours of Robert Morrison, Compiled by His Widow, with Critical Notices of His Chinese Works, by Samuel Kidd, 2 vols., ed. Eliza Morrison (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1839), II, Appendix, 33–39 (37). 34. Paul A. Van Dyke, “Fire and the Risks of Trade in Canton, 1730s–1840s,” in Canton and Nagasaki Compared, 1730–1830: Dutch, Chinese, Japanese Relations, ed. Evert Groenendijk, Cynthia Viallé, and Leonard Blussé (Leiden: Institute for the History of European Expansion, 2009), 171–202 (171). 35. Hazen and Hazen, Keepers of the Flame, 71. 36. “Fire Insurance in Canton,” Chinese Repository, vol. 4, no. 1 (May 1835): 30–32. 37. Van Dyke, “Fire,” 181–83; Patrick Conner, “The Fires of Canton in ‘Export’ Paintings,” Arts of Asia, vol. 38, no. 6 (November–December 2008): 110–23 (121); William C. Hunter, Bits of Old China (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1885), 205–6.

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which broke out after a particularly long dry spell, “burnt with great fury” and spread rapidly toward the factories. Both of the English factories caught fire and were saved only by “great diligence & perseverance.” More than 400 houses were burned and one Hong was “entirely consumed.”38 More important here is that foreigners often believed there were particularly “Chinese” features of fire and the risks it posed. We have already seen one of these features in the Canton Register’s account of the horrors of fire in China: the difficulty of escape for women, “crippled” in their bound feet. There were many more such features. Downing observed that apart from the deliberate acts of incendiaries, there is no doubt that many accidents of this kind arise from the gross neglect of the householders themselves. They seem perfectly careless of the consequences, but throw the fire about in every direction. Crackers are almost constantly exploding by hundreds in every corner, while flaming ghos-paper is bandied about the apartments. Before every image of the pagan deities at the corners of the streets, sticks of incense are continually burning, which are made of the aromatic powder or dust of the sandalwood.39

According to John Davis, the “greatest risk” to houses and shops in Canton came from fires, which in “frequent instances” were not caused by “mere accident.” The Chinese had “very generally” borrowed Western-style fire engines and had even constructed their own “sufficiently well to answer the purpose.” But their “foolish notion of fatalism” made them “singularly careless” about fire.40 This fatalism derived from a “variety of superstitious customs and observances” connected to Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. Like “a considerable portion of the rest of mankind,” the Chinese were “pretty generally fatalists, or believers in inevitable destiny.” But “the practical mischiefs” of this peculiarly Chinese fatalism were most pronounced in their “apathetic carelessness” toward the use of fire. Despite the “repeated conflagrations” that devastated the city every year, even the “most casual observer” could not fail to notice the “extreme carelessness with which burning paper and lighted sticks of incense are left about their combustible dwellings, or pipes smoked and bunches of crackers discharged in temporary edifices constructed entirely of matting.” Even if some of these fires were set by arsonists, “a large number” could be blamed on “that stupid belief in fatalism, which tends to paralyze effort and to banish caution.”41

38. Morse, Chronicles, vol. 5, 173. 39. Downing, Fan Qui, vol. 2, 226–27. 40. Davis, Chinese, vol. 2, 12. 41. Ibid., 129.

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Frustration and Helplessness: The Great Fire of 1822 Even in cities where fire is common, some fires become more legendary than others. As Alan Krell has argued, certain fires—London in 1666, Edinburgh in 1824, and Chicago in 1871, for example—tend to “enter the social imagination through various combinations of cause, effect and discourse and become ‘Great Fires’.” From rather ordinary origins, these fires “went on to draw out responses, literary and visual, that became as celebrated as the fires themselves.” The “combination of fear and fascination,” argues Krell, is “always simmering in the reception of public fires.” Such fires not only “destroyed structures and lives,” but entered the “more indeterminate space of rhetoric, reconstruction and memory.”42 For foreigners in Canton, the “great fire” was the one that broke out on November 1, 1822, and raged for two days (Figure 2.1). This “lamentable catastrophe,” as East India Company chief James Brabazon Urmston described it, began in the suburbs a mile and a half north of the factories.43 The news of the fire reached the factories at about 9:30 at night. The East India Company sent its fire engines to help extinguish the flames, but no water could be found. As the flames spread and the wind shifted, it became clear that the fire would soon reach the factories. Because the Company’s shipment of woolens for the season had not yet been transferred to the Hong merchants and were still in the Company’s warehouse, laborers were quickly hired to move them to a more secure spot. When the magnitude of the fire soon made laborers hard to find, sailors were called up from the foreign ships moored at Whampoa. The Americans arrived first because their ships were anchored closer to Canton, followed shortly by the British. Twenty-two people were killed, and the blaze devastated a large portion of the western suburbs of Canton and destroyed thousands of shops. The British moved most of their factory, including 700,000 dollars in the East India Company treasury, into a warehouse owned by the Hong merchant Consequa and were thus able to resume their trade within a week. Two of the other thirteen Hong merchants, Puiqua and Mowqua, incurred particularly heavy losses.44 The fire of 1822 became the fire that foreigners in Canton talked about and remembered, whether or not they had been in Canton when it broke out. “We well remember the fire of 1822,” wrote the Canton Register in May 1835, “when the flowery gaiety and glory of Canton was at once consumed, like the gaudy insect that rushes 42. Alan Krell, Burning Issues: Fire in Art and the Social Imagination (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 17, 51. 43. November 14, 1822, Canton, Urmston to Chair, Court of Directors, India Office Records (IOR)/G/12/284 (Secret Letters received from China, June 27, 1821–February 6, 1823), British Library, London. 44. November 1, 1822: Statement—Fire at Canton, IOR/G/12/227 (Canton Consultations, April 18, 1822– February 4, 1823); Morse, Chronicles, vol. 4, 64–66; Robert Morrison, “A Review of the First Fifteen Years of the Mission,” and “An Account of the Fire of Canton,” in Memoirs, ed. Morrison, 33, 183; Conner, “Fires,” 112–17.

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Figure 2.1 Canton Fire of 1822. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of The Martyn Gregory Gallery, London.

into the burning flame.”45 When reporting the “dreadful fire” in November 1835 that destroyed part of the new city of Canton, the Register recalled how the “recollection of the dreadful and extensive fire of 1822 occurred to many of the foreign residents, and the most gloomy anticipations began to disturb their breasts.”46 Writing in 1836, John Davis described the fire of 1822 as a “calamity of fearful extent, affecting equally the Chinese and Europeans, and which will not soon be forgotten at Canton.”47 When the foreign community debated the practicality of introducing fire insurance to Canton, they referred to the fire of 1822.48 As Patrick Conner has noted, the 1822 fire also seems to have been the first one to be commemorated in Chinese “export” paintings.49 The East India Company’s Select Committee described the fire of 1822 as a conflagration “without parallel in Canton.”50 Apart from Company records, the only substantial accounts of this fire come from Morrison, who had arrived in China in 1807 and would die there in 1834, shortly after being appointed as interpreter to Lord 45. Canton Register, vol. 8, no. 23 (June 9, 1835): 91. 46. “Dreadful Fire,” 185–86. 47. Davis, Chinese, vol. 1, 104. 48. Canton Register, vol. 8, no. 23 (June 9, 1835): 91. 49. Patrick Conner, The Hongs of Canton: Western Merchants in South China, 1700–1900, as Seen in Chinese Export Paintings (London: English Art Books, 2009), 90; Conner, “Fires,” 112–17. 50. November 1, 1822: Statement—Fire at Canton.

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Napier’s ill-fated mission to obtain better trading terms from the Chinese authorities. For Morrison, the destruction from the fire of 1822 was particularly personal: the fire destroyed not only his residence of many years but also 100 pounds of paper that he had prepared to send to Malacca for a new edition of the New Testament. Writing to the directors of the London Missionary Society 12 days later from “a Chinese warehouse to which for the time being we have removed,” Morrison described how on Friday evening, the first instant a fire broke out on the west side of Canton, about a mile north of the European Factories, in a cake baker’s shop. The fire increased & spread all the night of the 1st, & before the close of Saturday the 2nd, all the foreign Factories were entirely or partially consumed. On Saturday night & Sunday morning the fire spread to the westward along the banks of the river, at least a mile & a half, & did not cease in that direction till there were no more houses to burn—thousands of Chinese shops & houses were destroyed, & millions of property in a few hours reduced to ashes. Some estimate the loss of the English East India Company at one Million Sterling. The furious & devouring fire, the anxious crowds of clamorous houseless fugitives, running bearing their effects from the flames, with drawn swords to defend them—hard-hearted banditti, plundering the weak, cutting down & trampling to death the strong; presented an awful & afflicting scene.51

In Morrison’s report to his directors in London we see all the characteristics described by Krell: fear, fascination, incomprehension, horror, and awe. In his journal, parts of which were later compiled by his wife after his death, Morrison wrote about the fire in even greater length. His sentiments were echoed throughout the years by the English press after fires. Following the fire of November 1835, for example, the Canton Press wrote how “the whole of the melancholy occurrence” could be seen from the terraces of several foreign factories. By midnight, when the fire had reached its peak, “it conveyed to the mind some devoted city given up to pillage and the flames, to sate the merciless revenge of some modern Nero! or like unto a mighty caldron throwing up its flames and smoke, from the consuming materials with which it was charged.” Had the fire destroyed the suburbs and spread beyond the city walls to the foreign and Chinese factories, “the result might have been still more lamentable.”52 As would later fires, the 1822 fire exacerbated the foreigners’ sense of frustration and helplessness in Canton. Although the fire could be observed from the terrace of the apartments of the East India Company chief, no one could tell when it would reach the factories. At midnight the foreigners began to prepare their papers and other valuables. The demand for boats became so strong that some were unable to

51. Robert Morrison, Canton, November 12, 1822, CWM South China Incoming Correspondence, Box 2, Folder 2, Jacket B, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Morrison also mentions the fire in his correspondence of November 14, 1822. 52. “Destructive Fire in Canton!” 89–90.

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obtain any. Morrison explained how the fire engines belonging to the British factory and the Hong merchants were summoned immediately: But the streets being narrow, and no well-organized firemen, nor any efficient co-operation from the Government, the engines were ill-supplied with water, and made little or no impression on the fast-spreading conflagration. The Chinese carrying away their property, generally accompanied by a man with drawn swords or knives for its defence, and uttering loud cries, calling on people to clear the way, filled the streets. A few English gentlemen, officers of the Company’s ships, and others, endeavored to assist in extinguishing the flames, and in pulling down the houses; but they met with no co-operation from the natives, and the fire rapidly encreased [sic] its fury.53

When the danger of the fire became increasingly imminent by the early morning of Saturday, November 2, the East India Company and the private traders each presented written requests at the city gate, following established protocol, asking that the local authorities order the military and the police to tear down the houses around the fire in order to isolate it and save the remaining Chinese and foreign houses.54 Although the requests were written in “the most earnest and importunate language,” they were unsuccessful; the governor returned the Company’s letter unopened because it had been sealed with the chief ’s private seal rather than with the Company’s seal. By eight o’clock the fire had spread to the factories. After a day of “ineffectual struggles to arrest to progress of the flames,” by Sunday morning most of the foreign factories had been destroyed. The factories of four Hong merchants were completely destroyed, as were thousands of shops and houses. Governor Li told Morrison that some 50,000 people had been made homeless and that the fire had been “Heaven’s will.”55 And even though the factories were rebuilt after the fire of 1822, heaps of rubble remained in the square along the waterfront and became even larger over the years as more rubbish was deposited. The American missionary David Abeel, who arrived in Canton in 1830, later described how “the open space before the factories is the rendezvous of multitudes of the natives, who assemble daily to transact business, gratify curiosity, or murder time. It is level, for a short distance, beyond which it stretches over a large pile of rubbish, deposited here after the desolating fire of 1822, and retained, notwithstanding numerous applications for its removal, as a lasting and growing nuisance to foreigners.”56 For the East India Company chiefs, getting these unsightly heaps removed became part of a three-pronged attempt to have the land in front of the factories cleaned up while enclosing it and extending their jetty. Neither campaign bore immediate results. In March 1830 the Company sent a crew of sailors 53. Morrison, “Account of the Fire of Canton,” 33. 54. November 1, 1822: Statement—Fire at Canton. 55. Morrison, “Account of the Fire of Canton,” 33–35. 56. David Abeel, Journal of a Residence in China and the Neighboring Countries, from 1829 to 1833 (New York: Leavitt, Lord & Co., 1836), 76.

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to extend the jetty by filling it in with the rubbish. The rest of this “obnoxious mound” remained until the local authorities finally removed it in January 1831.57 The fire of 1822 also changed the layout of the factories and destroyed the fences that had partially enclosed the open space in front of the factories commonly known to foreigners as “the Square.” Aimed at controlling access to the Pearl River and to keep out vagrants and curiosity-seekers, these fences had been erected in the 1790s. Soon after the fire, Chinese of all walks of life congregated daily in the square.58 Downing remarked how “throughout the square, either collected in groups, or traversing with hasty but clumsy strides, are crowds of natives; shopkeepers, barbers, quacks, thieves, rogues, vagabonds and coolies, with their long blue tunics, and with or without their thick-soled shoes.”59 After the fire the British erected a garden and a wall enclosing the area in front of their factory, though the Square remained open until it was re-fenced in 1839.

Fire and “the Chinese Character” As in any city, fire was big news in Canton. The English press was suspicious of Chinese accounts of the damage caused by fire. The Canton Register explained in December 1835 how “our Chinese informant tells us that his countrymen greatly magnify their losses on these occasions; and that one mace worth of property destroyed becomes ten thousand in the fertile brain of the unlucky sufferer.”60 Still, the English press was eager to report on fire and other disasters and misfortunes, often to great dramatic effect. In November 1835 the Register described a “dreadful fire” that had destroyed part of the new city of Canton: The flames continued raging throughout the night, and the streets of the suburbs were thronged by a dense crowd of people moving to and from the scene of destruction, conveying their goods, or guiding their female and aged relations. The clamour of men and clash of weapons as they cleared the way, shouting, screaming, threatening, and complaining, were stunning and horrible. All the bad characters of a vast population flew, like harpies, to a scene which promised them employment in their vocation and a rich harvest. The ‘noisy and nasty’ Chinese were ten thousand times more noisy and nasty. Beds and bedding and wearing apparel appeared to be the things first saved; then domestic utensils and furniture and goods . . . The behaviour of the women was particularly remarked; 57. January 31, 1831: Offensive mound of dirt in front of the Factories removed, IOR/G/12/246 (Canton Consultations, January 28, 1831–February 28, 1832); Conner, Hongs, 103; Morse, Chronicles, vol. 4, 193–94, 278, 291. 58. Johnathan A. Farris, “Thirteen Factories of Canton: An Architecture of Sino-Western Collaboration and Confrontation,” Buildings and Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, vol. 14, (2007): 76–77; Conner, Hongs, 100. 59. Downing, Fan Qui, vol. 1, 301. 60. Canton Register, vol. 8, no. 48 (December 1, 1835): 190.

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Unlike in India, the very nature of the Canton System segregated foreigners from the Chinese, so the British were more often intrigued by, rather than afraid of, native crowds. However, the description quoted above of the fire and the panicked response it triggered among sections of the population suggests prevailing anxieties about the violent propensities of the vast, dense, and unfathomable “Oriental” crowd.62 Here, the panic of fire gives way to another species of panic, with the flames flushing out clamoring “harpies” and “noisy and nasty” throngs of Chinese men (in contrast to the resigned women). What is striking about such reports is the way in which the insecurities produced by the threat of fire could so readily shade into moral concerns about the dangers posed to foreigners by “corrupted” native compradors and servants. The perils of living in proximity to “such combustible materials” were easily conflated with “the burning-shame” of immoral behavior, such as gambling.63 In March 1837, the Register wrote that a fire that had begun in a teashop where tea was being dried “raged with little interruption for upwards of two hours.” Approximately 70 houses, “large and small,” were destroyed. A tea-packing warehouse burned with “a brilliant flame,” and the terrace atop one of the houses continued to burn in complete lines of fire for nearly an hour, presenting a magnificent spectacle.”64 The English press took particular delight in reporting fires caused by Chinese ineptitude. In January 1831, the Canton Register noted how a fire in the governor’s palace had been started by one of the viceroy’s domestics, who after smoking opium had fallen asleep with the lamp still burning in his bed: “Much treasure is reported to have been lost.”65 Later that March the Register described yet another fire in the governor’s palace, this time destroying the apartments that had survived the fire in January. Like the previous fire, this one had been caused by an attendant who had fallen asleep over his opium pipe, his lamp still burning. Given that in China the occupant of a house where a fire began could be subject to punishment for the public injury caused, it was “highly disgraceful” that this had happened to the governor’s family twice in only a few months. The governor had offered all the usual sacrifices at the right temples to shake off this “evil omen,” deriving some consolation from the 61. “Dreadful Fire: Destruction of the New City of Canton,” Canton Register, vol. 8, no. 47 (November 24, 1835): 185–86. 62. The idea of the latent aggression of “Oriental” crowds was popularized in the work of Thomas De Quincey, amongst others; see John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). 63. Canton Register, vol. 9, no. 5 (February 2, 1836): 20. 64. Canton Register, vol. 10, no. 12 (March 21, 1837): 51–52. Original emphasis. 65. Canton Register, vol. 4, no. 1 (January 3, 1831): 1.

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fact that a similar misfortune had occurred 60 years earlier, proving that the governor was suffering from “the inevitable decree of fate, which ordains a recurrence of the same events, in every succeeding Chinese cycle.” Or so the Register’s “Chinese informant” explained.”66 As they did in the fire of 1822, foreigners in Canton frequently complained that the Chinese did not understand fire prevention and seemed unable to fight fire properly. In July 1828, the Canton Register reported some signs of progress. During a recent fire, the local authorities had destroyed the houses on either side of a burning house to prevent the flames from spreading, a technique they had learned from foreigners who had helped put out earlier fires in Canton. This, “like the general use of the fire-engine, of watches, of telescopes, of woolens, &c. &c. shows that the Chinese will adopt what approves itself to their judgement or taste.”67 In September and October 1836 the Register observed that fires in each month had been controlled by pulling down adjacent houses to keep the flames from spreading.68 Still, Downing found it “singular” that the Chinese took “so little precaution” to prevent fire from reoccurring.69 Recalling the great fire of 1822, in June 1835 the Register argued that the fire “could have been extinguished soon after it commenced, if the efforts of Europeans had been encouraged; they could have pulled down the houses situated in the path of the flames; but this measure was too vigorous for the apathetic Chinese, who absolutely remained shut up in their houses until they were literally burnt out.”70 Foreigners often contrasted this lack of precaution with the efforts of the foreign community, both in Canton and in the Portuguese territory of Macao farther down the Pearl River. In January 1835 the Register reported how “nearly all the Macao and European gentlemen were quickly on the spot and handsomely exerted themselves in labourious services, entering the lower apartments of the house at imminent peril and rescueing [sic] anything within reach.”71 After the fire of November 1835, the Press bewailed the “weak, ignorant, and ill-applied efforts” of the Chinese—especially compared to “the precautionary measures” adopted by the foreign merchants, “whose zeal to protect the property of their constituents was admirably displayed on the occasion.”72 The way in which fire was handled in Canton seemed proof of what foreigners often called the “Chinese character,” which they blamed for everything that was wrong with China—including the Canton System and its restrictions. To Robert 66. Canton Register, vol. 4, no. 6 (March 17, 1831): 25. 67. Canton Register, vol. 1, no. 27 (July 12, 1828): 106. 68. Canton Register, vol. 9, no. 37 (September 13, 1836): 150, and Canton Register, vol. 9, no. 43 (October 25, 1836): 17. 69. Downing, Fan Qui, vol. 2, 226. 70. Canton Register, vol. 8, no. 23 (June 9, 1835): 91. Original emphasis. 71. “Fire at Macao,” Canton Register, vol. 8, no. 2 (January 13, 1835): 8. 72. “Destructive Fire in Canton!” 89.

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Morrison, the fire of 1822 only further emphasized the weakness of the Chinese character, which, “formed by paganism and despotism, exhibited on this occasion, was the opposite of generous and disinterested.” The government had not provided any aid to the victims of the fire, nor had any voluntary subscriptions been established for them. Instead, “a spirit of selfishness prevented those united efforts, and personal sacrifices, which, humanly speaking, would have mitigated the evil.” This included even the Hong merchants, some of whom had known the foreigners for 10 or 20 years, dealt with them daily, and developed friendships with them. Morrison opined that, unlike the Chinese servants, who “generally stuck by their masters, and aided honestly in saving their property,” not one of the Hong merchants who had survived the fire with their factories intact “volunteered a night’s lodging, or a single meal to the houseless and fasting Fan-kwei, ‘foreign devils:’ it was necessary for the foreigners first to solicit them.”73 As they often did when observing the dearth of charitable and philanthropic services in China, foreigners commented on the lack of provisions for fire victims. “Relief for the sufferers,” wrote the American missionary Elijah Bridgman in December 1835 after another fire, “we have not even heard mentioned by a single native.” The only contributions had come from foreigners in Canton and Macao. The missionary Walter Henry Medhurst, visiting from Batavia, had preached a special sermon to raise contributions, reminding foreigners in Canton of their obligation “to ameliorate the condition of the people among whom we dwell, on all necessitous occasions.”74 In yet another article on the “national character” of the Chinese, the missionary William Milne argued that the laws of China worked very powerfully against the exercise of benevolence cases where it is most needed. Whatever crimes are committed in a neighborhood, all the neighbors around are involved; and contrary to what is the case in most other civilized countries, the law considers them guilty, until they can prove themselves innocent. Hence the terror of being implicated in any evil that takes place, sometimes prevents the people from quenching fire, until the superior authorities be first informed—and from relieving the distressed, until it is often too late  .  .  .  It is easy to see how powerfully this operates as a national check to benevolence.75

Responses to fire also highlighted British interpretations of Chinese attitudes toward foreigners. As would also be the case in colonial Hong Kong (where, in 1844, John Davis would become the second governor), the British in Canton were often convinced that Cantonese of all ranks disdained foreigners more than other Chinese did and that they were themselves possessed of a lower moral character. “Barbarians and savages we may be thought by the ignorant in other parts of the empire,” wrote 73. Morrison, “An Account of the Fire of Canton,” 39. 74. “Fire in the City of Canton,” Chinese Repository, vol. 4, no. 8 (December 1835): 390–91. 75. “National Character of the Chinese,” Chinese Repository, vol. 1, no. 8 (December 1832): 30.

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Downing, “but in the vicinity of the commercial city, a portion of hatred and fear is mixed up with the general feeling.”76 Davis described the Cantonese as “the very worst specimens of their countrymen,” encouraged by local authorities to treat foreigners “as if they were really a degraded order of beings.”77 Shortly after four foreigners had helped put out a fire in February 1832, they encountered an official who “uttered some hurried words in Chinese” and “motioned his hand, as if threatening to behead them.”78 After the fire of November 1835, the Canton Press explained how the conflagration had “strongly exemplified” the “extraordinary adverse feelings” of the Chinese toward against foreigners. Several Westerners had managed to enter the city and show its “ignorant” inhabitants how to respond to the fire. But as soon as the fire had subsided, the “shameful and most diabolical wretches” demonstrated their gratitude by beating the foreigners. “This,” declared the Press, “speaks enough for China!”79 This does not mean that foreigners and Chinese never worked together when fires broke out. As Paul Van Dyke has argued, because they threatened everyone, fires could also lead to cooperation. Foreigners were not allowed into the inner city, but everyone tried to help whenever a fire broke out near the factories. Foreigners and Chinese cooperated to help extinguish the fires. Especially important were the “linguists,” whose job was primarily to minimize tension and conflicts between foreigners and Chinese and to help keep order.80 John Davis wrote how during the 1822 fire a “considerable amount of property” was saved because a Hong merchant had lent the East India Company his house and thus enabled the Company to resume its business only a week after the fire.81 In 1822, the Hong merchant Tingqua dispatched 80 of his own men to help Nathan Dunn of Philadelphia rescue his possessions (worth some $150,000) by loading them onto small boats.82 After the fire that destroyed Carpenters’ Square in 1836, the Canton Register reported how “all the foreigners in Canton were immediately on the alert, and the Chinese fire companies, encouraged and directed by the daring and strenuous efforts of many English and American gentlemen, who, in very dangerous situations, directed the engine-pipes from the tops of the burning houses, exerted themselves admirably.”83 One of the many duties of the Hong merchants, William Hunter explained, was to help foreigners protect themselves and their property during fires by dispatching their own boats and laborers. Hunter recalled how in January 1839, when the factories seemed “doomed to 76. Downing, Fan Qui, vol. 3, 94. 77. Davis, Chinese, vol. 1, 37–38. 78. Canton Register, vol. 5, no. 4 (February 16, 1832): 21. 79. “Destructive Fire in Canton!” 89. 80. Van Dyke, Canton Trade, 88, and “Fire,” 177–78. 81. Davis, Chinese, vol. 1, 105. 82. John Rogers Haddad, The Romance of China: Excursions to China in U.S. Culture, 1776–1876 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 86–87. Haddad speculates that Tingqua and Dunn may have been lovers, 94. 83. “Fire: Carpenter Square Burnt Down,” 13.

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utter destruction” by another fire that had begun in Carpenters’ Square, they were saved by engines owned by the Hong merchants Howqua and Mingqua and operated “splendidly” by their coolies.84

Fire as Opportunity (or Not) Fire often means opportunity. The London Fire of 1666 provided a chance to replan London under the supervision of Sir Christopher Wren.85 The Great Lisbon Fire of 1755, Mark Molesky argues, was both a turning point in the European Enlightenment and the beginning of a new political era in Portugal. The fire followed an earthquake that caused European scientists, theologians, and philosophers (including Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant) to reconsider longstanding beliefs about god, man, and nature. Molesky writes that the fire “helped pave the way for sweeping political and cultural reforms and a rebuilding project that radically changed the layout and function of the city center.”86 In his study of fire in nineteenth-century Montreal, Jason Gilliland sees fire as an agent of urban morphological change. Considering the impact of fire on the built form of Montreal, Gilliland shows how conflagration provided the opportunity to make improvements to the urban environment by leveling structures that blocked the way of capital accumulation.87 Closer to home, Alan Smart has demonstrated how a large fire in December 1953 helped push the colonial government of Hong Kong toward an ambitious public housing scheme that developed into a massive resettlement program run by the new Resettlement Department and accompanied by an expansion of education and medical services.88 Fire in Canton could also mean opportunity. It sometimes enabled foreigners to gain the goodwill of the Chinese by helping to extinguish blazes. As the Canton Register explained after the fire of February 1832, “the Chinese are fully sensible of the advantages derived from the presence of foreigners on these occasions—almost the only ones when even the mandarins welcome them with civility.” It also granted them temporary access to a part of Canton to which they were normally denied admission. After the fire of November 1835 that destroyed part of the new city, several foreigners managed to reach the city walls and then the gate on the northwest of the city.89 In December 1835, Elijah Bridgman, the American missionary, explained how 84. Hunter, Bits of Old China, 205–6, 219. 85. Robert Peckham, “The City of Knowledge: Rethinking the History of Science and Urban Planning,” Planning Perspectives, vol. 24, no. 4 (2009): 521–34. 86. Mark Molesky, “The Great Fire of Lisbon, 1755,” in Flammable Cities, 147–69. 87. Jason Gilliland, “Fire and Urban Morphogenesis: Patterns of Destruction and Reconstruction in Nineteenth-Century Montreal,” in Flammable Cities, 190–211. 88. Alan Smart, The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters, Fires and Colonial Rule in Hong Kong, 1950–1963 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006). Cf. David Faure, Colonialism and the Hong Kong Mentality (Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 2003), 31–32. 89. “Dreadful Fire: Destruction of the New City of Canton,” Canton Register, vol. 8, no. 47 (November 24,

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foreigners could walk on the city walls of Canton only “when some dire calamity compels the authorities to be kind.” Such a chance had appeared earlier that morning, when after a small fire Bridgman was able to walk along the western wall of the city. Bridgman attributed this opportunity to how the “fankwei, it was supposed, might do something towards checking its progress.”90 After a fire in late 1836, the Canton Press reported on how “several Gentlemen, after the Fire had been subdued, perambulated the walls of the city, which they were permitted to do, without any molestation.”91 After the fire in Carpenters’ Square in January 1836, a group of foreigners was able to walk around the city “without interruption or annoyance.”92 More often than not, however, fire did not lead to the kind of change foreigners desired. The fire of 1822, for example, convinced them of the need for more space between their factories and the adjacent Chinese shops. Although the factories were rebuilt, their plans for preventing another fire were not realized. The East India Company petitioned the governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi, Ruan Yuan, requesting that the ruined shops not be rebuilt as they were a fire hazard and that “a space of ground should be allotted to the foreign factories without any interruption of Chinese houses.”93 They did not “deny an overlooking providence,” but insisted that the destruction of their factories had been caused by their “close contact with Chinese houses being built with much wood in and about them,” and that “one half of the evil” could have been prevented had the houses around the fire been torn down.94 Although the factories were rebuilt after considerable negotiation, the Chinese shopkeepers produced their own petition observing that the fire had begun far from their shops and explaining how many livelihoods depended on their shops; they were “distressed natives begging deliverance from power and influence which would violently deprive them of their Shops,” and although they had “but a hundred shops” these supported “a thousand families.”95 In February 1836, one “Senex” complained in the Canton Register how the Chinese had not learned how to fight fire properly and were already rebuilding an easily combustible customhouse that had been destroyed in an earlier fire.96 In the same month, foreign merchants sent two petitioners to the acting-governor asking him to forbid the customhouse to be rebuilt. In the first petition, Arthur Saunders Keating, a British merchant, supported by the foreign residents of Canton, argued that the original building was “in reality, nothing but a common 1835): 185. 90. “A Walk on the Walls of the City of Canton,” Chinese Repository, vol. 4, no. 8 (December 1835): 536. 91. Canton Press, vol. 1, no. 21 (January 30, 1836): 161. 92. “Fire: Carpenter Square Burnt Down,” 13. 93. Quoted in Morse, Chronicles, vol. 4, 66. 94. November 5, 1822: Committee’s address to the Governor, IOR/G/12/227 (Canton Consultations, April 18, 1822–February 4, 1823). 95. December 12, 1822: Petition from Hog Lane shop owners, IOR/G/12/227; Conner, Hongs, 97–98; Morse, Chronicles, vol. 4, 66, 74. 96. “Fires in Canton,” Canton Register, vol. 9, no. 5 (February 2, 1836): 20.

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gambling house, and in consequence of its being so close to all the foreign factories, a common place of resort for the servants of the foreigners to gamble at.” More importantly, covered with easily burnable thatch, it posed a “great danger” to “most of the foreign factories” with their “quantities of valuable goods.”97

Fire and Grievances Worries about fire in Canton never reached panic proportions, especially compared with the other cases discussed in this volume. Still, concern was so great that in December 1836 the Canton Press explained what it thought should be the most important goal of the Canton General Chamber of Commerce, recently established to help protect foreign trading interests: This is the unprotected state of our property from fire. The houses of foreigners here, as is well known to the residents, are so closely surrounded on three sides by the suburbs of Canton, that whenever a fire breaks out there, they are in the most imminent danger, and hardly a winter has gone over of late, that some conflagrations, either in the city itself or in the suburbs, have not also threatened destruction to our houses . . . It is now fourteen years since, with the exception of a few apartments, the whole of the foreign factories were burnt, and since that calamity the danger of a similar occurrence has by no means been diminished.98

Fire, in fact, became one of the main grievances against the restrictions of the Canton System. In February 1838, the Canton Press explained how the biggest problem in Anglo-British relations was “the affectation of the Chinese Government to treat strangers coming from foreign countries to trade, as objects deserving its compassion, whom it suffers to visit the country from motives of ‘celestial benevolence’ but to whom it accords no right whatever, and who may be sent away agreeably to the Imperial pleasure.” Leading the list were the usual complaints. Trade was confined solely to Canton and dominated by the Cohong monopoly. British merchants could be sent away from Canton “according to the pleasure of the Chinese Government, without sufficient cause being assigned.” Unable to bring their women to Canton, they were “debarred from the society of their families.” The restriction confining them to the factory was a “restraint on personal liberty” that prohibited them from “taking healthful exercise.” The law demanding a life for a life when a foreigner accidentally killed a Chinese meant that foreigners lacked “the benefit of the law in force among the Chinese” and could be punished according to “an oppressive law made expressly for, and enacted only against, foreigners.” And, a grievance that is especially pertinent here: foreigners were unable to build warehouses to store their own property, “which not only at present is completely under the control of the Chinese, but is in 97. “Fires in Canton,” Canton Register, vol. 9, no. 6 (February 9, 1836): 22. 98. Canton Press, vol. 2, no. 13 (December 3, 1836): n.p.

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considerable danger from fire, the warehouses of the Hong merchants being in the most crowded parts of the suburbs, but on their southern sides, so that any fire breaking out during the winter, the northwind carrying it to the southward, endangers their safety.”99 These grievances became especially clamorous in the mid- and late 1830s, as the British, in particular, began to demand better trading conditions in Canton and to demand a more assertive policy toward China. This is not to suggest that worries about fire would play a large part in the lead-up to the war between Britain and China in 1839. And these concerns may seem irrational given how the risk of fire was probably no higher than in other cities, and given how secure and safe foreigners actually were in Canton, especially compared with foreign merchants in European colonies in Asia such as Batavia and Manila. As tensions escalated in early 1839 after the governor-general ordered foreigners in Canton to stop importing opium, the Hoppo (customs supervisor) commanded the Hong merchants to block up the rear door of the factories; he insisted that foreigners had no need to worry about fire, for the only time their factories had been harmed was in 1822.100 But perhaps the tendency to focus on isolated issues of panic and near-panic sometimes keeps us from noticing longstanding and simmering concerns—in short, an objectless anxiety which is often taken as fear and ascribed to specific causes, such as the breakdown of law and order, that necessitate specific action. In fact, as Barry Hindess puts it, anxiety is “more diffuse, lacking a clearly identifiable cause and failing therefore to invite an appropriate positive response.”101 In this tiny Western enclave in pre–Opium War China, anxiety did not tip into full-scale panic. As other chapters in this volume suggest, often colonial response to fears—and the assimilation of anxiety into a politics of fear—were preconditions for panic’s emergence. In Canton what is striking is how Western near-panics about fire both absorbed and reflected so many other worries and grievances, which would only intensify as Anglo-Chinese relations deteriorated and the two sides went to war.

99. “British and Chinese Relations,” n.p. Original emphasis. 100. Canton Press, vol. 4, no. 22 (February 2, 1839): n.p. 101. Barry Hindess, “Not at Home in the Empire,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, vol. 7, no. 3 (2001): 363–77 (363).

3 Epidemic Opportunities: Panic, Quarantines, and the 1851 International Sanitary Conference João Rangel de Almeida

This chapter examines the often unanticipated opportunities that crises may furnish to individuals, communities, and states. Epidemics—and the panic that commonly accompanies them—may be thought of as “social disruptors” that create opportune conditions for social reform, technological development, career advancement, or the expansion of markets. The distraction and anxiety caused by the “shock” of catastrophic events may be exploited politically to push through legislation, wage war, or curtail freedoms.1 As other contributors to this volume argue, epidemics and the panic that they induce have served to legitimate the proliferation of biosurveillance schemes and governmental control.2 In his account of Western anxieties in pre– Opium War Canton (Chapter 2), for example, John Carroll notes how destruction by fire might spell opportunity, just as Robert Peckham (Chapter 6) suggests how epidemic crises in the final decade of the nineteenth century consolidated and extended the strategic role of telegraphy. State responses to cholera in the mid-nineteenth century provide a good example of this biopolitical enlargement. As Christopher Hamlin has observed: “It is in the magnitude of the reaction to it that cholera stands out as the signal disease of the nineteenth century.”3 Cholera produced widespread panic, prompting measures to manage not only the disease itself, but also the volatilities of the panic-stricken population. Such measures could be counterproductive: the deployment of troops to keep order and to patrol quarantines often amplified fears in threatened populations, exacerbating rather than diminishing panic.4 The term “cholera panic” was widely employed in the press from the 1830s to describe the terror generated by the infectious disease. While noting the role of newspapers in “inducing apprehension and consequent depression of spirits,” contemporaries acknowledged how rumors could 1. For a popular account of the ways that such “shocks” are exploited as “therapy” by “disaster capitalism,” see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto: Knopf, 2007). 2. See Alison Bashford, “Global Biopolitics and the History of World Health,” History of the Human Sciences, vol. 19, no. 1 (2006): 67–88. 3. Christopher Hamlin, Cholera: The Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4. 4. Charlotte E. Henze, Disease, Health Care and Government in Late Imperial Russia: Life and Death on the Volga, 1823–1914 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 50.

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propel terror and produce a “fear-inspired panic.”5 As one commentator remarked of the 1832 New York cholera epidemic, panic-stricken inhabitants fled the city just as those of Pompeii must have fled “as the red lava showered down upon their houses, or when the walls were shaken asunder by an earthquake.”6 If authorities sought to downplay mass fear of the disease by, for example, understating mortality figures, they could equally exploit panic as way of changing behaviors and sensibilities—as Hamlin puts it, making “normal practices transgressive” in order to sanction public health interventions aimed at clearing up “nuisances.”7 The 1851 International Sanitary Conference, convened in Paris explicitly to deal with the cholera “crisis,” serves as a case study for how epidemics may open up political opportunities; in this case, by creating new diplomatic modus operandi and a rationale for imperial interventions abroad through the regulation of sanitary affairs. The aim of this chapter is to consider how European medical and diplomatic envoys to the conference sought to exploit an international regulatory event to construct policies aimed at controlling Ottoman public health affairs, ultimately extending their influence over the strategic territories of the Ottoman Empire in the East. In so doing, the chapter examines the interaction between epidemics and their panics, national sovereignty, and imperial performativity. In a world marked by contested boundaries between “civilized” and “non-civilized” societies (the Christian “West” versus the Islamic, Ottoman “East”), epidemics allowed for a clear demarcation of these spaces and the use of “civilized” knowledge and practices to control epidemic risks. Even in cases where these measures were not fully implemented, the process of negotiation in the face of a “real” infectious disease threat and the terror it triggered provides critical insights into imperial agendas, while suggesting the complex ways in which political expediencies were entangled with fears, expectations, and ambitions. Cholera, which had previously only been endemic in India, began to diffuse globally in several successive pandemic waves from the beginning of the nineteenth century (Figure 3.1).8 During this period, European state officials and medical communities carefully monitored the disease and were aware of its spread into the continent by the late 1820s. Medical missions, sent abroad by governments and scientific academies to study the disease, failed to reach a consensus about cholera’s etiology. As a medical category, cholera was far from clear and unified.9 Indeed, it was precisely its

5. See, for example, “The Press and The Cholera,” Times [London], September 15, 1849, 3. 6. Quoted in Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987 [1962]), 27. 7. Hamlin, Cholera, 118. 8. Different writers defend diverging dates for the onset and duration of successive pandemics. See Robert Pollitzer, Cholera (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1959), 11–49. 9. Pamela K. Gilbert, Cholera and Nation: Doctoring the Social Body in Victorian England (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008).

Figure 3.1 “Chart Showing the Progress of the Spasmodic Cholera.” Frontispiece to Amariah Brigham’s A Treatise on Epidemic Cholera: Including an Historical Account of Its Origin and Progress, to the Present Period (Hartford, CT: Huntington, 1832). Courtesy of Princeton University, Historic Maps Collection.

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elusiveness as a pathological entity that provoked apprehension.10 While some argued that the disease was a contagious pestilence, others vouched for its noncontagious nature; the majority of physicians and state administrators combined both positions in a malleable way.11 Given the disease’s uncertain identity, it is not surprising that there was a lack of consensus on how to prevent its spread.12 With simultaneous calls for quarantine and environmental reform, health authorities struggled to offer concrete results to their populations.13 Predictably, cholera became a major cause of panic in Europe, driven by speculation about its provenance, mode of transmission, and identity. However, the fears that united Lisbon, Paris, London, Moscow, and Vienna were less connected with the sheer number of deaths inflicted by the disease than with the cultural and political associations of cholera. A disease imported from the colonial world, cholera violated imperial expectations, countered enlightened ideals of progress, and challenged scientific rationality. The disease was progressively “Asianized” (Figure 3.2).14 By 1832, Parisians were questioning how a “pestilential” and “uncivilized disease” could break out in Paris, a city they believed to be the epicenter of the “civilized” world.15 As they faced once white bodies that had been transformed into dark corpses by cholera, doctors and popular writers in London feared the annihilation of British civilization and the degeneration of the nation. As Erin O’Connor notes, “Asiatic cholera took shape in the Victorian imagination as an Oriental raider, a barbaric force whose progress westward exposed the weak spots of an expanding industrial culture.”16 Cholera made visible (and tangible) civilizational and racial tensions in the metropole, opening up unique opportunities for debating matters of social justice and introducing institutional reforms, which led to new sanitary, housing, and urban management policies. While much has been written about the social and cultural repercussions of cholera in nineteenth-century Europe and North America, far less attention has been paid to epidemic diplomacy. Cholera and the panic it triggered were crucial to the 10. On the elusiveness of the cholera as an “object-without-an-essence,” see Projit Bihari Mukharji, “The ‘Cholera Cloud’ in the Nineteenth-Century ‘British World’: History of an Object-Without-an-Essence,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 86, no. 3 (2012): 303–32. 11. Margaret Pelling, Cholera, Fever and English Medicine, 1825–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Peter Vinten-Johansen et al., Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 12. Hamlin, Cholera. 13. See Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 14. Hamlin, Cholera, 39–46. 15. François Delaporte, Disease and Civilization: The Cholera in Paris, 1832 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); on France as antithetical to India and the “East,” see 17–18. 16. Erin O’Connor, Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 22.

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Figure 3.2 Illustration by Fritz Graetz showing the cholera personified as a Turkish immigrant arriving in New York, Puck, July 18, 1883.

development of multilateral public health initiatives, even as the often convoluted negotiations about the imposition and regulation of quarantine measures served as vehicles for preserving and extending national interests. In this chapter the emphasis is on the instrumentalization of panic in the construction of an international architecture for managing epidemic disease. The aim, in other words, is to write disease into diplomatic and international history.17 Many of the other contributors explore panic as a spatial phenomenon. Alan Lester, for example, investigates how panics are networked across space and human-nonhuman boundaries (Chapter 1). “The network, as both a descriptive and an analytical device,” he writes, “allowed nodal points to exist at a variety of scales, from individual people through institutional spaces such as the mission station or the laboratory, to agglomerations such as towns, cities, regions, and countries.” At the same time, efforts to stem the flow of disease entailed mapping its progress (see Chapter 6). This tracking of infection across space revealed geopolitical complexities, particularly in Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, where states with growing imperial ambitions sought 17. Erez Manela, “A Pox on Your Narrative: Writing Disease Control into Cold War History,” Diplomatic History, vol. 34, no. 2 (2010): 299–323.

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to gain ascendancy over the territories of the Ottoman Empire, which extended from Europe to Anatolia, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa. Here, disease and politics became intertwined, as the cooperation that had been stimulated by panic was overshadowed by anxiety over the consequences of losing out economically and politically to rival states.

Cholera, Quarantine, and International Regulation Opportunities From an international perspective, cholera created new tensions between the management of passenger and trade flows and port governance. The French state administrator, Ségur Dupeyron, concluded in 1834 that the disease had its origins in the Orient and that “commerce facilitated the transport of plague.” Since cholera outbreaks followed major commercial routes, it is not surprising that quarantine laws and practices were revived in Europe to avoid the diffusion of the disease. The idea was to erect a “first line of defense”18 between infected and healthy places, or, in the words of Valeska Huber, to develop “membranes” that would allow the passage of ships in the Mediterranean but halt the spread of infection.19 In theory, local health authorities would approach arriving ships to inspect their bills of health, passengers, crew, and cargo. If none of these elements were considered compromised, the vessel would be authorized to unload its contents freely. However, if authorities feared the possible presence of choleric matters, ship, passengers, crew, and cargo would be quarantined for the period deemed necessary to ensure the safety of the port and its adjacent territories. Given the impact of quarantine on international exchanges, heated debates took place in medical and political milieus about the relative merits, efficacy, and detrimental repercussion of quarantine measures. Newspapers, parliamentary reports, journals, academic papers, and pamphlets provided supporting and opposing opinions based on personal experiences, financial considerations, or medical data. Facing demands from passengers, merchants, and health authorities alike, diplomats endeavored to negotiate international regulatory agreements that would bring more uniformity to quarantine practices.20 Quarantine, although an important tool for avoiding epidemic outbreaks and quelling panic, was a persistent source of contention and debate that 18. Krista Maglen, “‘The First Line of Defence’: British Quarantine and the Port Sanitary Authorities in the Nineteenth Century,” Social History of Medicine, vol. 15, (2002): 413–28. 19. Valeska Huber, “The Unification of the Globe by Disease? The International Sanitary Conferences on Cholera, 1851–1894,” Historical Journal, vol. 49, no. 2 (2006): 454–76; see also Valeska Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). On the metaphor of the “membrane” in nineteenth-century literature, science, and politics, see Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Science, and Politics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 20. Mark Harrison, Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).

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was rarely confined to state bureaucrats and physicians.21 Fractures often emerged when assessing the prophylactic capacity of quarantines and evaluating their financial and personal costs: quarantines limited free maritime circulation, contributed to higher transaction costs with the imposition of quarantine fees, and required the use of public monies to fund the work of quarantine stations and associated staff.22 From a practical perspective, quarantine policies relied on extensive diplomatic networks that surveyed the epidemic status of regions under their jurisdiction. In preparation for international departures, a local consul from the country of destination would endorse a bill of health that accompanied the vessel. The document attested to the epidemic status of the region of departure, and described the health conditions of the vessel, its crew, passengers, and cargo. Consuls, merchants, and sanitary administrators often complained about the lack of reliable data and the scientific competence of diplomats to make decisions that could potentially compromise the safety of arrival ports. In addition, the fact that the bill of health dictated the quarantine fate of a vessel left merchants uneasy, as they feared that commercial rivalries influenced the information conveyed in these documents. Merchants suspected that through false epidemic reports, consuls were attempting to control the flow of trade in favor of the nations they represented: if a consul issued a false bill of health, the vessel carrying it would be retained in lengthy quarantine while competitors unloaded their goods and gained privileged access to markets.23 The haphazard legal framework of quarantines was also subject to stringent criticism. In the 1830s, quarantine practices in the Mediterranean were far from standardized. According to Dupeyron, a vessel departing from Constantinople (Istanbul) was subject to a quarantine of 60 days in Marseille but only 34 days in Venice or Trieste.24 Many argued that because of these variations, quarantines were inefficient and even useless. Arthur Todd Holroyd, an English physician, jurist, and explorer, asserted that quarantine was “unphilosophical in theory, or pernicious in practice [and full] of contradiction, absurdities, and inconsistencies kept up from ignorance 21. Anne Hardy, “Cholera, Quarantine and the English Preventive System, 1850–1895,” Medical History, vol. 37. no. 3 (1993): 250–69. 22. In a seminal article, Erwin Ackerknecht connected personal political ideologies with quarantine support. In his view, conservative and autocratic individuals were more likely to support the employment of quarantines than liberal ones. More recently, Peter Baldwin has argued for a link between adopted prophylactic strategies and the geo-epidemic position of the countries where these measures were practiced. According to Baldwin, countries closer to the epidemic center of a pandemic are more likely to adopt quarantines than those that experience outbreaks later; see Erwin Ackerknecht, “Anticontagionism between 1821 and 1867,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 22 (1948): 562–93; Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe. 23. Mark Harrison, “Disease, Diplomacy and International Commerce: The Origins of International Sanitary Regulation in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Global History, vol. 1, no. 2 (2006): 197–217. 24. Ségur Dupeyron, Rapport Adressé à Son Exc. le Ministre du Commerce (Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale, 1834).

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or interested motives.”25 Like many other radicals, he advocated for its cessation. In contrast, Dupeyron, alongside several other physicians, politicians, state administrators, travelers, and merchants, demanded that quarantine policies be reviewed and drafted at national and international level.26 Whether in the form of eliminating or reforming quarantine, regulatory changes were regarded as imperative. However, policy changes in the Mediterranean were a complex and problematic affair. For instance, from a national perspective, France only placed quarantine under the jurisdiction of central government in 1850. Until then, local authorities such as the Marseille Intendancy enjoyed a fair amount of autonomy in their operations. As the health of the local population was at stake, they demanded control over the preventive mechanisms to deter epidemic outbreaks.27 Thus, these local authorities were able to design and impose policies, perform sanitary inspections, and enforce sanctions on offending captains, crews, merchants, and passengers. The concentration of power in regional authorities undermined efforts to create coherent national—let alone international—sanitary programs by favoring local interests. Moreover, the dispersion of power across local authorities contradicted contemporary ideas of central governments as power and policy brokers.28 From an international perspective, states found it impossible to modify quarantine regulations without cooperation from other governments. J. Lewis, author of a report on quarantine commissioned by the British Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1838, viewed it as “the main obstacle to maritime intercourse in the Mediterranean.”29 Lewis found the practice superfluous, but was aware that any attempt to regulate quarantine would require international compromises: If the English Government should change the Quarantine Regulations of Malta and its other colonies in the Mediterranean, without previously obtaining the approbation of the sanitary authorities of the neighbouring countries, the pratique granted in those colonies would not be received elsewhere; and vessels coming from any of those colonies would be subjected to a quarantine of observation . . . The latter liability would attach to ships of the Royal Navy; as well as to merchant-vessels; so that no ship of war sailing from Malta could communicate 25. Arthur Todd Holroyd, The Quarantine Laws: Their Abuses and Inconsistencies; A Letter Addressed to the Rt. Hon. Sir John Cam Hobhouse, Bart. M.P., President of the Board of Control (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1839). 26. For example, in 1817 when the first cholera pandemic began, Henry Matthews left England in search of better climates to improve his health, keeping a diary in which he reflected on the purpose and scope of quarantines. See Henry Matthews, The Diary of an Invalid: Being the Journal of a Tour in Pursuit of Health, in Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, and France, in the Years 1817, 1818, and 1819 (Paris: Baudry, 1836). 27. Françoise Hildesheimer, “Marseille, capitale sanitaire de la France,” Actes du 101e Congrès National des Sociétés Savantes (Montpellier, 1985), 135–49. 28. See Stefan Berger, A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1789–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). 29. “Memorandum Respecting Quarantine Regulations in the Mediterranean by Mr. Lewis, London, 26 June 1838,” Enclosure 4 in no. 10, 83.

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with any part of France, Italy, or Austria, without being previously subjected to a quarantine of Observation.30

Unilaterally, Britain was unable to change the quarantine model practiced in the Mediterranean. Any small legal and practical change had the potential to produce ramifying “inconveniences far greater than those arising from the existing system.”31 This was far from an exclusively British concern. In 1850, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, the President of the French Republic, used similar arguments to justify the organization of an international conference to regulate public health internationally. In his view: Quarantine measures provide the government with means to protect public health against outside threats. However, their excessive use hinders the freedom of our international relations. The restrictive principles practiced by foreign powers cause great damage to French trade. Without reciprocity, our regulations have been inspired by a liberal attitude. An agreement between the great powers with Mediterranean ports will end obstacles, delays and costs imposed by quarantines. All our efforts are focused on reaching such an agreement.32

Confronted by similar challenges, Paris and London tried, without success, to create forums dedicated to the international regulation of quarantine from 1838 onwards.33 Although important, the free flow of trade was not the only reason underpinning the desired standardization of quarantine policies. The need to stop the increasing number of epidemic outbreaks in Europe played an equal role. Yellow fever and cholera, in addition to spreading fear and death, highlighted the fragility of antiepidemic measures practiced on the continent. Between 1800 and 1820, yellow fever outbreaks in Spain made it clear that Europe was exposed to a degree of “exotic” disease rarely experienced before.34 By the 1830s, cholera outbreaks were exacerbating fears and doubts about the capacity of European societies to cope with new epidemic 30. Ibid., 85. 31. Ibid. 32. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, Discours et messages de Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, depuis son retour en France jusqu’au 2 décembre 1852 (Paris: Plon Frères, 1853), 119. 33. From 1838, France and Britain actively endeavored to organize an international forum for the regulation of quarantine. However, cabinet changes and unstable international climates meant that the organization of international public health initiatives was unsuccessful. Detailed diplomatic correspondence can be found here: Great Britain Foreign Office, Correspondence Relative to the Contagion of Plague and the Quarantine Regulations of Foreign Countries, 1836–1843 (London: Harrison, 1843). 34. In 1800, yellow fever outbreaks in Spain resulted in a death toll of more than 60,000, spreading fear across Europe. Two decades later, new outbreaks in Spain justified a French intervention in the country. Epidemic diseases and public health safety conditioned international political affairs; see Lawrence A. Sawchuk and Stacie D. A. Burke, “Gibraltar’s 1804 Yellow Fever Scourge: The Search for Scapegoats,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 53, no. 1 (1998): 3–42; George D. Sussman, “From Yellow Fever to Cholera: A Study of French Government Policy, Medical Professionalism and Popular Movements in the Epidemic Crises of the Restoration and the July Monarchy” (unpublished PhD thesis, Yale University, 1971).

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diseases. Calls for the international production and circulation of knowledge intensified. At the same time, many physicians and politicians demanded the creation of central agencies to prevent and manage epidemics.35 These concerns led the French government to organize the 1851 International Sanitary Conference in Paris.36 The invitation letter sent to potential participants was clear regarding the object of the conference: “Health, and health only” would be the concern of the delegates. There was an expectation that state envoys would standardize quarantine practices in the Mediterranean and even improve the speed of international exchanges. However, Paris demanded that reforms not “compromise the sacred interests of public health.”37 The French plan was certainly ambitious. In contrast to proposals put forward in previous debates on quarantine regulation, the organizers envisioned a complex international epidemic governance scheme. Affixed to the invitation letter was a seven-page list detailing the major points of what France titled the Official Mediterranean Sanitary Law. In addition to quarantine reform, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs suggested the institution of a grand international program in order to establish international sanitary laws, standard bills of health, uniform sanitary authorities, and a shared judicial system. In short, epidemic panics, coupled with hopes of easing international exchanges, created the opportunity for an international governance of epidemic diseases that disregarded conventional political boundaries. In an unprecedented move, states were invited to find solutions to a scientific controversy through diplomatic channels and international law.

1851 as a Diplomatic Precedent Opening on July 27, 1851, the International Sanitary Conference was hosted in the Parisian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In total, 12 states with interests in the Mediterranean—Austria, Britain, France, Greece, Portugal, the Roman States, Russia, the Kingdom of Sardinia, Spain, the Ottoman Empire, Tuscany, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies—appointed two delegates each, a doctor and a diplomat. Doctors were expected to “represent the scientific element” while diplomats would protect

35. In 1838, for example, Dr. Bâtard proposed that a congress should be organized in Europe to research ways of improving sanitary measures against epidemic diseases. The congress, which was to be composed of physicians and state administrators, was expected to “elucidate the truth of the contagion of plague and apply this knowledge into universal sanitary legislation.” In his view, the combination of medical knowledge and systematic experimentation would allow old medical disputes to be solved, and, at the same time, enable legislation to be produced that would forever free humanity from plague and other epidemic diseases; see A. Bulard, “Congrès Sanitaire Européen,” Journal des débats politiques et littéraires (November 10, 1838): 3–4. 36. Bonaparte, Discours et messages. 37. Arquivo Histórico Diplomático, Lisbon, Leg./Emb. Paris (hereafter AHD, LEP) Maço 6, Baroche to Paiva, Lisbon, April 16, 1851.

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“the maritime administrative commercial” interests.38 Under the direct control of their respective ministers of foreign affairs, delegates were entrusted with particular agendas to defend in the sessions and commissions that composed the conference. The 1851 International Sanitary Conference was unique in many ways. As an international event dedicated to the circulation of knowledge, the conference was part of a new trend that emerged in the early nineteenth century. According to the Union des Associations Internationales, during the first half of the century, 26 international nondiplomatic conferences and congresses were organized in Europe. These meetings were convened in major European capitals over two to three days to debate particular issues related to physics, slavery, prison practices, economics, and agriculture—to name just a few topics.39 Although they were often sponsored by national governments, delegates to these events were not mandated by their states. Delegates represented professional and individual views without directly implicating their states or having the tools or power to translate congressional decisions into legislation.40 As a diplomatic event that aimed to regulate the world, the conference was equally original. International conferences and congresses such as the 1814–15 Congress of Vienna were sporadically organized after major armed conflicts. These events settled new political borders and negotiated war compensation agreements. Thus, diplomatic conferences were exclusively composed of state-appointed delegates—professional diplomats or in some cases governmental members or heads of state—mandated with clear national agendas. The heterogeneous structure of the 1851 conference, attended as it was by delegates with very different professional backgrounds, underscored the lack of pre­ existing protocols to guide and regulate its operations. Antonio Segóvia, the Spanish diplomatic envoy, wondered how to organize voting rights or even manage the work of the conference. Granting one vote per delegate would erode distinctions between diplomatic and medical expertise, while running the risk of weakening the representative power of countries in cases where a country’s delegates voted against each other. Although delegates such as Sir Anthony Perrier, who represented Britain, insisted that delegations to the conference should be cohesive groups united by terms of reference issued by each government and thus granted only a single vote, in the end the conference set the diplomatic precedent of granting equal rights to physicians and diplomats in a venue dedicated to the international regulation of epidemic affairs.41 38. Ibid. 39. Union of International Associations, Les Congrès Internationaux de 1681 à 1899: liste complète (Brussels: Union des Associations Internationales, 1960). 40. Christophe Prochasson, “Les congrès: lieux de l’échange intellectuel. Introduction,” Cahiers Georges Sorel, vol. 7 (1989): 5–8. 41. Conférence sanitaire internationale, vol. 1 (August 7, 1851), 5. The 1851 protocol decisions were revisited in 13 further International Sanitary Conferences organized between 1851 and 1939. Although they were organized by diplomatic institutions, the conferences did not always have diplomatic or

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To assess the program initially proposed and to organize the works of the conference, delegates elected a president—the French diplomatic envoy, C. E. David—and organized ad hoc commissions. These commissions analyzed specific issues such as the constitution of international tribunals, the organization of sanitary administrations, and the standardization of sanitary fees. After intense debate, delegates also set out the format of the final outcome of the conference: a draft Sanitary Convention (Projet de Convention Sanitaire) and draft International Sanitary Regulations (Projet de Règlement Sanitaire International). These documents represented the model of international public health governance envisioned by the officially mandated participants. Although they were merely drafts, the ratification of the documents would transform them into international law. Thus, in this instance, international law was co-drafted by professionals without a diplomatic background but who were considered expert enough to contribute to the international regulation of on scientific issues.

European Sanitary Authorities and the Uniformization Attempt The crises produced by cholera epidemics provided opportunities for imperial expansion. They also gave rise to debates about the feasibility of international public health interventions, in particular the creation of standard sanitary authorities and the establishment of international arbitration courts for sanitary matters. On December 9, 1851, delegates congregated to debate the future organization of sanitary authorities (magistratures or autorités sanitaires). France had urged governments to make these port institutions as uniform as possible. While they wished to take the “laws and practices of each country” into consideration, it was suggested that the new authorities should be organized along the same lines: first, sanitary authorities should be headed by a state-appointed agent; second, they should include a council of local dignitaries. The aim was to create a system controlled by centralized states and internationally recognized as credible. By allowing a forum for local voices, France hoped, to a certain extent, to integrate local peculiarities into the international regulation of epidemic diseases. This was particularly important, since these authorities required not only international but also national and local credibility in order to operate with success.42 France also hoped to open up places on local sanitary councils to foreign consuls in an attempt to break discriminatory practices against foreign vessels and to allow the free flow of information between all interested parties. Under the aegis of “international law,” consuls would be summoned every time that decisions concerning their nations were made locally.43 Arguably, this centralization medical envoys. In 1859, physicians were excluded while in 1866 diplomats were not appointed as official envoys to the conference. 42. AHD, LEP, Maço 6, Baroche to Paiva, Lisbon, April 16, 1851. 43. Ibid.

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attempt aimed to provide a mechanism for controlling the emergence of panic. Or rather, of multiple panics since, as a number of contributors show in this collection, the threat posed by epidemics produced a contagious effect across media: from the material pathways of trade to the transcontinental telegraphic cables which connected global markets. As Alison Bashford rightly points out in the epilogue to this book, “A history of panic and disease, then, turns out to be a history of communication and technology.” The French proposals for a uniform sanitary system in 1851 relied upon extensive transnational surveillance machineries underpinned by international law. States would be better able to control the flow of information, the trust in sanitary authorities would be reaffirmed, and the propagation of unwarranted and destabilizing fears avoided. Not surprisingly, these proposals were strikingly similar to the organization of the French sanitary system, which France hoped would be adopted as an international template.44 Soon after the opening of the conference in July, the Program Commission accepted and reinforced the initial French proposal by judging the project to establish international uniformity an “excellent idea.” The commission argued that “the presence of consuls in [local] councils could not be more advantageous” and invited delegates to determine the number of consuls to be included in each council and to offer these diplomats deliberative powers on local sanitary affairs.45 Efficiency and responsibility were the two buzzwords underpinning the commission’s report. In mid-October, a new commission was appointed. Headed by the French physician François Mêlier, the Commission on the Organization of Sanitary Magistracies or Authorities included diplomats from Britain, Russia, Tuscany, and Spain, and two doctors from Portugal and Sardinia in addition to Mêlier himself. One month later, the commission’s final report was read to the conference. The commissioners provided further details of the methods for organizing sanitary authorities in Europe, clearly framing the hierarchies and competencies. In contrast with the initial French invitation letter and the document produced by the Program Commission, the Commission on the Organization of Sanitary Authorities perceived local health councils as mere consultative bodies. All deliberative and executive powers would now be held by a director of health.46 Directly appointed by central governments, these new appointments were tasked with managing staff; executing sanitary laws 44. French attempts to model the world upon its own political and bureaucratic structures were not limited to the conference; see Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 110. In the particular case of sanitary affairs, in 1768 the Duke of Praslin—the French Secretary of State of the Navy—argued that “it was desirable for the communication between nations and for the wellbeing of humanity and navigators that all quarantine stations in the Mediterranean should be modeled upon [assimilés] Marseille”; Archive départmentales des Bouches-du-Rhone, C4464 cited by Hildesheimer, “Marseille, capitale sanitaire de la France,” 135. 45. Procés-verbaux, séance 7. 46. Procés-verbaux, séance 32.

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and regulations; assessing the sanitary status of arriving vessels; delivering bills of health to departing ships; and surveying the sanitary conditions of the region under each director’s jurisdiction. Due to their training and expertise, doctors were judged to be the most suitable candidates to head the new sanitary stations. In the hope of avoiding corruption and making these state agents accountable, the professionals were to be compensated with a fixed salary paid by the state, a practice not widespread at the time.47 Under the director of health, the institution of a local consultative board of health completed the proposed sanitary reform. Composed of civil and military leaders, notable citizens, members of local administrations, merchants, doctors, and chemists, the board brought a local perspective to the national governance of epidemics while promoting the local practice of hygienic measures.48 In addition, it was expected to include a member of the diplomatic community. By inviting local consuls to elect a delegate to the board, commissioners hoped to improve international trust in local strategies for avoiding epidemic outbreaks. As witnesses, consuls could offer valuable accounts of sanitary conditions abroad while gaining knowledge of local sanitary conditions and policies. It was thought that the inclusion of foreigners, who had access to privileged information through extensive diplomatic networks, would add further sources of epidemic data for local consideration. Moreover, it was expected that these consuls would also raise the international level of trust in the local epidemic control practices through reports to their superiors. In order to avoid international interference in local affairs, the consul-delegate was deprived of any deliberative power. Instead, he was exclusively invited as an observer and it was anticipated that, upon request, he would offer advice. Although local and international voices were to be taken into consideration by the local board and the director of health, local health authorities were clearly placed under the control and jurisdiction of central governments. In early December, delegates met to discuss the projects produced by the Program Commission and the Commission on Sanitary Authorities. Ebeling, the Russian diplomatic envoy, immediately announced that he was forced to abstain from voting on any measure that obliged his empire to reorganize its sanitary institutions. Ebeling’s declaration caused bewilderment. As an active member of the Commission on Sanitary Authorities, the Russian diplomat had helped develop the reformist agenda; however, when voting in the name of his state, Ebeling struggled to reconcile his personal convictions with the agenda pushed by his government. Russia did not wish to abdicate its freedom and control over what it considered to be exclusively a national affair.49 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Procés-verbaux, séance 41.

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Russia was not the only state apprehensive about the commission’s interventionist agenda. Austria refused to support measures that contradicted its own sanitary policies, while the Two Sicilies and Portugal had reservations about an international engineering of national sanitary affairs.50 In the view of the Austrian physician representative, Dr. Ménis, any international resolution should take the form of guidelines. States could use these recommendations if they desired to reform their sanitary systems without compromising their legitimate autonomy and control over these issues. Forcing any mandatory organizational changes, Ménis argued, would directly intervene in private national affairs. Each government had “its administrative principles, its particular rules to manage state administration” that resulted from demographical, geographical, and climatic peculiarities.51 If an international reorganization of sanitary authorities did not account for these realities, it was destined to failure: no state would adopt or execute these measures. Ménis believed that it was pointless to work out a common model of sanitary organization given that many nations were determined to maintain their heterogeneous administrative practices. Austria had introduced major sanitary reforms not long before the start of the conference. During its most recent reformist wave in 1847, a system similar to the one under discussion at the conference had been instituted: sanitary affairs had been centralized under the Ministry of Trade, which, through its Central Maritime Sanitary Council, regulated health affairs and quarantine practices.52 The Central Council also coordinated a network of subordinate offices, each composed of one state agent and a controller.53 The active resistance of Austria was primarily an attempt to maintain the status quo of its sovereignty and to avoid the introduction of foreign diplomats into its internal institutions, a measure not practiced in Austria. Facing opposition, France highlighted the similarities between the Austrian system of organization and the one under discussion. François Mêlier, the French medical envoy, stressed that the conference’s attempt to standardize sanitary authorities at an international level still preserved the autonomy of states over sanitary affairs.54 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. During the conference, delegates struggled to square personal beliefs with state mandates and international agendas. For example, when the delegates discussed the etiology of cholera, the British medical envoy voted against his government’s orders in order to preserve his professional integrity. 52. Ronald E. Coons, “Steamships and Quarantines at Trieste, 1837–1848,” Journal of History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 44, no. 1 (1989): 28–55. 53. During the debate on sanitary administration, Ménis described Austria’s national system in some detail; see Procés-verbaux, séance 41. 54. Mêlier was closely involved with the conference’s organization as the author of the preliminary conference program attached to the invitation letter sent by France to all participating countries. He was also a central figure in the quarantine dispute involving the French government and the Marseille Intendancy in 1850. The French doctor was then appointed the government’s agent responsible for the Marseillais health authority; Hildesheimer, “Marseille, Capitale Sanitaire de la France”; see J. Bergeron, “Éloge de M. Mêlier. Lu dans la séance du 11 Décembre 1888,” Mémoires de l’Académie de Médecine, vol. 36 (1891): 1–38.

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Isolated, English and Spanish delegates voiced clear support for the pro-reformist and interventionist agenda of the conference. Together, they repudiated Austro-Russian attempts to preserve the status quo in a venue organized specifically to promote change. As the Spaniard, Segóvia, concluded, “if each [country] was to stay in the same way, it was useless to discuss [any agenda aimed at standardizing procedures].”55 Both delegates agreed that even if gradual, reform implied change and that the conference’s commitment to standardization was clear from the moment it was organized.56 However, the British support for centralization contained an important caveat. Perrier regarded the system proposed by the conference as a positive strategy, accommodating the promotion of central control while allowing local interests to be taken into consideration. Yet, as he eventually revealed, his country’s strategy was marked by a double standard: Britain only intended to reform the organization of the sanitary institutions of its Mediterranean territories—Gibraltar, the Ionian Islands, and Malta. Mainland affairs, it appeared, were to remain the exclusive responsibility of the national government. No international organization should aspire to intervene in the autonomy, control, and legitimacy of the British state.57 The capacity to demarcate territorial boundaries as subject to uneven doses of international intervention was not available to all countries. For instance, in contrast with Britain, the geopolitical reality of Austria resulted in the likelihood of the subjugation of national health authorities to international decisions. The sacrifice of autonomy would be felt in the very territory of the country itself, not in some rather distant possession that already enjoyed a certain level of political autonomy.58 Territorial topology was clearly important when assessing the impact of international intervention upon national sovereignty. Although compromises could be attempted in order to solve disputes surrounding the idea of standardizing health authorities, agreeing on specific details was far more problematic for the delegates to the conference. In particular, delegates struggled to support the idea of opening health authorities to foreign consuls. From the organizers’ perspective, this measure allowed both local and international interest to be 55. Procés-verbaux, séance 41. 56. By the end of the 1840s, Whitehall started developing policies and infrastructures to impose and supervise national sanitary standards within a frame of local autonomy. The 1848 Public Health Act, for example, was a clear attempt to impose a public health central supervisory body; see Robert M. Gutchen, “Local Improvements and Centralization in Nineteenth-Century England,” Historical Journal, vol. 4, no. 1 (1961): 85–96; E. T. Stokes, “Bureaucracy and Ideology: Britain and India in the Nineteenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Fifth Series), vol. 30 (1980): 131–56; Carlo M. Cipolla, Miasmas and Disease: Public Health and the Environment in the Pre-Industrial Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 57. See Procés-verbaux, séance 42. 58. If this argument is explored to its full extent, one can perhaps see the conference as an opportunity for the British government to claim and gain legitimacy so as to further control and order its overseas territories. Under the general veil of international sanitary reforms and the specific conference mandate, Britain was “obliged” to intervene in its Mediterranean possessions. These policies could even be claimed as “humanitarian.”

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easily taken into account by opening new channels of communication. The consuldelegate would be able to offer official documentation that proved the sanitary status of departure ports while directly observing and reporting on local initiatives in order to curb epidemic risk and avert unnecessary local fears. In summary, the presence of an international observer was aimed at raising trust in local sanitary activities and potentially shortening—perhaps even avoiding—costly quarantines both locally and abroad. This measure was not wholly original. Both France and Sardinia already granted diplomatic access to their local boards of health. In fact, British and Austrian envoys sat regularly in these sanitary councils as consul-delegates.59 Even in countries where councils were not open to foreigners, consuls were heavily involved in their work. As the Turkish diplomat summarized, consuls certified bills of health, facilitated the process of cargo quarantine, and witnessed the opening of letters and official correspondence: they were a constant presence in the governance of epidemic matters.60 The novelty of this proposal of opening health authorities to foreign consuls, therefore, was not in its practice, but in its formal character. If accepted, a foreigner would legitimately have the right to a permanent presence on the council without depending on the goodwill of local or national authorities. Formal ratification of such a role was indeed the pivotal issue at hand. If formalized, the introduction of consuls could potentially degrade national autonomy and control over territories and issues of sanitary governance. There were several aspects of the issue that caused disagreement. First, as Ménis noted, the inclusion of consuls in an official national body—even if local in its nature—was illegal in countries like Austria where “the exercise of public functions [was] interdicted to foreigners.”61 Second, it was argued that the presence of foreign citizens on these boards would have serious local consequences: introducing foreign elements into institutions that, first and foremost, had been designed to protect local interests would compromise the trust placed in them by local populations. How could they be sure that their interests were properly protected when foreigners often had conflicting agendas imposed by the states and merchants they represented?62 Third, because it would be the task of local consular communities to elect a delegate, the measure did not allow “perfect reciprocity.” For these reasons, a state with powerful diplomatic apparatus could, in theory, secure the election of its consuls all over the Mediterranean while those less powerful might fail to secure any seats at all. According to the Sardinian, Magnetto, this would work against the national dignity of represented states, as it potentially reified their inequality.63 Furthermore, the Portuguese diplomat pointed out that 59. Procés-verbaux, séance 41. 60. Ibid. 61. Procés-verbaux, séance 41. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid.

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smaller countries, like his own, risked being undermined by foreigners if they were to have the same power as national authorities.64 Others were wary of foreign access to privy matters. Vitalis, the Greek envoy, voiced his concerns that there could be a breach of national security if foreigners were allowed to freely survey the works of important governmental bodies.65 On the same note, the Roman diplomat contended that many of the affairs under discussion in these authorities should not be disclosed to foreigners due to their confidentiality.66 Finally, as the Sicilian delegate, Carbonaro, put it, political reforms should result from a recognizable need for change that was not present in this initiative: resident consuls were already called every time that local councils needed them. To reserve a mandatory seat for a consul-delegate did not offer sanitary or organizational advantages but instead imposed extra layers of problems.67 The concerns voiced by the opposition were dismissed by Mêlier and Segóvia as out of tune with reality. Segóvia reminded his fellow delegates that the conference had already redefined the structure of sanitary authorities. The new model removed the executive and deliberative powers of local councils in order to give them a new role as advisors to a state-appointed director of health. Thus, their lack of power restricted the capacity of foreign councils to influence national sanitary policies.68 Furthermore, as Mêlier somewhat idealistically argued, foreign consuls would not jeopardize national security or interest since they acted on goodwill: health, a matter that concerned everyone, was not susceptible to national interest.69 In order to bypass the controversy, some delegates requested that the proposal be withdrawn. Others, led by the Portuguese delegate, Mouzinho da Silveira, suggested leaving the decision up to each nation’s individual discretion. Clearly, both of these positions privileged the status quo and resisted change. Eventually, delegates followed the Portuguese proposition and allowed each state to apply the measure voluntarily. If desired, states could allow the presence of consuls in local councils, just as they had before the conference. This decision may have reflected a growing anxiety over national sovereignty, of which ministers of foreign affairs made their delegates aware of. More importantly, the attempt to limit the exposure of sanitary institutions to foreign governments was a symbolic move that avoided the formalization of a procedure already largely practiced. From a political perspective, abandoning the idea of introducing foreign consuls may have been more profitable than trying to impose it. In addition, by avoiding the formal introduction of foreign elements into local institutions, states hoped to maintain the levels of trust in local health authorities, 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., séance 42. 69. Ibid., séance 41.

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thus avoiding the introduction of further uncertainty and possibly contributing to the emergence of panic.

International Arbitration Courts and the Fear of Lost Sovereignty The conflict between concerns for national sovereignty and the proposed program reached its peak at the start of the debate on the creation of international arbitration tribunals. The tribunals were to be composed of foreign consuls with jurisdiction over all sanitary disputes, and would transfer the national control over judicial disputes to international bodies. States would lose their autonomy and their right to address and punish the infringement of sanitary law independently. Instead, new international institutions, outside of national governmental jurisdiction, would have the capacity to rule on crimes committed in national territories. In the program circulated prior to the beginning of the conference, France requested that delegates consider the creation of an “Arbitration Tribunal [Tribunal Arbitral] in charge of hearing and ruling [sanitary infractions].”70 Departing from this document, the Program Commission found it necessary to compose a threeperson subcommission in order to make an immediate assessment of the viability of the measure. Together, Perrier (Britain), Segóvia (Spain), and Lavison (Austria) questioned whether the conference had a mandate to debate the creation of an institution composed of foreign consuls with potential power to rule in national sovereign territories. If instituted, these tribunals could be capable of “decid[ing] upon governmental decisions, or at least, to condemn their actions.” It was crucial, they concluded, to ascertain whether the conference was authorized to pronounce upon such paramount issues.71 It was clear to the subcommissioners that all participating states had received the precirculated program of the conference and that this document had been instrumental in the decision to send a delegation to the conference. Therefore, members of the subcommission presumed that all delegates were authorized to engage in such discussions, since they were each chosen and mandated by their respective governments based on information provided in the conference program. Moreover, the subcommissioners argued that ignoring debate about these matters—as some delegates suggested—would contradict the expectations of the organizers and participating governments. The subcommission suggested changing the name of the proposed arbitration tribunal to “arbitration court.” A court composed of consuls belonging to the high contracting parties and residing locally would be instituted in each major port—or, at least, one per country. This court, after considering evidence on sanitary misconduct, 70. AHD, LEP, Maço 6, Baroche to Paiva, Lisbon, April 16, 1851. 71. Procés-verbaux, séance 7.

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would be empowered to settle pecuniary compensation. Nevertheless, all parties would be allowed to appeal to local justice if unsatisfied with the verdict. More importantly, the court would only have jurisdiction over questions of sanitary regulation. Any infraction of the future International Sanitary Convention would still be solved through traditional diplomatic mechanisms outside of the courts.72 Nevertheless, the existence of arbitration courts would offer a prompt solution to curb infractions and raise the levels of trust in the international sanitary system envisaged in the conference. Perhaps organizers hoped that the introduction of efficient legal tools could contribute to reducing local fears caused by the possible mismanagement of sanitary affairs. Upon reading the subcommission’s report, the Program Commission concurred: the creation of common arbitration institutions was “the most difficult and delicate” issue to be addressed by the conference. Nevertheless, in proportion to its difficulty was its importance.73 The conference had to develop mechanisms that enhanced regulation compliance and the punishment of inevitable offenders. Merchants, crews, and passengers were all likely to evade international sanitary regulations, as indeed were state authorities. Any international mechanism had to account for the wide range of potential offenders. The introduction of international courts also aimed to avoid the constant involvement of diplomats in sanitary disputes: an expensive, inefficient, and time-consuming option. Likewise, the commission hoped to prevent the situation of a state being judged by a foreign court under the jurisdiction of a second state and its foreign law. A possible solution was the creation of a shared institution under the jurisdiction of international law and legitimately mandated to solve sanitary disputes. The courts, the commission hoped, would provide the much-needed tools to “assure the loyal and complete execution of the Convention and Regulation.”74 The idea of states being judged from outside their own legal institutions did not gather enthusiastic support from the delegates. Even France, the country that had suggested the creation of international sanitary tribunals, expressed concerns about its own idea. David, the conference president and diplomatic envoy of the host state, noted that such a measure could potentially infringe “the letter and spirit of all existing [international] treaties by which consuls were limited to exercise judicial authority in foreign countries.”75 More radically, Ménis of Austria demanded the immediate revocation of any attempt to introduce international tribunals disguised as courts. In his view, the legitimacy and autonomy of each state’s judicial system should not 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid. There were other issues addressed by the conference that were also considered to be among the most difficult and delicate issues to be solved: for example, deciding whether cholera was a contagious disease. 74. Procés-verbaux, séance 7. 75. Procés-verbaux, séance 43. My emphasis.

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be sacrificed by any means. To interfere with national judicial matters offended the dignity of represented government, he argued.76 From a practical perspective, the Sardinian, Magnetto, argued that no absolutist state would support a measure that jeopardized its direct authority and control over national affairs. To these governments, the word “court” “produce[d] the same horror as that of Holy Office in France and in Britain.”77 Moreover, the diversity of European legal traditions and judicial systems made any attempt at standardization impossible in the eyes of the Greek diplomatic envoy. The most probable result, he concluded, was an ever-growing number of illegal sentences likely to be subject to appeal. This naturally defeated the purpose of instituting such courts. Equally problematic were the stipulations to secure fair trials: the Program Commission barred consuls of nations whose citizens or interests were under trial to be appointed to the judging collective. This, the Greek noted, created an inevitable legal loophole. Cases under trial were likely to involve vessels registered in one country but captained by a citizen of another. The cargo could easily belong to a merchant from a third nation, while passengers could potentially be subjects of all contracting powers. The cosmopolitan nature of international transportation initiatives could result in cases where courts could not be appointed due to the lack of impartial consuls.78 Moreover, as the Portuguese diplomat stressed, the ratification of the International Sanitary Convention and Regulations required states to incorporate international law into their national legal corpus, making it de facto national law. For this reason, legal infractions transgressed national laws. He concluded that “the right to judge infraction of laws [was] a liberty that should be allowed to each government. This was a guarantee of order and national independency.”79 Silveira expected the conference to “respect the liberty of nations.”80 Only Spain and Britain supported the idea of developing a network of international sanitary courts. For Segóvia, it was clear that an alternative to the present system was required, ideally one that would end the “countless complaints and endless diplomatic correspondence” exchanged when solving sanitary infractions and disputes. An alternative, moreover, that would end the present dissatisfaction with verdicts that made “one of the parties . . . always feel injured.”81 The alternative he desired was a new network of international sanitary courts. Segóvia understood that delegates feared the empowerment of foreigners to “judge infractions committed by compatriots or state officials.” This fear and prejudice dated back to ancient Roman civilization, he noted. However, times had changed. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid.

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Europe was now a modern and civilized continent where the degree of “distrust and antipathy against foreigners was inversely [proportional]  to the civilization of the people.” Whatever was “unfair to a Frenchman, to a Spaniard, or to a Russian, would not be honest or fair to an Englishman, a Portuguese, or an Italian.” Consuls were modern men who had “studied the laws and customs of the country” of residence; they learned the language, established families, and worked toward the prosperity of not only the countries they represented but also the communities where they lived. Foreign consuls were a singular class of humanity, capable of judging sanitary offences without prejudice.82 Despite Segóvia’s confidence in the good nature and impartiality of consuls, the attempt to create international sanitary courts failed. Out of 24 delegates, 19 voted against institutions they saw as a challenge to the autonomy, control, and legitimacy of national legal systems. In a private letter sent to the English Foreign Office, its delegates concluded that “the advantages of an Arbitration Tribunal, composed of consuls, was admitted by almost all the members, but the dread of foreign influence, and the desire to keep secret their motives for imposing quarantine measures, caused a most strenuous opposition from the delegates of all the petty states.” 83 Even French delegates failed to support their own proposal: “Mr David,” the English delegates wrote, “joined the opponents and stated his belief that France would not admit of any foreigner jurisdiction within Her Territory.” 84 It was clear that European countries were powerful enough to avoid relinquishing autonomy over their legal apparatus. While discussing the harmonization of sanitary institutions and the creation of international courts, delegates considered multiple interventionist scenarios. Aiming to create a common institutional framework, they hoped to institute an efficient and accountable way of controlling epidemic diseases. During the process, delegates struggled to articulate the emergence of an international order with the preservation of the autonomy, legitimacy and control of the states they represented. For these reasons, they found it impossible to relinquish their states’ sovereignty and refused to adopt any measure that would compromise such an important value. Delegates agreed to standardize the structure of European sanitary authorities, but would not allow either the election of foreign consuls to national institutions or the subjugation of their states to the judicial control of international courts. Epidemic crises opened several opportunities for the creation of transnational governance mechanisms, but concerns about the sanitary and judicial independence of European states limited the ambitious plan defended by some delegates. In many ways, as we have seen, epidemic fear and panic were two leitmotifs that facilitated the organization of the conference. 82. Ibid. 83. Perrier and Sutherland to Palmerston, December 15, 1851, Great Britain, Foreign Office, Series 97 FO97/212, Public Records Office, Kew, London. 84. Ibid.

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However, fear and panic over issues of jurisdictions and trust also compromised the development and implementation of effective international governance for infectious disease.

“Oriental” Opportunities The attitude of European delegates toward interventionism was profoundly inconsistent: while delegates protested against interventionist reforms in Europe, they wanted to make substantive interventions in the Ottoman sanitary services. When organizing the conference, France invited participating countries to consider whether Oriental arrivals should be granted free pratique in European ports.85 The French government recognized that “Egypt and Turkey now had sanitary institutions that allowed nations to relax [quarantine practices].”86 In fact, French ports already granted free pratique to these arrivals on the condition that vessels had sailed for longer than eight days, carried a valid bill of health, and kept a permanent onboard physician. It was thus necessary to decide whether this policy could be extended beyond French ports and uniformly practiced in Europe.87 The French relaxation of quarantine resulted from two major changes: first, the Ottoman Empire had instituted sanitary authorities within its territory, and, second, France had implemented a network of physicians in Turkey trusted to survey and report on the Orient’s health conditions. The institution of the Constantinople Superior Board of Health in 1838 allowed Turkey to develop mechanisms for the central government of epidemic diseases. The Constantinople Board aimed to survey public health conditions, prevent epidemic outbreaks, and eradicate epidemic diseases that were already present in the country.88 Under the symbolic presidency of a Sublime Porte minister, the board included an equal number of Ottoman officials and foreign delegates from Austria, Belgium, Britain, France, Greece, Prussia, Russia, Sardinia, and Tuscany. Regardless of nationality, all members enjoyed deliberative powers. The board controlled 63 local boards of health, which “surveyed public health conditions . . . executed or made executable sanitary regulations, and any other decision communicated [by the Constantinople Board].”89 85. For a genealogy of “Orientalism,” see Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978). Delegates to the 1851 conference generally used the “Orient” synonymously with the Ottoman Empire, in particular when referring to Turkey and Egypt. The term Levant was used in the same fashion. 86. AHD, LEP, Maço 6, Baroche to Paiva, Lisbon, April 16, 1851. 87. Ibid. 88. The following description of the Oriental sanitary organization is based on the conclusions drawn by the Conference’s Commission on the Organization of the Sanitary Service in the Levant. Composed of diplomatic envoys from Sardinia, Turkey, and Greece, and Russian, English, Sicilian, and Portuguese physicians, this commission made use of a large variety of documents which included Ottoman legislation and medical reports commissioned by several European powers. 89. Procés-verbaux, séance 29.

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The Ottoman sanitary reforms were not isolated; they resulted from extensive restructuring policies that had been pursued by Sultan Mahmud II since 1826.90 The need for reform derived from widely recognized military and economic weaknesses that resulted in numerous military fiascos, an absence of reliable infrastructure within the Ottoman territory and a general lack of competitive industries.91 In 1829, the sultan created a bureaucratic apparatus to modernize the state. Through the Tanzimat reforms, deliberative and executive powers associated with the sultan were progressively transferred into the hands of state bureaucrats.92 At the same time, the Ottoman financial system was reorganized, slavery abolished, and a legal code for commerce and trade instituted. The new ruling elite, which had close European contacts, saw the establishment of Western institutions as the only viable strategy for avoiding the decline of the Empire.93 Although an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt had grown progressively autonomous from Constantinople during the first half of the nineteenth century. Under the rule of Muhammad Ali, Viceroy of Egypt, the country went through radical reforms. Muhammad Ali restructured the armed forces, reorganized state administration around a centralized bureaucratic structure, and expanded Egyptian territory through the annexation of sections of northern Sudan, the western coast of Arabia, Syria, and southwestern Anatolia.94 By doing so, he secured autonomy from the Ottoman Empire while establishing close commercial and diplomatic contacts with European powers. On the sanitary front, in 1831 the Egyptian government created the Alexandria Board of Health. This body was exclusively composed of foreign consuls who, on the eve of its constitution, declared that “quarantine service [and all future sanitary establishments] should be controlled, directed and manned by Europeans, since this was the only way to achieve the success desired.”95 The European-dominated board soon became a venue of intrigue where personal and national agendas were protected. Even more problematically, the board instituted a discriminatory policy that often granted free pratique to European vessels while imposing hefty quarantines on Ottoman ships sailing under the exact same circumstances. In large measure, the discriminatory policies spelled the end of the Board of Health, and, in early 1840, the 90. On Ottoman reforms, see Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 [1961]), 74–128. 91. Murat Gül, The Emergence of Modern Istanbul: Transformation and Modernisation of a City (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009). 92. Youssef Choueiri, A Companion to the History of the Middle East (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 239. 93. Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 26. 94. William L. Cleveland and Martin P. Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East, 4th ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2009), 66. 95. LaVerne Kuhnke, “Resistance and Response to Modernization: Preventive Medicine and Social Control in Egypt, 1825–1850” (unpublished PhD thesis, The University of Chicago, 1971).

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Board was nationalized.96 Eventually, following considerable diplomatic negotiation in Cairo and Constantinople, foreign consuls regained access to the board but this time with solely consultative rights.97 In addition to sanitary institutions engineered by the Ottoman governments, France also developed its surveillance capacities within the Empire. In 1847, a network of French physicians was established. The territory was divided into six zones: Constantinople, Smyrna (Izmir), Beirut, Alexandria, Cairo, and Damascus. French physicians in the Levant were mandated to “meticulously report on the health conditions of the region; to issue, for the convenience of French consuls, [medical]  certificates [that allowed] dispatching bills of health; to observe the health conditions of passengers, crews, and vessels departing to France; and to study, in general, the country regarding its climate, [and] diseases.”98 While France was establishing its network of sanitary physicians, Austria also developed medical institutions in the Ottoman Empire.99 Through these interventions, both countries—like those with seats on the Constantinople Superior Board of Health—were attempting to transfer Europe’s first line of defense against plague to the Orient so that quarantines at their homeports could be safely reduced.100 With the help of the Austrian government, the Ottomans established a Western-style medical school in the late 1830s, and Metternich’s personal physician was entrusted to procure Austrian teachers (and directors) for the new Constantinople school. The increasing presence of Austrian physicians as medical professors and the development of close ties between Austrian doctors and the sultan led to public health initiatives marked by a distinctive Austrian flavor.101 The efforts developed by France and Austria to improve Ottoman health conditions and to impose epidemic surveillance mechanisms were part of larger national epidemic control projects. Thus, years before the conference convened, European powers already enjoyed a considerable sanitary influence both in Turkey and in Egypt. Presided over by the Sardinian consul, Magnetto, and including the Turkish medical delegate among its members, the Conference Commission for the Organization of Levant’s Sanitary Service presented its report on November 11, 1851.102 Within 96. 97. 98. 99.

Ibid., 162–63. Ibid., 164. Procés-verbaux, séance 29. The Ottoman government also welcomed French assistance in military and educational fields; see M. Raccagni, “The French Economic Interests in The Ottoman Empire,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 11, no. 3 (1980): 339–76. 100. Coons, “Steamships and Quarantines at Trieste, 1837–1848.” 101. Marcel Chahrour, “‘A Civilizing Mission’? Austrian Medicine and the Reform of Medical Structures in the Ottoman Empire, 1838–1850,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, vol. 38, no. 4 (2007): 687–705. 102. In addition to Magnetto, the commission was composed of six other delegates: Dr. Bartoletti of Turkey, Dr. Carbonaro of the Two Sicilies, Dr. Grande of Portugal, Dr. Rosenberger of Russia, Dr. Sutherland of Britain, and the Greek consul Vitalis.

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a total of 35 pages plus two attachments, the commissioners considered the existing sanitary institutions and suggested a set of measures that, if practiced, could finally allow permanent free pratique between Ottoman and European ports. The commission appraised the sanitary reforms conducted by the Ottoman Empire; the collaboration between Turkish officials and European consuls in the Constantinople Superior Board of Health had successfully managed to make “the plague scourge disappear throughout the extent of the Empire.”103 In Egypt, despite the lack of European control, plague had also been eradicated due to the efficient practice of quarantine. “The capacity of Egypt’s sanitary service men, their zeal and courageous perseverance”—the commission concluded—“added guarantees that Europe [needed] to relax its rigorous [quarantines] against the country.”104 However, the commissioners believed that further conditions were required to eliminate epidemic risk entirely and to allow the introduction of permanent free pratique for vessels arriving from Ottoman to European ports. The commission required the sultan to perpetuate the European presence in the Superior Health Council of Constantinople through a legislative initiative. It was important to ensure that the deliberative power that European consuls enjoyed was maintained and not jeopardized by possible nationalization policies such as those in Egypt.105 Additional physicians were expected to be appointed by the government in order to staff newly instituted local sanitary boards in the vast Turkish territory. The government was also invited to complete the construction of four quarantine stations and start work on two others. In addition, the commission proposed the creation of new sanitary regulations that included a penal code and a special tribunal to deal with sanitary infractions.106 Finally, they desired to promote the Constantinople Superior Board of Health as the de facto leading sanitary institution of the entire Ottoman Empire, with powers to oversee Egyptian sanitary affairs.107 This did not mean the extinction of the Alexandria Board of Health. On the contrary, this institution was to be reinvented: foreign consuls were to regain the original deliberative powers that they enjoyed before the Egyptian sanitary reforms, while local members of the board were required to demonstrate that they held medical certificates from European universities before their membership was accepted.108 Controlling sanitary institutions and practices in the Ottoman Empire was an attempt to introduce trust and predictability into the transnational system of epidemic surveillance and control. Such measures demon103. Procés-verbaux, séance 29. 104. Ibid. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid. The new regulations were inspired by the work of the British delegate Dr. Sutherland. The full list of hygienic measures to be instituted in the Orient, authored by Sutherland, was annexed to the commission’s report. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid.

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strated to signatory states and their populations that their biosafety was secured: an important message to avoid potential fears and panics. With regards to the network of doctors that France had instituted to survey the epidemic status of the Ottoman Empire, the commission supported its expansion. These doctors had contributed toward the production of more accurate bills of health while also improving the local health conditions of territories under their jurisdiction. The French doctors provided “incontestable services not only to their countries of residence but to all Europe,” the commission noted.109 In total, the commission hoped to create 26 medical stations in Egypt, Syria, and the remaining Ottoman Empire. These European doctors were to remain autonomous from any Ottoman intervention, being accountable only to their appointing governments. During the debate on the commission’s report, the listed measures found support from a majority of the delegates. In the process, the Turkish envoys never expressed apprehension regarding the conference’s interventionist deliberations. Dr. Bartoletti had been directly involved with the works of the commission on the Organization of Levant’s Sanitary Service, and often acknowledged that his government agreed with the proposed measures. However, Bartoletti stressed that international decisions on Ottoman sanitary affairs were geographically restricted to its territories by the sea. His government was not ready to relinquish its freedom and autonomy in governing the vast Ottoman overland territory and borders.110 Delegates accepted the commission’s proposals, including this caveat, and agreed that following institutionalization, free pratique could be established in the Mediterranean region in the near future.

Conclusion The climate of panic experienced in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century as a result of cholera epidemics created unique opportunities for the development of transnational schemes of public health. As delegates to the 1851 International Sanitary Conference, doctors and diplomats acting as the official envoys of 12 states created new ways to conduct diplomatic affairs and draft international law. The representatives also envisioned new bureaucratic and judicial mechanisms to prevent the spread of epidemic diseases while allowing the flow of vessels, passengers, and cargo. The solutions proposed by the delegates to the conference derived from particular conditions caused by specific epidemic outbreaks and the panics that these engendered, which impacted upon trade and raised broader security issues. The epidemic management program adopted by the 1851 International Sanitary Conference carried different financial and sovereignty costs for each participating state. From a European perspective, changes were regarded as possible so long as 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid., séance 44.

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they did not compromise strongly held notions of state sovereignty and independence. However, this power was unbalanced, since the Ottoman Empire would not be able to maintain control over its own sanitary affairs. In terms of imperial performance, the financial burden of the biosurveillance suggested by delegates was also unevenly shared. For Europe, the sole financial cost of the program was the salary of the doctors posted to the Orient. In contrast, Ottomans were expected to finance the construction of new sanitary institutions and to maintain existing ones. Additionally, while European states would gain access to legitimate mechanisms that allowed them to intervene in Ottoman affairs, neither Egypt nor Turkey were able to secure similar privileges in Europe. The Ottomans were required to forgo portions of their autonomy, legitimacy, and control over sanitary matters within their territories, without reciprocity. Such proposed policies were thus fundamentally asymmetric: while international interventions in the Ottoman Empire were readily justified by European delegates, similar interventions were deemed wholly unacceptable in Europe. Underlying this skewed approach were Orientalist assumptions that the Ottomans were incapable of developing the necessary institutions for improving and monitoring their own territorial and sanitary affairs. Instituting the ambitious program of international public health governance designed by the conference would bring significant advantages. With little investment, Europeans would be able to erect an epidemic defensive line in the Orient in order to protect Europe from epidemic diseases, simultaneously allowing the free circulation of cargo. Ottomans would also reap benefits from these new arrangements. Like its European counterparts, the Ottoman merchant navy would profit from the economic advantages of quicker sailing times within the Mediterranean. In addition to the swifter transportation of passengers and goods, the eradication of quarantine would improve the turnaround time for vessels embarking on new trips and, potentially, increase profits associated with the volume of transported cargo and passengers. Moreover, the eventual end of quarantine would decrease transaction costs through the effective abolishment of expensive quarantine fees. The derived economic gains would make the Mediterranean trade route even more competitive when compared to the time-consuming Atlantic route between India and Europe. These advantages were likely to increase the volume of taxable trade passing through Ottoman territories, directly contributing to the fiscal revenue of Turkey and Egypt. From a sanitary perspective, the Ottomans would also profit, at no cost to themselves, from epidemic monitoring networks composed of highly trained physicians. The global circulation of knowledge that these professionals enabled was likely to improve local health conditions or, at least, alert authorities to approaching epidemic diseases in an efficient manner. Just as importantly, through their delegates, the Ottomans could oversee any international interventions in their territories, thereby regulating foreign activities in Turkey and Egypt. By conceding foreign access and

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control to national sanitary institutions, Constantinople conceivably avoided future territorial incursions justified by epidemic episodes. This was a valid fear following the 1820 invasion of Spain by France, which was justified on the grounds that Madrid was incapable of controlling yellow fever outbreaks, which posed potential epidemic risks to the French population.111 Through complex negotiations, delegates to the 1851 International Sanitary Conference created shared international standards and practices in order to control transnational epidemics. Acknowledging the innovative character of the conference and the hard work of the delegates, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, the President of the French Republic, honored diplomatic and medical envoys with the Légion d’honneur. The future international sanitary order was detailed in two documents, which were to be submitted for the ratification of participating governments. To the disappointment of several delegates, the majority of states refused to ratify the draft Sanitary Convention and the draft International Sanitary Regulations. When delegates left Paris, it was presumed that the ratification of the Draft Sanitary Convention and Regulation would proceed without obstacle. However, once delegates returned home, the work developed in Paris was closely scrutinized by the governments they represented. Optimism gave way to apprehension and discontentment. Ultimately, only France and Sardinia ratified the two documents. Nevertheless, the 1851 conference represented a crucial moment in the long history of internationalizing public health. The inability to follow through with these initial plans resulted in recurring International Sanitary Conferences over the next 80 years.112 The long but anticlimactic 1851 conference anticipated many of the issues connected with the use of scientific expertise to regulate an increasingly interconnected, imperial world. The conference exposed tensions between competing national interests and a growing impetus for international collaboration in order to effectively manage epidemics. Fears and panics were prevalent during the process of organizing the conference, as well as during the event itself. Aligned with certain agendas, these apprehensions had the potential to transmute into concrete sanitary regulations that would mitigate institutional and public anxieties. However, counter-concerns over the integrity of national jurisdictions and residual suspicions about the effectiveness and motivation for international interventions ultimately blocked the process of creating a unified European sanitary program.

111. Sussman, “From Yellow Fever to Cholera.” 112. In total, 14 conferences took place between 1851 and 1938. These events were mostly hosted in European cities with the exception of the 1866 and the 1881 conferences which were respectively convened in Constantinople and Washington DC. As a result of the 1903 conference, the first permanent international institution for public health governance was instituted. The Office International d’Hygiène Publique was eventually dissolved with the creation of the World Health Organization in 1948.

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While other chapters in this volume deal with the social, cultural, and political dimensions of epidemic panics, here the focus has been on drawn-out diplomatic maneuverings and transborder institution-building. These mid-nineteenth-century processes may appear obscure and remote from the kinds of on-the-ground anxieties, fears, and panics dealt with by other contributors. And yet, the history of this epidemic diplomacy provides another important vantage on panic’s catalyzing role in making the modern world. It also furnishes a critical context for reflecting on contemporary regimes of global health, as novel panics, unleashed by the dissolution of postcolonial pacts in the Middle East and elsewhere, test the resilience of inherited diplomatic mechanisms and their capacity to meet the cross-border threats of the present.

4 Health Panics, Migration, and Ecological Exchange in the Aftermath of the 1857 Uprising: India, New Zealand, and Australia James Beattie The First War of Indian Independence in 1857—the “Mutiny” or “Uprising” as Anglos quickly coined it—gave the British a “shock which . . . can scarcely be understood in your part of the world,” as one panicked officer wrote to a newspaper in New Zealand.1 As a result, he continued: “[n]umbers here are turning their eyes wildly about looking for a land in which they can live in peace, without a chance of their wives and children being cut into ribbons.” The officer, expressing confidence in his ability to “direct a real emigration from India” to the New Zealand province of Canterbury, observed: “Whenever I get an opportunity I always introduce New Zealand as the subject of conversation. People are invariably interested and anxious for information.”2 The events of 1857 precipitated panic among the British in relation to the “murderous” propensity of the indigenous population. Accounts from the time emphasized its contagious quality, its uncontrollable spread throughout the subcontinent.3 The Uprising also sparked panic about the best means of governing a colony whose sickly climate, according to many British commentators, had not only severely limited their ability to suppress rebellion, but had also induced disaffected Indians to take up arms in the first place. Panic heightened already existing British anxieties about India’s climate and people. That tropical climates and diseases could dull the fighting mettle of British soldiers and had the capacity to render imperial administrators jabbering wrecks—victims of “brain fog” or, worse still, “Punjab head,” as some would later describe such afflictions—were well known before the events of 1857.4 What 1. I use the term “Uprising” in this chapter, conscious of the different appellations which have been given to the events of 1857, and in the knowledge of their changing meanings and contested nature. 2. “Pahari” to Editor, Murree, August 8, 1858 and August 12, 1858, reproduced in Lyttelton Times, December 22, 1858, 4. 3. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780– 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); John William Kaye and George Bruce Malleson, History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857–8, 6 vols. (London: W. H. Allen, 1889–1892). 4. David Arnold, “Introduction: Tropical Medicine before Manson,” in Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine 1500–1900, ed. David Arnold (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 1–19; David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in NineteenthCentury India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). The phrase Punjab head comes from Bosworth Smith quoted in Frederick P. Gibbon, The Lawrences of the Punjab (London: J. M. Dent & Co.;

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the Uprising did was to magnify growing anxieties about the feasibility of long-term British residence in India. Panicked individuals like the officer quoted above, as well as officials, urgently recommended health migration to other parts of the British Empire as well as to high-altitude areas in India itself. In particular, Australia and New Zealand were posited as possible solutions to India’s “problematic” climate. As several authors have shown, the panic which accompanied the 1857 Uprising marked something of a watershed in British attitudes toward India by heightening anxieties about the perceived pathological nature of both its climate and people.5 My intention in this chapter is to demonstrate the spatial and environmental dimensions of health panics associated with the Uprising. In other words, I wish to highlight some of the material and geographical impacts of the “colonial information panics” associated with this signal event in the British Raj.6 These specifically relate to health migration and ecological exchange among India, Australia, and New Zealand. Examination of Australasian-Indian exchanges resulting from India’s post-Uprising health panics provides new understanding of how definitions of the tropical and temperate characteristics of India and Australasia sharpened in the second half of the nineteenth century as a consequence of the events of 1857 (Figure 4.1). The chapter shows how the Uprising helped to define the “problem” of India’s climate more clearly to the British, but also how it helped provide them with a solution. The “problem” of India’s pathogenic climate forced the British to appreciate more fully the perceived health benefits and strategic importance of certain places in India (hill stations) and Australasia alike. In the process, it also helped to settle debate about the relative suitability of India and Australasia for white colonization.7 Furthermore, such concerns underlined the spatial extent of the health panic, demonstrating how its impacts were New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1908), 171; Dane Kennedy, “Diagnosing the Colonial Dilemma: Tropical Neurathenia and the Alienated Briton,” in Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World, ed. Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006), 157–81. 5. Note, for example, David Arnold, The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005); Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999); Philip D. Curtain, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 6. Kim A. Wagner, “‘Treading Upon Fires’: The ‘Mutiny’-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India,” Past and Present, vol. 218, no. 1 (2013): 159–97 (160); Bayly, Empire and Information. 7. Although lessening, fears lingered into the twentieth century over the perceived effects on whites of the tropical and subtropical climates of northern Australasia. With tropical climates held to restrict white labor, the perceived climatic similarities between tropical northern Australia and tropical India—and elsewhere—led to the introduction of Indian and Chinese laborers into this region. By the late nineteenth century, anxieties over the threat posed by Asia’s teeming masses, provoked especially by the rapid rise of Japan, led to renewed calls to secure this region for white settlement. Accordingly, evidence of the old age and health attained by many whites in northern Australia, along with the growth of tropical medicine, renewed confidence in the possibility of white settlement in the north; see Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 72–126.

Figure 4.1 Location map of places mentioned in the text.

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felt well beyond the subcontinent through Australasian schemes to encourage migration from India and through transcolonial exchanges of plants and animals.

Climate and Migration Even before the Uprising, the British were becoming increasingly pessimistic of ever being able to successfully acclimatize to India. This was part and parcel of a generalized shift in European attitudes toward the subcontinent and its peoples that became evident as Britain’s informal trading empire of the eighteenth century gave way to one of formal territorial control. Territorial conquests in the nineteenth century brought imperial troops into contact with new diseases, the effects of which heightened fears about the impact of tropical climates on health. Military aggression supported perceptions of Indians as foes, attitudes reinforced through the influence on officers and men of the burgeoning Evangelical Movement. The Evangelical Movement stressed the innate superiority of Christianity over Indian religions, and, by default, of anything British over anything Indian. Scientific ideas reflected these broader political and religious attitudes. As a consequence, many now regarded race as a fixed biological essence, incapable of change or adaptation to new circumstances. According to this view, climate weakened the constitutions of all Europeans, especially those of children and women. Later in the nineteenth century, fewer marriages between European men and Indian women—due to the migration of single white women to the subcontinent—further strained racial tensions.8 Geopolitical, religious, and demographic factors meant nineteenth-century Britons regarded the “epidemiological costs of territorial expansion” as “an intrinsic part of colonial discourse, whether on moral, economical or medical grounds.”9 Nor were anxieties only limited to Europeans. For example, in the 1820s, a Maori chief from New Zealand attempted to dissuade another, Titore, from visiting Bengal on the grounds that “the Indian climate . . . [w]as very unhealthy; [being] . . . intolerably warm, and so much infested with mosquitoes as to prevent sleep.”10 In the late nineteenth century, Bengali Hindus, likewise, came to fear malaria’s degenerating effects, against which Muslim families were seemingly immune.11 Taken together, the bitter and bloody fighting of 1857 amplified and generalized these “pre-existing 8. The chapter draws from several sources, including Arnold, Warm Climates and Western Medicine; Arnold, Tropics and the Travelling Gaze; and Harrison, Climates and Constitutions. 9. Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 22. 10. Peter Dillon, Narrative and Successful Result of a Voyage in the South Seas, 2 vols. (London: Hurst, Chance and Co., 1829), I, 196. 11. Arnold, “‘An Ancient Race Outworn’: Malaria and Race in Colonial India, 1860–1930,” in Race, Science and Medicine, 1700–1900, ed. Ernst Waltraud and Bernard Harris (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 123–43.

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anxieties” about Indians and Indian environments; together they produced a generalized panic about the place of Britons in India. As Kim Wagner has recently argued in an article examining the impact of 1857 on later British anxieties: “Panics and anxieties, as conceptual frameworks, are not incompatible but stand in the same relation as event and structure; information panics were transient but recurring episodes in the long-term pattern of systemic anxieties within the colonial sphere.”12 In this sense, then, the panic induced by the Uprising was a significant event which occasioned a wider structural shift in British attitudes toward Indians, Indian environments, and especially Indian climates. In social and political terms, it magnified racial divisions, discouraged racial mixing, and significantly increased British military and official presence on the subcontinent. Spatially, it encouraged segregation and the establishment of geographical boundaries drawn along the lines of race.13 Yet, it also heightened British anxieties about how best to maintain racial purity, their morals, and, ultimately, territorial control over such varied and homogenous terrain and peoples. As I have argued elsewhere in relation to imperial development, landscape aesthetics, and health policies, anxiety was a colonial condition caused in some senses by the British realization that people and environments did not always behave in ways expected of them.14 For Ranajit Guha, this story of anxiety is at the heart of imperialism and forms a necessary corrective to its “triumphalist and progressivist moments.”15 Anxiety about the climate of India infuses British accounts of the Uprising. These depict India’s climate as being almost as formidable a foe as the Indian militias the British were fighting against. Disease undoubtedly reduced the effectiveness of British troops.16 For example, during the campaign, The Calcutta Englishmen of May 3, 1857, reported how the effects of India’s sickly “climate has begun to tell upon the soldier, and sickness prevails to a large extent” in Bengal.17 Notwithstanding the very real demographic impacts of disease, the deployment of such an argument played an important political—and racial—role. Images of Britons battling India’s climate effectively served to belittle the skills, bravery, and tactical acumen of the “rebels.” For example, in parliament in 1857, Lord Stanley praised Sir Hugh Rose’s heroic struggle “against the severity of a terrible climate,” a climate he faced “again and again, disabled but never giving up; encountering fatigue and suffering, and always showing 12. Wagner, “‘Mutiny’-motif,” 161. 13. See Arnold, Colonizing the Body; Nandini Bhattacharya, Contagion and Enclaves: Tropical Medicine in Colonial India (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012). 14. Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety. 15. Ranajit Guha, “Not at Home in Empire,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 3 (1997): 482–93 (483). 16. Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Curtin, Death by Migration. 17. Cited in Otago Witness, July 17, 1858, 6.

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himself ready to place himself at the head of his troops.”18 No less a figure than Queen Victoria commended the “[g]allantry of the Troops employed against the Mutineers, their Courage in Action, their Endurance under Privation, Fatigue, and the Effects of Climate.”19 Blaming the climate, rather than the qualities of the Indians who rose up against them, made it easier for the British to rationalize how they could have lost control over a territory to a people who many Britons regarded as inferior intellectually and physically. If the Uprising drove home the problem of India’s climate to the British, then its aftermath heightened anxieties about the lingering dangers of its climate. Following the formal transfer of control of India to the British crown in 1858, the House of Commons sought to secure its hold over the subcontinent by increasing British troop numbers relative to Indian soldiers and by seeking to reduce death and disability among troops. Yet, as contemporaries pointed out, this ambitious plan faced a distinctive challenge in the form of India’s climate. The scheme to employ experienced administrators to rule India, noted the Saturday Review in the early 1860s, “meets a formidable and (and it may even be) a fatal impediment in the dangers of the climate.” Proof, it continued, of the perilous venture they [British administrators] make in going to India have been pouring in. Lord Dalhousie returned only to die. Lord Canning, though he has not suffered himself, has seen the fatal blow struck close to his side. Mr. Wilson died. Mr. Laing’s health failed him. And it is notorious that, when the two, principal legal appointments at Calcutta recently became vacant, the India Office was forced to appoint gentlemen (happily able men) who were already on the spot and acclimatised, from the sheer impossibility of obtaining in England persons at once equal to the position of and willing or able to face the climate.20

Intriguingly, the writer seems to have accepted the possibility of European acclimatization, but pointed out that the immediate need for so many new administrators to come directly from Britain to India made such a process impractical. And, what of the health of British troops? Finding suitable sanatoria for British troops stationed in India became an urgent matter of imperial geopolitics. As a commentator observed in a colonial New Zealand newspaper in 1858, the identification of appropriate sanatoria was “a most, important one, both as it affects the efficiency of the Indian army, and as it may be conducive to the peace and prosperity of the colony in which such Sanatorium [sic] shall be established.”21 The panic generated by the Uprising triggered a flurry of official 18. Lyttelton Times, July 16, 1859, 3. 19. Hansard, December 3, 1857. 20. Cited in Otago Daily Times, April 24, 1862, 5. 21. Article from Auckland Weekly Register, August 16, 1858, n.p., reproduced in the Nelson-based newspaper, Colonist, October 5, 1858, 3. Under New Zealand’s provincial system (1852–76), provinces took responsibility for the promotion of colonization. As a result, provinces competed not only with

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proposals to the British Raj from various Australasian colonies seeking to get Indian authorities to dispatch British troops to their colonies. In recommending medical migration for health, Australasian colonial writers appealed to a wide body of work relating to medical geography and medical topography that recognized the intimate connections between environment and health. Medical doctors and the lay public alike acknowledged the health benefits of sea voyages and of geographical relocation to climates and environments free from sudden changes of temperature—ideally ones resembling as closely as possible the climate of the migrants’ birthplace.22 Drawing from this literature, colonial writers stressed various aspects of their settlement’s climatic advantages, all of which accorded with popular medical opinion. Personal observation and detailed statistics pointing to the healthiness of Europeans living there backed up such claims, especially information about Europeans from India whose health had benefitted from residence in Australasia.23 In this sense, the health panic occasioned by the Uprising represented an opportunity for colonies and provinces, towns and cities—even different suburbs—to attract settlers, but it also became a source of sometimes bitter tensions within and among different polities. After all, the stakes were high: the very success of settler colonies hinged on their ability to attract significant numbers of migrants. Featuring prominently in the hundreds if not thousands of migrant handbooks produced—not to mention the millions of words written in magazines, journals, and newspapers— was the subject of migration and climate, including the benefits to Europeans from India.24 Doctors cautioned against the “immediate return to a cold climate” such as Britain’s, since this was “likely to be injurious to persons who have resided in India and suffered from disease produced by the effects of the climate.”25 Health matters aside, there were other compelling reasons to avoid returning to Britain. As a retired Indian military officer explained, when an Anglo-Indian commonly retires to Britain, he overseas colonies but with each other for migrants. This effectively pitted province against province, colony against colony. 22. J. M. Powell, “Medical Promotion and the Consumptive Immigrant to Australia,” Geographical Review, vol. 63, no. 4 (1973): 449–76; Linda Bryder, “‘A Health Resort for Consumptives’: Tuberculosis and Immigration to New Zealand, 1880–1914,” Medical History, vol. 40, no. 4 (1996): 459–64; James Beattie, “Colonial Geographies of Settlement: Vegetation, Towns, Disease and Well-Being in Aotearoa/ New Zealand, 1830s–1930s,” Environment and History, vol. 14, no. 4 (2008): 583–610. 23. Conevery Bolton Valencius, “Histories of Medical Geography,” in Medical Geography in Historical Perspective, ed. Nicholaas A. Rupke (London: Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2000), 3–28. 24. See James Beattie, Emily O’Gorman, and Matthew Henry, eds., Climate, Science, and Colonization: Histories from Australia and New Zealand (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 25. Military Sanatarium [sic]. Report of the Board of Commissioners, September 7, 1858 (Tasmania: no publisher, 1858), in Tasmania: Miscellaneous 1857–1897, V354.946008 T 741, National War Memorial Museum of Australia, Canberra, 5.

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James Beattie arrives in the country he calls home, and finds it a strange land; his friends are dead, dispersed, or receive him coldly . . . he sits in a draught, and gets a cold in this head: he is caught in a shower, and gets rheumatism in his shoulder: and he concludes the climate of England has changed.26

Moreover, in Britain, the returning East India Company (EIC) man “is a mere nobody.” “What influence [has he] on the affairs of even a village?”27 Another newspaper wrote how: “The sickly Nabob, the childless wife, and the attenuated object of consumption will soon be eager to reach” New Zealand to experience its salubrious climate, where, “they may be restored to the blessings of health and enjoyment.”28 By heightening anxieties about residence in India at a time when the British were committed to sending more troops and officials than ever before, the Uprising seems to have reenergized schemes designed at encouraging the Indian government to direct migration to various Australasian colonies. The Australian colony of Tasmania fired one of the first salvoes in what would become an ongoing Australasian battle over the diseased minds and bodies of Europeans from India. In July 1858, Sir Henry Young established a Board of Commissioners to consider “the establishment in Tasmania of a Military Medical Sanatarium [sic], and Post for Convalescents.”29 The committee, comprising military officers—some like Lieutenant-Colonel Hungerford (Bengal Artillery) with experience in India—in addition to a politician and two medical doctors, waxed lyrical of the benefits of offering the disabled [British] Soldier [from India] the advantages of the Climate of Tasmania; as, giving him four months in this Colony for the recovery of his health, he could be returned to Calcutta or Bombay in six months after quitting either of those Ports, in all probability quite efficient for duty.30

The committee favored Hobart Town as the site of the sanatorium. This site, the report noted, made sensible use of existing buildings while maximizing the capacity of existing shipping networks for rapidly moving troops. The regular mail steamers plying their way between Australia and India meant troops could be dispatched to Calcutta or Bombay in a matter of only three weeks, the committee argued, quicker in fact than could be conveyed from the hill stations of India. Moreover, the mail vessels, returning from Suez nearly empty, would provide “good accommodation for the sick men in those vessels,” while offering troops the additional benefits of a sea voyage considerably shorter than of that to Britain.31 26. The Canterbury Colony: Its Site and Prospects, Reprinted from Saunders’ Monthly Magazine 1852 (Dunedin: Hocken Library, 1976), 4. 27. Ibid. 28. Crayon, April 11, 1842, Auckland, reproduced in New Zealand Journal, November 12, 1842, 279. 29. The Hobart Town Daily Mercury, August 12, 1858, 5. 30. Military Sanatarium, 3. 31. The Hobart Town Daily Mercury, August 12, 1858, 5.

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The official report reinforced its claims to authority by publishing detailed descriptions of the medical geography of the island: including its vegetation, geology, and rainfall, its seasonal climatic variations and disease occurrences, and its morbidity and mortality rates.32 The report highlighted how Tasmania’s low death rate among troops—of nearly eight per 1,000—compared favorably to both Britain’s (33 per 1,000) and India’s (nearly 50 per 1,000). This was attributed to an “absence of temperature extremes on the island”33 and the island’s freedom “from marsh miasma” and intermittent and remittent fevers.34 Personal observation reinforced the statistical evidence. For example, the local member of the Legislative Council, Dr. E. S. P. Bedford, confidently declared that Tasmania’s climate had produced “good effects” among the “persons coming on sick leave to this Colony from India” whom he had examined. Tasmania’s mild climate, its cool nights; its equal fall of rain during the year; its freedom from malaria; its bright and clear atmosphere; its scenery, and the general English aspect of its Towns, buildings, and cultivations, all have great influence upon persons seeking health after a residence in a warm climate.35

Only a month later, colonial boosters in Auckland, New Zealand, responded to Tasmania’s proposal by agreeing on the necessity of overseas sanatoria. “Now that it has become imperative to maintain a large European army in India,” the Auckland Weekly Register stated in August 1858, “it has also become incumbent to” find a suitable sanatorium to which to send debilitated troops.36 But the newspaper diverged from the Tasmanian committee’s recommendation of just where such a sanatorium was needed. “Without any desire to undervalue the salubrity of the climate of Tasmania,” the Auckland Weekly News disingenuously declared, “we cannot close our eyes to the many official reports that have been issued . . . with respect to the unhealthiness of Hobart Town, or to frequent fevers and epidemics with which the chief towns of the colony have been visited.” Tasmania’s “great and sudden alternations from extreme heat to extreme cold, and that, too, often within the twenty-four hours, is much too trying for invalids worn down by tropical disease.” Thankfully, Auckland experienced “no such sudden extremes,” and possessed none “of the fever heats of Australia.” Nor is it subjected “to the biting; hoar frosts, (with the accompanying fogs) of Tasmania.” Auckland’s “mild and equable” climate and absence of “that convict element in its

32. Valencius, “Histories of Medical Geography.” 33. Military Sanatarium, 5. 34. Ibid. 35. E. S. P. Bedford, quoted in Military Sanatarium, 12. 36. Article from Auckland Weekly Register, August 16, 1858, n.p., reproduced in the Nelson-based newspaper, Colonist, October 5, 1858, 3.

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organization” are other advantages favoring the New Zealand city over its Tasmanian counterpart.37 Like the Tasmanian committee report (discussed earlier), Auckland’s referenced both statistics and the opinion of medical authorities who had treated soldiers from India in New Zealand. Such sources revealed that “deaths from fevers, liver complaints, and diseases of the stomach and bowels are lower in New Zealand than in any of the other countries named, so that it follows that New Zealand is by far the fittest place for individuals suffering from any of these diseases.” Like Tasmania’s report, to support its healthiness, Auckland’s drew from testimonies from medical officers from India stationed in New Zealand. Although it failed to name its sources, Auckland presented testimonies upholding claims about its ideal climate from two military surgeons, Arthur Saunders Thomson (1816–60), and Robert Keating Prendergast (1811–90). Thomson, an Edinburgh University MD, had taken a lively and active interest in the effects of climate on health and racial development ever since his doctoral thesis, which had examined “the influence of climate on the health and mortality of the Indigenous Inhabitants of different countries.” Its particular focus was on the mortality which takes place when individuals emigrate “to climates differing in temperature and other circumstances, from that of their native country.”38 Subsequent postings to Afghanistan and India in the 1830s, and Auckland, New Zealand, in the 1840s and 1850s, had afforded him ample opportunity of examining individuals subjected to different climates and for compiling statistics on the impact of climate on health. In New Zealand, Thomson published a series of influential medical geographies extolling, in particular, the beneficial effects of New Zealand’s climate on troops from India. These received widespread publicity from government and military officials, and from among the general reading public. This was thanks to their reporting in newspapers and to their appearance in Thomson’s popular two-volume general history of the colony, The Story of New Zealand.39 As Thomson wrote: To the Indian who has suffered from no disease, but whose mind and body are exhausted and enervated by the high temperature and restless nights, which residence in the tropics produces, New Zealand will be found a peculiarly agreeable 37. Colonist, October 5, 1858, 3. 38. Arthur Saunders Thomson, Prize Thesis: Inaugural Dissertation on the Influence of Climate on the Health and Mortality of the Inhabitants of the Different Regions of the Globe (Edinburgh: John Carfraw and Son; London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, London; Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1837), in Special Collections 3143, University of Edinburgh. 39. James Beattie, “Tropical Asia and Temperate New Zealand: Health and Conservation Connections, 1840–1920,” in Asia in Making of New Zealand, ed. Brian Moloughney and Henry Johnson (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2007), 36–57; Arthur Saunders Thomson, The Story of New Zealand: Past and Present—Savage and Civilized, Two Volumes (London: John Murray, 1859); Wellington Independent, vol. XII, no. 1, January 1, 1859, 3.

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residence. I speak of this from my own personal experience, and that of one or two others who have suffered from the exhaustion of an Indian life.40

Like Thomson, Prendergast had several years’ service overseas, in his case in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from 1838 to 1842, before arriving with the 65th Regiment in New Zealand in 1846.41 Although the 65th Regiment had its headquarters in Auckland, several detachments were scattered throughout the North Island. Prendergast, based in Wellington, studied the health of troops in that town over a period from 1847 to 1858. In the context of colonial rivalry, what the Auckland proponent of the sanatorium proposal neglected to say was that Prendergast—in agreement with Thomson— actually regarded Wellington’s climate, not Auckland’s, as the most favorable to troops’ health.42 Accordingly, in early January of 1859, The Wellington Independent provided detailed discussion of the findings of both Prendergast and Thomson’s reports, pointing to several conclusions demonstrating the healthiness of Wellington over Auckland. Drawing attention to the “Table showing the Aggregate Strength, Admissions into Hospital, and Deaths from Disease, among the Troops serving in the Provinces of Auckland and Wellington,” it pointed out “that the Troops Stationed in the Province of Wellington were more healthy [sic] than those in the Province of Auckland.” Likewise, it related how, immediately upon the arrival of the 65th Regiment in Auckland in November 1846, “an Epidemic Fever of a low Typhoid character became very prevalent [sic], and caused great mortality especially amongst the Children.” Weakened, 56 men were treated, of whom 52 survived. The “seeds of the disease,” it explained, had travelled with the troops sent to Wellington in September 1847, leading to the treatment of 33 cases of fever, out of which two patients did not recover, with one suffering a recurrence of the disease. After this, there was no recurrence of the disease under the period reported, 1853–55, despite 370 men being stationed there on average. Similarly, “the Returns of each Class of Disease,” the report pointed out, “show the marked immunity from disease enjoyed by the men of the 65th Regiment” based in Wellington.43 Other provinces in New Zealand, as well as several Australian colonies, presented similar proposals and arguments, again using the 1857 Uprising as a springboard for 40. Wellington Independent, vol. XIII, no. 692, May 29, 1852, 4. 41. “Officers of the 65th [Regiment] in New Zealand”: http://hicketypip.tripod.com/officers65th.htm (accessed January 28, 2014). 42. Robert Keating Prendergast, “On the Best Test of the Climate of a Country,” Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, vol. XIII, June 24, 1854, 2. See also: Robert Keating Prendergast, Surgeon 65th Regiment, To His Honor the Superintendent, Wellington May 14, 1854, New Zealand Government Gazette (Province of Nelson), vol. 2, no. 9 (June 16, 1854), 53; Robert Keating Prendergast, May 14, 1854, New Zealand Government Gazette (Province of Nelson), vol. 2, no. 9 (June 16, 1854), 54; “Reports on the Health of the Troops Stationed in New Zealand,” enclosures 1–3, Supplementary New Zealand Government Gazette (Province of Wellington), vol. 5, no. 38 (December 27, 1858), i–xxiii. 43. Wellington Independent, vol. XII, no. 7, January 5, 1859, 5.

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schemes to be able to help govern in India’s unhealthy climate. Noting “how the war in India has only revived discussion” of the concept of establishing New Plymouth Province as a national sanatorium for Indian troops, the provincial Superintendent in February 1859 submitted a dispatch to that effect. The meteorological and health statistics furnished, it noted, “convincing proof of the singular salubrity and equability of our climate, which for some years has enjoyed a colonial celebrity.”44 In August 1859, the New Plymouth Provincial Government duly requested from the secretary of state for war the establishment in New Zealand of a sanatorium “for the benefit of Invalids from the Indian Army.”45 Also in that same year, Sir James Stirling (1791– 1865), governor of Western Australia, published a pamphlet promoting his colony’s climate. According to the document, the colony of Western Australia possessed “a sea-climate, fresh and invigorating; temperate in point of heat; equable in point of temperature; free from sudden chills.”46 Panic occasioned by the Uprising heightened deeper anxieties about India’s pathological environment, one that, unless measures were taken to annul its threat, threatened ultimately to erase British rule in the subcontinent. The panic triggered a flurry of responses from other colonial governments and officials, as well as from private settlers themselves. For officials in India and the Australasian colonies, environment respectively offered a potential cause and a potential solution to the ill-health experienced by British troops and officials. As Alan Lester suggests in this volume (Chapter 1), panic took on a distinctly geographical dimension, not only in its association with certain kinds of environments, but also in connecting different colonies. The next section explores the panicked responses of private health migrants from India as they sought somewhere peaceful and healthy for their families to live, and traces the outcomes of official migration schemes.

Impacts of Proposals Each of the panicked and opportunistic colonial proposals issued from Australia and New Zealand received the imperial cold shoulder.47 Despite this, Australasian 44. Taranaki Herald, vol. VII, no. 342, February 19, 1859, 2. 45. See Dispatch Number 69 mentioned in “Government Gazette, Province of Taranaki,” New Plymouth Provincial Gazette, vol. 7, no. 10 (May 25, 1859), 40; Henry John Tancred to His Honour, The Superintendent, Napier, Colonial Secretaries’ Office, March 29, 1859, Auckland, HB, 3 1, 1859/Letter No. 5, General Government Letters, National Archives (NA), Wellington. 46. J. Stirling, Observations on the Climate and Geographical Position of Western Australia, and on Its Adaptation to the Purposes of a Sanatorium for the Indian Army in a Letter Addressed to J. R. Martin, Esq (London: J. C. Bridgewater, 1859), 3. 47. See Dispatch Number 69 mentioned in “Government Gazette, Province of Taranaki,” New Plymouth Provincial Gazette, vol. 7, no. 10 (May 25, 1859), 40. For discussion of the forwarding of the proposal, see Henry John Tancred to His Honour, The Superintendent, Napier, Colonial Secretaries’ Office, March 29, 1859, Auckland, HB, 3 1, 1859/Letter No. 5, General Government Letters, NA, Wellington.

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colonies continued in their attempts to attract British health migrants from India, while many private settlers from India also retired to the region. They were attracted not only by fears of India’s climate and the dangers its people posed to their life, but also by favorable descriptions of Australasia’s climate and preferable land grants. For example, from the early 1850s, Auckland Province’s attempts to attract military settlers included legislation specifically encouraging members of the EIC. Auckland Province’s 1858 Waste Lands Act was extended into the remainder of the North Island, as the New Zealand Waste Lands Act, 1858, an indication of the opportunities the Uprising was seen to afford both colonies anxious for settlers and settlers anxious for healthy colonies. The act was intended to encourage the settlement of naval and military officers, and men, “belonging to Her Majesty’s Service or to Service of the East India Company” in the North Island. Free land was granted based on a sliding scale: a commissioned officer qualified for 400 acres; a warrant and noncommissioned officer, 80 acres; and a private soldier, marine or seaman, 60 acres.48 Although this particular clause was removed in 1860, EIC troops and officers had already by this time settled in different parts of the Colony, including in New Plymouth Province, on North Island. Some came from among those already stationed there with imperial forces, including from the 58th and 65th Regiments.49 It is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain detailed statistics of those who came from India to New Zealand, or to correlate motives for settlement with health panics. Nevertheless, returns from requests made by widows of ex-soldiers or by surviving soldiers who had taken advantage of free land grants in 1860, reveal the tip of the iceberg of a significantly larger number who had served on the subcontinent and subsequently settled in New Zealand. For example, of 18 who applied in Nelson Province, six had served in India; in Canterbury, the figure was six out of 29.50 More rewarding are the letters, diaries, obituaries, and newspapers from the time, which hint at the importance of health migration from India sparked by the Uprising. Individuals like Mr. Chapman, encountered by Dr. Andrew Sinclair (1794–1861) while aboard the Oberon, sailing between Dunedin to Bluff in 1860, seem not to have been uncommon in New Zealand. Chapman, Sinclair wrote, was “a tall, thin, broken down man in constitution from the Indian military service, who snivelled in his speech from

For the Governor’s messages of this period, see “Governor’s messages—outwards 16/5–21/8/1858” [note: incorrectly dated], Internal Affairs 4, No. 296, NA, Wellington. 48. Summarized in Alex F. Ridgway, Voices from Auckland, New Zealand (London: Alex F. Ridgway & Sons, 1862), 137. 49. James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Auckland: Penguin, 1986), 59. 50. Military Land Claims, Nelson, 1259–1275: LS 66, Record 15, NA, Wellington; Military Land Claims, Canterbury, 1285A–1294B: LS 66, Record 17, NA, Wellington.

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hare lip and was now endeavouring to patch up and make the best of his shattered constitution in a mild climate.”51 Particular places in New Zealand were notable for attracting migrants from India. Located at the top of the South Island, the settlement of Nelson, noted Edward Payton (1859–1944) in 1888, has earned itself the reputation as “the resort of men of means who have come from India.” Indeed, several families from India settled in the region.52 Likewise a cluster of EIC military, attracted by the recommendations of friends and family, settled in and around Christchurch. Many others also appeared in colonial parliaments and provincial assemblies, and served as land officials and miners, doctors and laborers throughout the Colony. They—and others—also named New Zealand places after geographical regions and Britons associated with the Uprising. For example, the settlement of Kirwee (now, Karwi, Uttar Pradesh), in New Zealand’s Canterbury Province, commemorated its founder’s storming of the fort of the same name in 1857, while at least a dozen ex-Mutiny veterans and their families settled in the region.53 Several Scindes, numerous Napiers, and countless Kashmirs, too, still grace street names and areas in New Zealand, while the province of Hawke’s Bay boasts the towns of Meanee, Havelock, Napier, Hastings, and Clive.54 In 1900, there were still sufficient numbers of “Indian Mutiny Veterans” alive in New Zealand to gather for a sizeable reunion (Figure 4.2). In the Australian colonies, indirect evidence also points to the importance of the Uprising in precipitating the migration of many Europeans from India. Like those coming to New Zealand, health figured as a prominent motivation, as did advantageous provisions in settlement schemes aimed at attracting Indian migrants. For example, Tasmania’s Immigration Act (1867) granted immigrants from India 30 acres of land, in addition to other benefits to their families.55

51. Andrew Sinclair, Letters and Journals, March 1860, MS 1947, ATL. 52. E. W. Payton, Round about New Zealand: Being Notes from A Journal of Three Years’ Wanderings in the Antipodes (London: Chapman & Hall, 1888), 171. I thank Tony Ballantyne for sending me this reference. See also Helena Drysdale, Strangerland: A Family at War (London: Picador, 2006). 53. James Beattie, “Making Home, Making Identity: Asian Garden-Making in New Zealand, 1850s–1930s,” Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, vol. 31, no. 2 (2011): 139–59. 54. James Beattie, “Plants, Animals and Environmental Transformation: New Zealand/Indian biological and landscape connections, 1830s–1890s,” in The East India Company and the Natural World, ed. Vinita Damodaran and Anna Winterbotham (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 219–48. 55. Andrea Scott Inglis, Summer in the Hills: The Nineteenth-Century Mountain Resort in Australia (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2007), 56–57. See, also, Joyce P. Westrip and Peggy Holroyde, Colonial Cousins: A Surprising History of Connections between India and Australia (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2010).

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Figure 4.2 “Group of Veterans Who Served in the Indian Mutiny,” hosted at a Government House Auckland fete held by Lord Ranfurly on April 24, 1900. Reproduced with the kind permission of “Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries,” AWNS-19000504-4-1.

Hill Stations and Gum Trees While EIC officials and military eagerly retired in droves to the colonies—liberally planting Simlas and Scindes throughout Australasia and the rest of the Empire— British officials in India instead looked to the restorative properties of the subcontinent’s high-altitude climates as a means of maintaining British rule. Following the Uprising, hill stations assumed ever greater importance in India as centers of civil and military administration. Indeed, by the century’s end they were regarded as essential to maintaining the fighting fitness of imperial troops and the mental dexterity of the Indian Civil Service. Although individuals like Lord Clyde might have found the climate of the hill station of Simla “nearly as exhilarating as any in Europe,”56 or, like Elizabeth Muter, have fancied themselves “again in an English dell, with the trickling water rolling over the mossy stones,”57 the ever greater numbers of factotums, functionaries, and flunkeys flocking to the hill sanatoria began to cause a deterioration in their healthiness and environment, leading in turn to wider anxieties about their strategic usefulness, and ultimately the ability of the British to maintain an empire in India. The pall of cholera, observed Muter gloomily, hung miserably over the hill station of Murree. “Mysore, Chickmagoor,” moaned another, “from its elevation and situation, enjoys

56. Wellington Independent, May 24, 1859, 5. 57. Elizabeth Muter, Travels and Adventures of An Officer’s Wife in India, China, and New Zealand, 2 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1864), I, 125–26.

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the most temperate climate; yet it has the worst reputation for fever” because it stands “in the midst of paddy flats.”58 As a consequence of such health anxieties, a host of public health measures were instituted in hill stations and at other British centers of population. Drawing from medical geography, with its emphasis on public health, and informed by growing fears of Indians as sources of pollution, key aspects of these measures included the detailed monitoring of health and environment, provision of clean drinking water, improved barrack design, better nutrition, and spatial separation of whites from Indians. For Nandini Bhattacharya, the public health measures instituted in hill stations and other colonial enclaves were reforms premised on ideological belief in the healthiness of the hills over the plains and were instituted regardless of the actual rates of disease in hill stations.59 The ideological importance of disease in generating panic and anxiety is reinforced by the sometimes disproportionate reaction of colonial authorities to such threats. Although troop mortality rates dropped from the early 1880s,60 major outbreaks of disease still broke out in India, spreading to other areas and feeding significant health panics, sometimes regardless of the actual mortality impact of the disease (as David Arnold shows in Chapter 5).61 Amidst these health fears, administrators sought to plant eucalyptus trees. Colonists praised them because of their perceived ability to absorb, and thus neutralize, what contemporaries regarded as the noxious effluvia of decaying animal and vegetable matter—the miasma of which lay people and doctors alike sought so keenly to avoid. They also esteemed their ability to drain swampy ground, another site regarded as sources of miasma. Although primarily introduced into India to meet the rapidly expanding fuelwood needs of hill stations—needs precipitated by the cold of such places and by their ever larger populations denuding such regions of existing timber—foresters and medics attached great hope to the health-giving properties of the eucalyptus.62 Eucalypts would “improve the health and add to the wealth of the country,” enthused one correspondent in the Indian Forester, the key professional organ of 58. “Malaria and the Value of the Eucalyptus,” Indian Forester, vol. 7, no. 4 (April, 1882): 336. 59. Bhattacharya, Contagion and Enclaves. 60. Harrison, Public Health, 97; Radhika Ramasubban, “Imperial Health in British India, 1857–1900,” in Disease, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion, ed. Roy MacLeod and Milton Lewis (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 38–60. 61. Dhrub Singh, “‘Clouds of Cholera’: and Clouds Around Cholera, 1817–70,” in Disease and Medicine in India: A Historical Overview, ed. Deepak Kumar (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2001), 144–65; I. J. Catanach, “Plague and the Tensions of Empire: India, 1896–1918,” in Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, ed. David Arnold (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 149–71. 62. Brett M. Bennett, “The El Dorado of Forestry: The Eucalyptus in India, South Africa, and Thailand, 1850–2000,” International Review of Social History, vol. 55, supp.S18 (2010): 27–50; Robin W. Doughty, The Eucalyptus: A Natural and Commercial History of the Gum Tree (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 128–29.

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Indian forestry.63 Initial attention in India centered on particular qualities of the blue gum (Eucalyptus globulus), praised by forester J. L. Laird for its “utility in hygiene.” Not only did the tree absorb moisture from the atmosphere, but, its healthful emanations, he noted, possibly neutralized or even destroyed the deadly but unseen miasmas.64 While acknowledging the exaggerated nature of some of its claimed health benefits, as a drainer of miasmic marshes, the forestry writer J. E. O’Connor explained, the eucalyptus genus was second to none, “absorbing daily ten times its own weight of water from the soil.”65 Accompanying these reports were glowing accounts of eucalyptus plantings redeeming malarial wastelands in North Africa and southern Europe.66 In areas deemed climatically appropriate, medical doctors enthusiastically advanced tree-planting programs as a means of improving a locality’s healthiness.67 The widespread service of medical doctors in forestry, botany, and other areas related to resource management in India reinforced the connections believed to exist between environment and health in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.68 In the wake of the Uprising, it also made it more likely that such figures would be acutely aware of the strategic importance of tree planting for reasons of health. This seems to have been the case, as witnessed by a large-scale increase in the activities of tree planting around the hill stations. Various figures from Australia now working in an official or unofficial capacity in India, or with strong connections to it, also encouraged or led some of the experimentation.69 For example, the governor of Madras Presidency, Sir William Thomas Denison (1804–71), was a former governorgeneral of Australia, who enthusiastically plugged the species’ health-giving

63. E. Morton, “Arboriculture in Its Relation to Climate,” Indian Forester, vol. 1, no. 2 (October, 1875): 151. See, also, Ashley Hay, Gum: The Story of Eucalypts and Their Champions (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002), 71–103; Kenneth Thompson, “Trees as a Theme in Medical Geography and Public Health,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, vol. 54, no. 3 (1975): 518–23. 64. J. L. Laird, “The Eucalyptus Globulus: From a Botanical, Economical and Medical Point of View, Translated from the French by J. E. Planchon, Professeur à la Faculté de Montpellier,” Indian Forester, vol. 1, no. 2 (October 1875): 175–77. 65. J. E. O’Connor, “The Cultivation of ‘Eucalyptus Globulus’ and other Australian Gums in India,” Indian Forester, vol. 2, no. 2 (October 1876): 120–35. 66. See Doughty, The Eucalyptus: A Natural and Commercial History; Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930 (Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999). 67. Dr. J. Maitland cited in “Plantation of Australian Trees, Nilgiri Hill,” in Hugh Cleghorn, The Forests and Gardens of South India (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1861), 180–81. 68. Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety; James Beattie, “Natural History, Conservation, and Scottishtrained Doctors in New Zealand, 1790–1920,” Immigrants & Minorities, vol. 29, no. 2 (2011): 281–307. 69. Cleghorn, Forests, 339; G. Foster, “Plantation of Eucalypti,” Indian Forester, vol. 2, no. 3 (January 1877): 324.

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properties.70 Botanical gardens and private settlers in Australia also sent eucalyptus seed to their Indian equivalents.71 By December 1859, medico-forester Hugh Cleghorn reported that some 10,000 Australian trees had been planted in the neighborhood of the hill station of Ootacamund (Utakamand).72 Their primary purpose was to meet the growing fuelwood needs of the hill station which, by this time, had some 7,420 houses, and a population of 2,500 Europeans, 34,500 natives, 500 East Indians.73 As an 1857 report on the Nilgiri Hills shows, contemporaries regarded the benefits of eucalyptus as manifold. They ranged from the supply of fuel and the furnishing of building materials, to an ability to “create and improve the soil, and secure the permanency of the springs,” and provide “shelter from the violent winds” and modification of the climate.74 Dr. J. Maitland considered “tree-planting to be . . . of great importance, both in a sanitary and economic point of view.” Maitland’s observations over three years led him to believe “that the larger proportion of disease at Wellington than at the neighbouring station at Kúnúr, is due” to environmental factors “as, in all other respects, height, temperature, exposure, &c., there is scarcely any appreciable difference between the two places.” By “planting trees judiciously,” he believed, “great benefit would be derived, not only from the shelter they would afford, but from the good effects produced by a moderate quantity of vegetation in purifying the atmosphere.”75 Surveying South India’s uplands in 1882, Dietrich Brandis (1824–1907), India’s first Inspector General of Forests, commented that their planting has “altered the appearance of the country.” “[L]arge trees, chiefly Eucalyptus globulus, Acacia melanoxylon and Acacia dealbata” surround the hill stations of Wellington, Ootacamund, and Coonoor (all in the Nilgiris).76 In 1883, Ootacamund was “almost surrounded by a forest of these trees,” while on the Nilgiris eucalypts grew four times as fast as teak.77 In 1873, some 16,000 various eucalypts were growing in Ranikhet (Uttarakhand).78 Yet, the eucalyptus trees introduced into India did not grow in the places where they were most wanted—on the malarial plains. In the 1870s, for example, Madras’

70. Doughty, The Eucalyptus: A Natural and Commercial History, 129. 71. Cleghorn, Forests, 339; for complaints at the “heavy charges” incurred from importing Australian seeds, see O’Connor, Eucalyptus Globulus, 131. 72. Hugh Cleghorn, “Second Annual Report, 1858–59,” December 31, 1859, in Cleghorn, Forests, 42–43. 73. Cleghorn to Secretary to Government, R. D., Utakamand, November 8, 1859, no. 836, “Firewood of the Nilgiri Hills,” in Cleghorn, Forests, 158. 74. “Plantation of Australian Trees, Nilgiri Hills,” in Cleghorn, Forests, 171. 75. Dr. J. Maitland cited in “Plantation of Australian Trees, Nilgiri Hills,” in Cleghorn, Forests, 181. 76. D. Brandis to Editor Ootacamund, April 7, 1882, “The Forests of South India,” Indian Forester, vol. 7, no. 4 (April 1882): 366. 77. D. Brandis, “On the Distribution of Forests in India,” Indian Forester, vol. 9, no. 5 (May 1883): 224; O’Connor, Eucalyptus Globulus, 120. 78. O’Connor, Eucalyptus Globulus, 128.

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sanitary commissioner unsuccessfully attempted to introduce eucalypts.79 Repeated failures established the climatic limitation of its growth; namely, to the hill stations of southern India. Those areas on the subcontinent outside of southern India proved to be either too dry or too humid to permit the successful growth of eucalyptus. It was not until the 1920s that research revealed that most eucalyptus introduced into India came from Australia’s temperate south, not its north. Thereafter, especially from the 1960s, more ecologically appropriate species were planted, along with the creation of new hybrids.80 Just as the health panic generated by the Uprising had led to a flurry of official proposals from Australasian politicians and boosters to establish sites for convalescent troops from India, as well as encouraging the migration of private settlers from India to the Antipodes, so the identification of healthy areas in India and the need to keep them healthy precipitated further biological connections with Australia through the introduction of eucalyptus. These exchanges of people and plants point to the geographical and environmental dimensions of health panics. The transnational dimensions of panic generated by the Uprising also encompassed those over migrating labor and their potential for revolution, as witnessed with the transportation of Indian convicts from the subcontinent to the Straits Settlement following the events of 1857, as Rajesh Rai has recently highlighted.81 Finally, if panic heightened anxieties about India’s climate, exchanges of people and plants with Australasia also served to reinforce worries about the healthiness of particular colonial environments in Australasia, as the last section of this chapter reveals.

Interchangeable Imperial Places As thousands of Australian species were introduced into India to enhance the healthiness of hill stations in the wake of the Uprising, so officials in southern Australia and New Zealand drew from Indian experiences—and sometimes Indian plants—in establishing their own hill stations. While most Australasian colonists believed in the healthiness of their new colony’s climate, they recognized that, like hill stations, the salubrity of some local areas might deteriorate and require improvement. Swamps in Australasia, in particular, elicited fears of miasma. In consequence, marching to the drumbeat of progress, settlers across Australasia set about transforming them into swathes of verdant pasture, activities, they believed, that brought both financial and health benefits.82 Yet drainage seldom proved as quick or as easy a process as many 79. Ibid., 124. 80. Brett M. Bennett, “A Global History of Australian Trees,” Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 44, no. 1 (2011): 125–45. 81. Rajesh Rai, “The 1875 Panic and the Fabrication of an Indian ‘Menace’ in Singapore,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 47, no. 2 (2013): 365–405. I thank Robert Peckham for alerting me to this source. 82. Anderson, Cultivation of Whiteness, 20, 35–8.

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hoped.83 Sometimes the healthiest—and cheapest solution—was to get as far away as practicably possible from such waterscapes, at least until such time as they had been drained.84 This is what some individuals did in the early years of the establishment of Christchurch, capital of the South Island Anglican colony in Canterbury Province, New Zealand. The fledgling city suffered one outbreak of disease after another as its engineers and medical authorities battled the challenges posed by the city’s swampy soil, crisscrossed by creeks and washed by tidal flows.85 (Indeed, the so-called New Zealand death—drowning—was particularly prevalent in Christchurch, owing to the propinquity of waterways and pubs.)86 Respecting neither the inebriate nor the teetotaler, typhus and typhoid, along with other remittent and intermittent fevers, recurred with unerring and sometimes deadly frequency in the colonial settlement.87 By the time of his urgent recall to India following the Uprising, Sir John Cracroft Wilson had already established a hill station above miasmic Christchurch. Although likening Canterbury’s climate to that of the hill stations of Nainee Tal, Munsooree, and Simla, Wilson chose to live above the malarial morass of Christchurch.88 That way he could avoid the disadvantages posed to health and transportation by the swampy nature of the town below. Wilson’s naming of the area above Christchurch in which he chose to live recalled its Indian namesake, Cashmere (Kashmir). New Zealand’s Cashmere, like India’s, Wilson explained, rose abruptly over flat plains and had a similarly healthy climate to match.89 Wilson introduced into his New Zealand property a veritable cornucopia of plants and animals brought from India on a ship he chartered from the subcontinent. These included Himalayan rhododendrons and bamboos (some of which decidedly did not survive), as well as many other different plants. Some, if not all, would have been planted by the retinue of Indian servants Wilson brought out with him, some of whom he also employed to drain the swamp at the bottom of Cashmere. Intriguingly, the grounds of the residence Wilson had built mimicked aspects of the Indian hill stations in other ways, including having Indian plants ringed by eucalyptus trees, no 83. Geoff Park, “‘Swamps which Might Doubtless Easily be Drained’: Swamp Drainage and Its Impact on the Indigenous,” in Environmental Histories of New Zealand, ed. Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002), 151–68. 84. Beattie, “Colonial Geographies of Settlement,” 583–610. 85. Geoffrey Rice, “Public Health in Christchurch, 1875–1910: Mortality and Sanitation,” in A Healthy Country: Essays on the Social History of Medicine in New Zealand, ed. Linda Bryder (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1991), 85–108. 86. Peter Holland, Home in the Howling Wilderness: Settlers and the Environment in Southern New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2013). 87. Rice, “Public Health,” 85–108. 88. Sir John Cracroft Wilson, Transcript of Diary/Recollections, 1854, of Canterbury, typed transcript by Ron Chapman, 1989, Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand, ARC1989.80, 41. 89. Beattie, “Making Home, Making Identity,” 141.

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doubt chosen for the shelter and fuelwood they provided, but perhaps, too, because of their perceived health benefits.90 Across the Tasman, the need for a temporary refuge from the heat was more much apparent than in New Zealand’s somewhat fickle climate, where heat one day frequently contrasted with a bone-chilling “southerly buster” the next.91 In March 1858, for example, the South Australian Register recorded how “[t]he extreme heat of the weather experienced for the last few weeks has greatly tried the physical endurance of weak and susceptible persons.” At least, it noted, the lack of humidity resulted in only a handful of deaths.92 Countless private letters and diaries complained of Australia’s excessive summer heats, its searing oven-like winds and piercing light. As Warwick Anderson has shown, specific complaints associated with Australia’s heat lasted well into the 1870s, revolving around fears of how “the antipodean climate could both deplete and over-excite the otherwise phlegmatic British constitution.”93 Although inspired by Indian models, Australia’s hill stations differed from the subcontinent’s in several significant ways. Andrea Inglis has argued that Australia’s hill stations did not replicate the rigid class divisions and military hierarchies of India. Nor did they develop as attempts to flee an alien environment. Instead, as Inglis has shown, through their incorporation of particular aspects of Australian nature and scenery, they facilitated greater appreciation of Australian environments. By the late nineteenth century, Inglis contends, they contributed to Australian nationalism, by promoting appreciation of the native nature around mountain resorts. Inglis also demonstrates their seasonal nature. For example, the Blue Mountains, north of Sydney, catered to upper- and middle-class needs, by offering relaxing walks in cooler summer temperatures, and providing luxury accommodation amidst pleasingly picturesque scenery. Places fulfilling similar needs sprang up in other parts of Australia. South Australians had the summer balm of the Adelaide Hills while Queenslanders could flee to Toowoomba.94 As the colorful meteorologist, Indianophile, theosophist, and gardener Clement Wragge (1852–1922) explained: [No] finer place for a sanatorium can be found than residence in a gum-tree forest in the dry belt of country of Southern Queensland at a reasonable elevation. There the percentage of oxygen as compared with other atmospheric constituents in slightly above the normal, and thus must the lungs have vigorous action in purifying the blood and rendering the individual less susceptible to disease; and to remove one stricken to such an environment probably means to cure him.95 90. Beattie, “Plants, Animals, and Environmental Transformation.” 91. See, Holland, Home in the Howling Wilderness. 92. South Australian Register, March 11, 1858, 3. 93. Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 25. 94. Inglis, Summer in the Hills. 95. “The Coming Summer: Our Defence of the Brisbane Climate,” Wragge, vol. 1, no. 10 (September 18, 1902): 73.

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Responding, perhaps, to residual pessimism about the suitability of white residence in Australia’s semitropical and tropical north,96 Wragge admitted that while “we have our hot days . . . there is always Toowoomba, and our hills—always have we Wynnum, Manly, Cleveland, and the other balmy spots on Moreton Bay—and the heat is of that soft seductive nature, tempered by sea breezes, which can only be experienced in coastal districts bordering the seductive tropics.”97 Continued debates about the benefits of Indian laborers—along with those from the Pacific Islands and China—for working the plantations of Australia’s tropical north reveal the limits to some of the confidence expressed by the likes of Wragge, at least beyond “semitropical” Brisbane.98 As India’s hill stations had introduced eucalyptus, so several of Australia’s hill stations introduced perceived health-giving plants from India. They also constructed buildings modelled on those of India’s hill stations, themselves derivative of English styles. In Victoria in 1884, its governor (1884–89), Henry Loch (1827–1900), rented the Mt. Macedon property, Rosenheim, as a summer retreat. Its function elicited comments by the pastoralist and gold commissioner, Thomas Alexander Browne but better known as the novelist Rolf Boldrewood (1826–1915). Browne described Macedon as “the Simla of Victoria.”99 Macedon’s “deodars, Himalayan spruce, Assam tea, Rhododendron Dalhousie, and Indian ducks on the State Nursery Lake,” notes garden historian Paul Fox, “had been re-created in the image of an Indian hill station.” The mock-Tudor construction of the new two-storied governor’s residence in Macedon closely resembled the commander-in-chief ’s recently constructed abode in Simla (India), further enhancing that image.100 These complicated borrowings involved assemblages of different plant and building styles, but with local variations, much as how, for example, the Bengal bungalow developed in form and function through time and over space.101 This evidence also suggests the creation of imperial landscape of health, constructed in part as a result 96. On which, see Anderson, Cultivation of Whiteness; Meg Parsons, “Creating a Hygienic Dorm: The Refashioning of Aboriginal Women and Children and the Politics of Racial Classification in Queensland 1920s–40s,” Health & History, vol. 14, no. 2 (2012): 112–39; Alison Bashford, “‘Is White Australia Possible?’ Race, Colonialism and Tropical Medicine,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 23, no. 2 (2000): 248–71. 97. “The Coming Summer,” 73. 98. David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850–1939 (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999); Julia Martínez, “Plural Australia: Aboriginal and Asian Labour in Tropical White Australia, Darwin, 1911–1940” (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wollongong, 1999). 99. Rolf Boldrewood, Old Melbourne Memories (Melbourne: George Robertson and Co., 1884). Quoted in Paul Fox, “The Simla of the South,” The Changing Landscape: The Garden in the Landscape: Proceedings of the Australian Garden History Fifteenth Annual National Conference, Melbourne, 21–23 October 1994 (Ballarat: Australian Garden History Society, 1994), 10, 11. 100. Fox, “The Simla of the South,” 11. 101. Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 14–64.

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of the connections established by the health panic following the 1857 Uprising. This event led to the migration of many officials and military to the Australasian colonies. Some migrants introduced the concept of the hill station from India into Australasia, while others argued for its importance based on the high profile of such institutions in the wake of the Revolution. Visiting Darjeeling in 1890, Indianophile, irrigator, and politician Alfred Deakin (1856–1919) noted in his diary, “cleared patches of garden and dry grass like Macedon—gardens on steep slopes and crests of hills,” seemingly genuinely unaware that the model was India and not the other way round.102 Such intertwining of ecologies, buildings, and landscapes suggested by descriptions of Mt. Macedon and by its resemblance to Darjeeling, illustrates the complex assemblages of people, places and plants, that imperialism could throw together.

Conclusion The events of 1857, in catching British forces off guard and throwing postwar imperial strategists into panic, starkly revealed British susceptibility to what they regarded as a pathological climate. The Uprising and its aftermath heightened existing anxieties about the salubrity of India’s climate, signaling a shift in British attitudes and intentions toward India and Indians. In the urgent search for a climate best able to maintain the readiness of troops and officials, other parts of the British Empire eagerly threw open their doors to sickly soldiers, enfeebled officers and fading factotums. They presented their own colonies as able to render remarkable changes to bodies blasted by the heat and disease of the Indian subcontinent. In the event, despite the many enticing schemes put forward, only, it seems, private retirees sought shelter in Australasian sanatoria. Still, the centrality of the hill station to the British Raj in the wake of the Uprising made it imperative to ensure the healthiness of such places, and led to further ecological exchanges between India and Australia. Finally, the very concept of the hill station itself provided a model for combating Australia’s summer heat and the sickly swamps of Christchurch, New Zealand. The health panic associated with the 1857 Uprising demonstrates the importance of considering matters of migration, health, and landscape change across Empire, not just within either white settler colonies or tropical colonies. Panic, in bringing about wider structural change in British India, had significant geographical and environmental dimensions, which extended beyond the subcontinent. Panic triggered complex interchanges among colonies in India, Australia, and New Zealand, leading to new patterns of environmental change, migration, and political discussion. It also

102. “Alfred Deakin, “Diary, Indian 1890–91,” Deakin Papers, National Library of Australia. Quoted in Fox, “The Simla of the South,” 13.

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underlines the importance of considering as the cultural and material dimensions of imperial health and environmental history as interrelated and coproduced.103

Acknowledgements This chapter builds upon work previously reported in “Imperial Landscapes of Health: Place, Plants and People between India and Australia, 1800s–1900s,” Health & History, vol. 14, no. 1 (2012): 100–20; and Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800–1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). I thank the editors of Health & History for their permission to draw from earlier material, Catharine Coleborne and Ondine Godtschalk for their comments on this chapter, the research assistantship of Nicola Lemberg, and the encouragement of David Arnold, Robert Peckham, and Maria Sin. Research for this chapter was made possible by a FASS Contestable Research Grant, University of Waikato.

103. James Beattie, Emily O’Gorman, and Edward Melillo, “Rethinking the British Empire through EcoCultural Networks: Materialist-Cultural Environmental History, Relational Connections and Agency,” Environment and History, vol. 20, no. 4 (November, 2014), 561–75; James Beattie, Edward Melillo, and Emily O’Gorman, eds., Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire: New Views on Environmental History (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

5 Disease, Rumor, and Panic in India’s Plague and Influenza Epidemics, 1896–1919 David Arnold

Disease—or the threat of it—has been a potent source of rumor and panic in modern times. Cholera, plague, influenza, AIDS, SARS, and avian flu have all in their time provoked fear and dread among those groups that appeared most at risk or caused waves of terror that have engulfed entire societies. It is not always the most deadly diseases that have had this effect: malaria, for instance, seems rarely to have precipitated widespread panic. Nor has the level of response necessarily been in relation to those diseases that were most stigmatizing or disfiguring, like leprosy, tuberculosis, and syphilis, whose social impact was constrained by secrecy and denial or which were managed through practices of social exclusion and institutional incarceration.1 Perhaps the greatest turmoil occurred in epidemic episodes that combined disease, rumor, and panic, united in a single moment of actual or incipient catastrophe, or those epidemics whose causes and consequences were unknown and whose advance appeared so rapid and overwhelming as to be unstoppable. The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the role of rumor and panic by comparing and contrasting two of the most destructive episodes in the disease history of modern India. In 1896–97, India was struck by bubonic plague, part of the third global pandemic that began in southern China and Hong Kong in 1894, and which over the following 50 years resulted in an estimated 10 to 15 million deaths worldwide, 12 million of them in India alone.2 Even before India had fully recovered from this catastrophe, it was hit by a second and still more destructive disease. The influenza outbreak of 1918–19 has been described as the greatest pandemic in world history, leaving in its wake an estimated 30 million dead.3 According to official statistics, influenza resulted in 12.5 million deaths in India, a figure that has subsequently been revised upwards 1. That said, as was evident following the death of Father Damien in 1889, a disease like leprosy could become “an imperial danger” and cause a worldwide scare; see Zachary Gussow and George S. Tracy, “Stigma and the Leprosy Phenomenon: The Social History of a Disease in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 44, no. 5 (1970): 425–49. 2. Myron Echenberg, “Pestis Redux: The Initial Years of the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic, 1894–1901,” Journal of World History, vol. 13, no. 2 (2002): 429–49. 3. Howard Phillips and David Killingray, “Introduction,” in The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19: New Perspectives, ed. Howard Phillips and David Killingray (London: Routledge, 2003), 2, 4.

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to 18 or even 20 million.4 While plague and influenza caused heavy mortality around the globe, India’s experience of both pandemics—given the size and the poverty of its population—was particularly severe. In the case of influenza, India was much the hardest hit of any country and by an epidemic that was itself the most destructive of its kind ever known.5 As one health officer remarked: “In its rapidity of spread, the enormous number of its victims, and its total fatality,” influenza in India “reached a virulence before which even plague with all its horrors” faded “into insignificance.”6 And yet, where plague provoked full-scale panic, unleashed a spate of wild rumors, triggered mass migration from cities, caused riots, and incited state repression, the greater and more temporally concentrated mortality of the influenza epidemic gave rise to abundant rumor but otherwise passed without any major panic or upheaval. Clearly, the relative scale of mortality does not alone explain the onset of panic in many parts of India in the late 1890s and early 1900s and its absence in 1918–19. So why, in terms of panicked reactions, was the influenza epidemic, to quote Sherlock Holmes, the “dog that didn’t bark”?7 By examining these two major epidemic episodes side by side, and looking in particular at their impact on the principal cities of India, this chapter tries to explain why plague sparked such drastic state action and intense public response while, barely 25 years later, the influenza epidemic did not. In attempting to explain this difference, the chapter looks at the nature and understanding of the two diseases, the very different responses they produced, and the timing of the epidemics in relation to internal political and economic developments, as well as the international context in which they occurred.

India’s Plague Panic The response in India to the unfolding pandemic of bubonic plague in the 1890s and 1900s can be understood as a reciprocal panic episode, with one crisis response feeding upon the other. The initial sense of panic came from the Government of India. The outbreak of plague in Hong Kong in 1894 caused alarm that it might rapidly spread 4. Karl D. Patterson and Gerald F. Pyle, “The Geography and Mortality of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 65, no. 1 (1991): 4–21 (18); Mridula Ramanna, “Coping with the Influenza Pandemic: The Bombay Experience,” in Phillips and Killingray, Spanish Influenza, 86–98. For a revision downwards to around 14 million, see Siddharth Chandra, Goran Kuljanin and Jennifer Wray, “Mortality from the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919,” Demography, vol. 49 (2012): 157–65. 5. I. D. Mills, “The 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic: The Indian Experience,” Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 23, no. 1 (1986): 1–40 (2). 6. N. H. Choksy, “Influenza,” Administration Report of the Municipal Commissioner for the City of Bombay, 1918–19 (Bombay: Times Press, 1919), 2, 78. 7. A phrase also used to describe the apparent lack of reaction elsewhere: Myron Echenberg, “‘The Dog that Did Not Bark’: Memory and the 1918 Influenza Epidemic in Senegal,” in Phillips and Killingray, Spanish Influenza, 230–38.

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to Calcutta and Indian ports.8 The Government of India’s sanitary advisers feared that once the disease gained a foothold in the country (as it did in Bombay in July–August 1896), it would surge across the subcontinent in an almost unstoppable epidemic. The speed of state action was further prompted by concern that, once plague had become established on the subcontinent, it would advance into the Middle East and Europe, reawakening fears and folk memories of the devastating Black Death five-and-a-half centuries earlier. An emergency international sanitary conference convened at Venice in 1897 threatened an embargo against the importation of goods from India, directly engendering British commerce with India.9 Drastic state action seemed necessary to allay international fears and save India from economic as well as epidemic disaster. Moreover, even though the epidemiology of plague was as yet poorly understood, India’s public health experts were confident that, if sufficiently drastic action were taken, the epidemic could be contained. In October 1896, the municipal authorities in Bombay were granted extraordinary powers to suppress the outbreak. This was followed in February 1897 by the Government of India’s Epidemic Diseases Act.10 With its “wide and summary powers,” applicable to the whole of British India, the act was one of the most extreme set of measures ever employed by the colonial regime in India. It authorized the health authorities to confiscate or destroy any property (including houses) that they believed to harbor the disease; gave them the right to prohibit fairs and festivals where these might endanger public health; permitted the hospitalization and segregation of suspected plague victims; allowed the rapid disposal of the dead to prevent the spread of disease; and instituted systematic inspection of travelers by road, rail, and sea to search for physical signs of infection and detain plague suspects.11 In Bombay city, an emergency plague committee was formed under an Indian Army general to enforce these highly unpopular measures, signaling an extension to India of the militarized and highly interventionist approach previously adopted in Hong Kong. Indeed, some

8. Editorial, “The Plague in Hongkong, and the Measures to Prevent Its Introduction into Calcutta,” Indian Medical Gazette [hereafter IMG] vol. 29 (1894), 263. 9. On the plague epidemic and its handling in India, see David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth–Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), chap. 5; Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo–Indian Preventive Medicine, 1858– 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chaps. 5–6; Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India, 1896–1914,” in Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence, ed. Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 203–40. 10. India, Legislative, nos. 37–46, February 1897, National Archives of India, New Delhi. 11. On the Bombay outbreak and official responses to it, see P. C. H. Snow, Report on the Outbreak of Bubonic Plague in Bombay, 1896–97 (Bombay: “Times of India” Steam Press, 1897); W. F. Gatacre, Report on the Bubonic Plague in Bombay, 1896–97 (Bombay: “Times of India” Steam Press, 1897).

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of those involved in implementing anti-plague measures were “Hong Kong doctors,” members of the Royal Army Medical Corps who had previously served in that city.12 The nature and scale of these interventionist measures are remarkable, especially for a regime that still, in the aftermath of the Mutiny and Rebellion of 1857–58, remained broadly committed to a policy of laissez-faire in social and economic matters. Thus, in the three years 1897–99, in what proved to be an unsuccessful attempt to prevent plague from reaching Calcutta, nearly four million railway passengers were examined on entering Bengal. About 72,000 travelers were detained for further observation, though very few of them died in detention from plague and other causes.13 In Bombay from late 1896 onwards, thousands of houses were declared unfit for human habitation. Buildings were lime-washed or doused with disinfectant, their earthen floors were dug up, roofs broken open, and walls pierced to admit sunlight and fresh air. Behind these measures lay the prevailing sanitary wisdom that saw damp, darkness, and dirt as conducive to disease, if not its actual cause. It was almost incomprehensible to the authorities that residents were unable “to understand the importance of ventilation and light to the inside of their houses.”14 But these interventionist measures were also backed by an antagonistic attitude toward the Indian public by colonial authorities who believed that Indian ignorance, prejudice, and hostility needed to be confronted and overcome if progress in public health were ever to be achieved. Pressure for such drastic moves had been growing for some time (as was evident from mounting concern over recurrent smallpox and cholera epidemics). It was further nurtured by the increasing animosity the colonial regime faced with the rise of militant Indian nationalism and by the vociferous criticism of its handling of famine and other public health and public order issues. With the enforcement of far-reaching anti-plague measures, many Indians inevitably felt that they, and not just the disease, were under attack. By the 1890s, Indian cities, especially the largest, Bombay and Calcutta, had become troublesome sites of colonial control, with rapidly expanding populations and escalating problems of poverty, overcrowding, and disease. Urban control was further threatened, in colonial eyes, by the rise of an industrial working class, based primarily on the jute and cotton textile industries, with mill-hands posing an 12. Ian J. Catanach, “Plague and the Tensions of Empire: India, 1896–1918,” in Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, ed. David Arnold (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 149–77. On the Hong Kong connection, see Mary P. Sutphen, “Not What, but Where: Bubonic Plague and the Reception of Germ Theories in Hong Kong and Calcutta, 1894–1897,” Journal of the History of Medicine, vol. 52, no. 1, (1997): 81–113. 13. Calculated from: Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner for Bengal, 1897 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1898), 8; Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner for Bengal, 1898 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1899), 5; Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner for Bengal, 1899 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1899), 6. 14. T. S. Weir, Executive Health Office, Bombay, in Administration Report of the Municipal Commissioner for the City of Bombay, 1896–97 (Bombay: “Times of India” Steam Press, 1897), 681.

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“ever-present source of danger.”15 In this regard, the British administration and its police and public health advisers were stoking a “moral panic,”16 using the outbreak of plague as an opportunity to strike down all those they saw as a threat to their authority and enlightened intentions. The panic over plague tapped into longstanding issues of colonial governance and deep-seated fears. The second source of panic came from the Indian population, from the Indian elite and, more evidently, from the urban masses. The elite (which included the Westerneducated middle class, the commercial and business classes, as well as “traditional” caste and community leaders) felt that its authority was being challenged or undermined by aggressive state intervention and the apparent determination to brush aside Indian agency and opinion as obstructive and unresponsive to modern sanitary needs. Their privileged status ignored, members of the elite found themselves subjected to humiliating searches on railway stations (including women whose customary seclusion and privacy was thereby violated), to house searches that invaded and polluted the innermost parts of their homes, and to the wholesale destruction of their houses and other property. Similar fears and annoyances also inflamed the Indian masses—at first the industrial and municipal workers of Bombay, but increasingly, too, the poorer strata of other cities, towns, and villages. Social norms and caste or religious conventions also appeared under attack, especially through compulsory hospitalization of the sick and rapid disposal of the dead. The sanitary assault on plague fuelled popular alarm and physical resistance, but it also provoked elite hostility at a time when middle-class nationalists were already seeking closer engagement with the masses. The consequence was a powerful wave of protest and panic, directed far more against state intervention than the disease itself, beginning in Bombay in late 1896 and subsequently spreading to other parts of western and northern India.17 According to Bombay’s stressed and censorious health officer, T. S. Weir, it was only after the disease had reached its first peak of intensity in the closing months of 1896, “and the cause for panic had really passed away” (a serious misreading of an epidemic still growing in intensity), that “the panic became most intense. It seemed as if the people had been frightened by a nightmare.”18 Weir revealed his intense irritation when he claimed that there were three stages to this upsurge of “popular feeling”: first, “when people would not believe in [any] plague measures”; second, when they “believed in all measures except the right ones”; and, third, when they “believed in every rumor and would not believe in any measure.”19 This adverse reaction might 15. Snow, Report, 7. 16. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972). 17. For details, see David Arnold, “Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896–1900,” in Subaltern Studies V, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 55–90. 18. Administration Report for Bombay, 1896–97, 705. 19. Ibid., 680.

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have been anticipated. In 1877, at the height of one of India’s worst famines, more than 10,000 hunger-struck people flooded into Bombay city in search of relief. The city authorities were overwhelmed by this influx and the upsurge of disease that accompanied it. They tried to segregate the famine poor, creating a special camp on waste ground on the west of the island. Attempts to feed such vast numbers and to cope with the swelling tide of sick and dying provoked fear and sparked rumors that the authorities were trying to poison the poor (in order to be rid of their ever-growing numbers), to break their caste (by giving them forbidden food or through the defiling touch of foreigners), and, worst of all, were taking them to hospitals in order to kill them and cut up their bodies (a reference to the loathed practice of medical dissection). Precisely the same response—dubbed “the unreasoning terror of hospital life” by the city’s municipal commissioner—occurred in Bombay 20 years later.20 No one, it seems, had heeded the lessons of the recent past. The upshot in 1896–97 was a wave of “wild, unreasoning panic” in Bombay.21 One response was flight, as thousands of working- and middle-class inhabitants fled the city, including the street-cleaners and sweepers on whom the city’s crude sanitary system relied. Nearly 400,000 people, almost half the total population, had deserted Bombay by February 1897.22 Rumors abounded as to the authorities’ malevolent, even homicidal, intentions. Among “the wildest and most improbable stories,”23 was a recrudescence of momiai rumors—which claimed that Indians were being captured and taken to hospital in order to extract a body fluid used to protect the lives of Europeans.24 In all of this rumor-mongering the press played a vital role. Most rumor, no doubt, was spread by word of mouth, but the press, which by the 1890s included many vernacular as well as English-language papers, greatly facilitated the circulation of rumors and seemed, by their repetition, to give them a degree of authority even while often denouncing their improbability. This was done to help discredit the colonial administration or to stoke popular, as well as middle-class, resentment. Howard Phillips and David Killingray remark on the power of the press at the time of the influenza pandemic in 1918, but in India newspapers were far more prominent in public reactions to disease during the early plague years than they were 25 years later.25 Some officials even accused the “native” press of fomenting unrest by 20. Snow, Report, 16. 21. Ibid., 4. 22. Ibid., 19–20. 23. [J. Neild Cook], Report of the Epidemics of Plague in Calcutta during the Years 1898–99, 1899–1900 and up to 30th June 1900 (Calcutta: Municipal Press, 1900), 25. 24. R. E. Enthoven, “Editor’s Introduction,” to William Crooke, Religion and Folklore of Northern India, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 2; and Crooke in ibid., 111–12; F. S. P. Lely, Suggestions for the Better Government of India (London: Alston Rivers, 1906), 28–30. There are similarities (and possible connections) here with stories recorded by Luise White in East Africa: see her Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 25. Phillips and Killingray, “Introduction,” 3.

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publishing “without enquiry, any wild tale, or, as it is termed in India, any piece of ‘gup’ that seems likely to interest their readers and increase their circulation.”26 Rumor impelled action. Central to events in Bombay was the Arthur Road Hospital, used to accommodate and treat patients with smallpox and other infectious diseases. Twice in October 1896 it was stormed by irate workers from the Bombay textile mills seeking the release of plague suspects. Elsewhere ambulances were attacked and Europeans chased and assaulted in the belief that they were party to caste-breaking, forced segregation, and compulsory hospitalization.27 Searches of Indian homes and the inspection of travelers created intense opposition. Resentment at these intrusive measures was one factor behind the assassination of Poona’s plague commissioner, W. C. Rand, in June 1897, an action which made the infuriated government still more determined on coercion and repression.28 In an attempt to halt the epidemic, the government turned to the Paris-trained Russian bacteriologist Waldemar Haffkine, who was already in Calcutta studying cholera, to prepare a plague prophylactic. The serum Haffkine developed in Bombay ultimately proved of immense value in countering the spread of the disease, but in the short term (coming in the wake of widespread resistance to smallpox vaccination) inoculation only added fresh fuel to “absurd rumors” about the cruelty inflicted and the sinister intentions involved.29 In Punjab, where inoculation was most systematically employed, it was reported that the needle used “was a yard long; you died immediately after the operation; men lost their virility and women became sterile . . . and other like nonsense.”30 To add to its woes, and as the epidemic continued to spread, the government was finding its anti-plague measures extremely costly to implement and a great drain on its administrative resources.

Recoiling from Panic It did not take long for the colonial regime in India to realize the dangers of such a deeply hostile public response. Anti-plague measures were proving counterproductive, failing to prevent the spread of plague but also causing panic and running the risk of unleashing a second Mutiny. Already in Bombay in 1898–1900 the need for a partial “liberalizing” of earlier extreme measures had been recognized, with some of 26. Arthur Crawford, Our Troubles in Poona and the Deccan (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1897), 78. 27. Snow, Report, 6–7. 28. Ian J. Catanach, “Poona Politicians and the Plague,” South Asia, vol. 7, no. 2 (1984): 1–18. 29. Between 1911 and 1930 more than 33 million doses of Haffkine’s serum were prepared in Bombay, steadily outstripping the number of plague deaths. As the director of the Haffkine Institute reported in 1930, the reception of inoculation in India had undergone a “profound change.” “Where [at first] riots were liable to occur when inoculation was pressed, recently a riot was threatened because the supply of vaccine ran short”: “Report of the Haffkine Institute for the Year 1930,” IMG, 67, 476–77. 30. E. Wilkinson, Report on Plague in the Punjab from October 1st, 1901, to September 30th, 1902 (Lahore: Punjab Government Gazette, 1904), 9, 28.

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the more offensive provisions withdrawn or modified. Efforts were made to mollify middle-class opinion by allowing well-to-do householders to segregate and treat their sick at home rather than sending them to hospital. Indians were encouraged to create their own caste and community hospitals. Previously shunned practitioners of “traditional” Indian medicine—vaidyas and hakims—were entrusted to notify and treat plague cases, and “influential men” and “natural leaders” were co-opted to mediate between health authorities and their own communities.31 Sanitary policy backed away from outright coercion toward a far greater emphasis upon persuasion and education, in the belief that even though this might take longer to produce results, it would in the end be far more effective in winning over the masses as well as the middle classes. Panic began to abate. Plague reports and manuals were now issued stressing that persuasion, not coercion, was the necessary policy. The Punjab Plague Manual of 1909 opened with the statement that: The cardinal principle of all plague administration must be that no pressure or compulsion, in any shape or form, is to be brought to bear on the people. Encouragement, persuasion and the provision of facilities for carrying out the measures advocated are the only legitimate means of influencing and guiding public opinion in the direction desired.32

To be effective all preventive measures relied on the cooperation of the people, and every effort must be made to enlist their sympathies and bring home to them through their natural leaders and in any other way that may be practicable, that it rests mainly with themselves to bring about, by their own action, the cessation of plague.33

All this suggested that the government had come to recognize that it—or its public health establishment—had at first overreacted to the onset of plague, with generally unhelpful results. But in consequence the struggle to contain the disease (let alone eradicate it) became extraordinarily protracted. Even though the peak of mortality was passed in 1907 (a year which saw 1.3 million deaths from plague across India), localized outbreaks persisted into the 1920s. As aggressive measures were reined back and the disease began to recede, panic gave way to resignation. Punjab’s sanitary commissioner remarked in 1909 that “general apathy and distrust” was now the greatest obstacle to plague control.34 Apathy was also the term used by Bombay’s health officer five years earlier in lamenting how familiarity with plague and lack of effective 31. [James MacNabb Campbell], Report of the Bombay Plague Committee on the Plague in Bombay, 1st July 1897 to the 30th April 1898 (Bombay: “Times of India” Steam Press, 1898), 24. 32. Punjab Plague Manual, 1909 (Lahore: Punjab Government Press, 1909), 1. 33. Ibid. 34. Report on the Sanitary Administration of the Punjab, 1909 (Lahore: “Civil and Military Gazette” Press, 1910), 11.

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measures had “blunted the feelings of the people and rendered them apathetic.”35 By the time influenza struck India in 1918, plague had entered a period of slow decline, but it was still seen as a continuing threat to public health.

The Influenza Epidemic The impact of influenza on India in 1918–19 was devastating. Upwards of 12 million people (perhaps as many as 18 million) died either of influenza itself or, more commonly, from pneumonia and other respiratory complications. Young adults between the ages of 20 and 40 were particularly susceptible, with more women than men dying from the disease. Unlike plague, mortality from the epidemic was concentrated in a few months. It began, allegedly, with the arrival of infected troops at Bombay and Karachi in May and June 1918; this launched the first wave of disease that swept across India in the middle months of the year, resulting in an estimated six million deaths.36 A second, still more fatal, wave erupted in the autumn, between September and November 1918. In one day, October 6, 1918, there were 768 deaths in Bombay city alone, more than in the worst days of the city’s plague epidemic, while across the Bombay Presidency more than a million deaths occurred in October and November 1918. But the disease rapidly lost its initial impetus and within a few years had sunk to statistical insignificance.37 An unknown number of other people, tens of millions, fell seriously ill from the disease and its complications, reports suggesting that in some areas half the population were affected.38 Mortality was exceptionally great in rural areas and among tribal populations in the Central Provinces, which, at 102.6 per thousand of the population, experienced the highest death rate of any province in 1918. Plague began as an urban phenomenon, with most resistance to anti-plague measures and the reporting of rumors and resistance to them occurring in the cities: it then gradually infiltrated the countryside. But the destruction wrought by influenza was most profound in rural India, especially during the epidemic’s “second wave.” The Central Provinces’ sanitary commissioner noted how influenza had “spread with great rapidity, paralysing towns and decimating villages.” In October and November “the ravages of the disease were at their worst in the villages, where the complete helplessness of the people[,]

35. Administration Report of the Municipal Commissioner for the City of Bombay, 1903–04 (Bombay: “Times of India” Press, 1904), 2, 179. 36. F. Norman White, A Preliminary Report on the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 in India (Simla: Government Monotype Press, 1919), 1. 37. Mills, “Influenza Pandemic.” 38. T. G. N. Stokes, “Report on the Influenza Epidemic in the Central Provinces and Berar,” Annual Sanitary Report of the Central Provinces and Berar, 1918 (Nagpur: Government Press, 1919), Appendix 2, p. 3.

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combined with scarcity of food and clothing[,] produced a calamity which baffles description.”39 Like plague, the geographical distribution of influenza was uneven. Western, northern, and central India were hit hard while eastern and southern India were, as during the plague epidemic, less affected. But, unlike plague, influenza, though extremely destructive in 1918–19, rapidly faded out and by the early 1920s no longer appeared a major health threat. Perhaps the greatest contrast with the plague epidemic is that influenza did not occasion anything like the kind of panic that had characterized plague at the outset in 1896–97 and intermittently for several years thereafter. One reason for this surely lies in the different nature of the two diseases. Plague had an impact—an aura one might say, following Walter Benjamin—that greatly exceeded its initial occurrence.40 It was a disease well known to Europe from the Black Death onwards and recalled with particular dread. It was a disease familiar, too, to Islamic medicine and its Indian offshoot, Unani-tibb. An extensive literature existed on how the disease arose and appropriate measures for its treatment and containment.41 Such a culturally entrenched position—for Europeans and Indians alike—made plague a particularly problematic site for sanitary negotiation. The hasty and draconian nature of state measures accentuated Hindu and Muslim fears about colonialism and hence about the way in which the sick and dead were treated. Influenza, by contrast, carried very little cultural or political baggage. It had no anticipatory “aura.” It was not a disease extensively discussed in Unani and Ayurvedic texts: indeed, it was said not to exist in the original Ayurvedic corpus at all.42 Like other parts of Eurasia, India had experienced an epidemic of influenza in 1890, and, as F. Norman White, the Government of India’s sanitary commissioner, noted in October 1918, its symptoms were “strikingly similar to the present epidemic.” Like the current epidemic, too, it arrived from Europe via India’s western ports.43 But the 1890 epidemic caused far less mortality than that of 1918–19, occasioning neither panic nor stimulating medical research. With the benefit of hindsight, Punjab’s sanitary commissioner regretted the “apathy and skepticism” with which the earlier influenza epidemic had been greeted by doctors profession in India.44 The 1918–19 epidemic found India utterly unprepared. 39. Annual Sanitary Report of the Central Provinces, 1918, 8. 40. Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” in Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1997 [1985]), 240–57 (247–48). 41. See Guy Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb: Plural Healing in Late Colonial India (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007). 42. Koilas Chandra Bose, “Epidemic Influenza in and around the City of Calcutta,” IMG, vol. 55, 1920, 169–74 (169). 43. White, October 15, 1918, India, Education (Sanitary), no. 7, October 1918, India Office Records [hereafter IOR], British Library, London. 44. Appendix D: “The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 in the Punjab,” Report on the Sanitary Administration of the Punjab, 1918 (Lahore: Superintendent, Government Printing, Punjab, 1919), xv.

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Moreover, unlike plague, influenza spread with “lightning rapidity.”45 The earlier disease essentially relied on rats and their fleas for transmission of the plague bacillus (a connection only scientifically established in 1897). It progressed slowly from town to town and village to village, though once established it was difficult to eradicate. Hence, it was most often the anticipatory nature of government measures (as well as their drastic nature) that provoked such a pronounced panic reaction, and it continued to do so as body searches at railway stations and road junctions were persisted with, as entire villages were evacuated and their inhabitants removed to segregated plague camps, and as determined attempts were made to promote inoculation. Postmortems, despite their unpopularity, remained a crucial diagnostic tool. Nothing of the kind attended the influenza epidemic. Characterized by “intense infectivity” and a short incubation period of only six to 48 hours, the disease raced across India, especially during the deadly second wave.46 Concentrations of people—in workplaces, cinemas, markets, and schools, on public transport, in the home or crowded slums— presented ideal conditions for rapid person-to-person transmission. Reports speak of “the absolute helplessness of the people,” or liken the epidemic to “an avalanche” no state agency could hope to arrest.47 Influenza incapacitated and immobilized entire families, leaving them without medical assistance or even the care of relatives and friends. There were some incidents of localized panic and flight, especially during the early days in Bombay, causing the Government of India’s sanitary commissioner to remark: “During the panic caused by the epidemic the trains were filled with immigrants from infected centres, many of them being ill.”48 Yet even in Bombay there was no repetition of the mass exodus that had paralyzed the city in 1896–98. Many people simply died where they were. There was no time to protest, no energy to riot, no anticipatory and coercive state measures to convert dread into action. Indeed, on this occasion, the state was largely inactive. Its soldiers, policemen, postmen, and sanitary staff were immobilized by sickness and death. The senior ranks of the medical services had been depleted by the war and the state had, anyway, little to offer by way of preventive or remedial measures, apart from advising people to stay indoors, and to keep warm and well nourished. Bengal’s sanitary commissioner, Charles Bentley, aptly summarized the situation: Owing to the sudden onset and rapid spread of the epidemic little could be done to check the ravages of the disease and in the face of such a widespread outbreak the medical and sanitary organizations were powerless to attempt measures 45. Bhupal Singh, “Influenza,” IMG, vol. 55, 1920, 15–18 (15). 46. “Influenza Memorandum,” Bengal, Municipal (Sanitation), no. 15, 1920, IOR. 47. Stokes, “Report on the Influenza Epidemic,” 5. 48. Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India, 1918 (Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing, India, 1920), 61.

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Firsthand accounts of the epidemic repeatedly stress incapacity and paralysis, and the fast moving and often fatal consequences of the disease. One of the most vivid descriptions came from N. H. Choksy, assistant health officer at Bombay’s Arthur Road hospital, the scene of violent clashes over the removal and treatment of plague victims in 1896. In his long experience he had never come across so many cases of physical deterioration, men with haggard features, emaciated from semi-starvation and clothed literally in rags, as during this epidemic. Their condition was greatly exaggerated by their continuing to work for 2 or 3 days after the onset of the disease, so that they naturally fell easy victims to it. The high prices and consequent dearness of food coupled with high rents had knocked all stamina out of them.50

The Want of Panic One explanation for the widespread panic in the late 1890s and early 1900s and its virtual absence in 1918–19 thus lies in the very different character of the two diseases, plague in the first instance, influenza in the second. But that is not the only reason why this dog did not bark. No less significant was the lack of interventionist measures against influenza by the government and local public health authorities as well as a changed attitude on the part of the public, or at least of those who influenced public attitudes, toward Western medical and sanitary measures. As already indicated, since the early plague years the government and its public health experts had come to the view that aggressive intervention was politically unwise and counterproductive in India and that efforts instead had to be made to persuade and educate the public into a more enlightened attitude. But it was not just a matter of state policy. By 1918, the medical and sanitary services in India had been depleted by four years of war and the loss to military service of senior medical personnel. The epidemic left the authorities with no convincing strategy for combating influenza other than to recommend that people keep away from work once they fell ill, avoid public places, and try to rest and eat light but nourishing food. Some temporary hospitals were set up and travelling dispensaries mobilized. A great number of leaflets were printed and distributed in English and the vernaculars advising people what they should do, but the kinds of drastic measures used against plague in 1896–97 seemed to have no relevance, and

49. Report on Sanitation in Bengal, 1918 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1919), 24. 50. Choksy, “Influenza,” 78.

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there were, anyway, no time or resources to deploy them even if they had seemed advisable.51 It helped, too, that even though it followed the same route once it arrived in India, spreading from Bombay outwards to the north and center of India, the 1918–19 influenza epidemic, unlike plague, arrived in India from the West rather than the East. Since Europe had singularly failed to do much to prevent or contain influenza what could India possibly hope to do? By contrast, plague, in moving west from Hong Kong to India, seemed to demand drastic and urgent measures to save the West from an eastern epidemic invasion. Plague in India in the late 1890s attracted a host of investigative commissions, including foreign delegations from Germany, Austria, France, Russia, and Turkey. Intensive local research in Bombay especially was also prompted by the appointment of a Plague Research Committee and the arrival of the Plague Commission from London. The meteoric rise of bacteriology as a laboratorybased medical specialty in India and the creation of a separate bacteriology section of the state medical service owed much to the timing of the plague epidemic and its perceived political and sanitary importance. Influenza, for all its catastrophic mortality, produced a far smaller response. Only one medical officer (R. H. Malone of the Indian Medical Service) was deputed by the Government of India and the Indian Research Fund Association in December 1918 to investigating the bacteriology of influenza and the possibility of developing an effective prophylactic.52 In fact, the cause of the disease, a virus rather than a bacillus as previously thought, was not discovered until 1933. Articles appeared in the Indian medical press on influenza, recounting local experience and discussing possible treatments and prophylactics, but in nothing like the volume that had followed the plague epidemic.53 When a fresh epidemic did not arrive after 1920, medical and sanitary interest rapidly waned and returned to more enduring issues like the containment and treatment of malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, and kala-azar. Punjab’s sanitary commissioner observed in 1919 that there had previously been a “panic” over plague, which had led to the setting up of a plague department, and then a decade later over malaria, resulting in a department dedicated to that disease. For a time the influenza epidemic, which cost Punjab almost one million lives, seemed likely to produce a similar result—an influenza department—but this time it did not happen.54 51. For illustrations of this, see Ramanna, “Coping” and the provincial reports already cited. 52. India, Education (Sanitary), nos. 15–17, December 1918, IOR; White, Preliminary Report, 12–14. 53. Further to articles already cited, see E. Selby Philson, “Influenza in Bombay,” IMG, vol. 53, 1918, 441–48; Debendra Nath Sen, “Influenza as Observed in the Sambhu Nath Pandit Hospital, Calcutta,” IMG, vol. 55, 1920, 89–92; Editorial, “Influenza,” IMG, vol. 55, 1920, 381–82. India attracted some (minimal) attention in the British medical press: H. G. Waters, “A Note on Influenza in India, 1918–20,” British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 3120 (1920): 591–92. 54. Report on the Sanitary Administration of the Punjab, 1919 (Lahore: Superintendent, Government Printing, Punjab, 1920), 17.

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If plague had preeminently been India’s business, influenza was Europe’s or North America’s. It was there that the main debate over causation took place and the hunt for an influenza bacillus most actively pursued. It was there, too, that the main investigation into a prophylactic vaccine took place, though bacteriologists in India experimented with their own vaccines or versions of formulae pioneered in European laboratories. However, with the bitter experience of popular opposition to anti-plague inoculation in mind, many sanitary officials were skeptical about the social acceptability of an anti-influenza vaccine even if one could be developed. In the view of the United Provinces’ sanitary commissioner it was simply “not a practical proposition.”55 The general view was that such a massive crisis was unlikely to recur and that the root problem lay with India’s ignorance, poverty, and lack of basic medical services, especially in the countryside. When in July 1924 the Indian Medical Gazette identified the “seven scourges of India,” influenza was not among them (though plague was).56 There was no commission of enquiry into influenza as there had been into plague, no foreign deputations. Most accounts of the epidemic appeared in provincial and municipal annual reports (or as appendices to them) rather than as separate publications. Probably the most dramatic and enduring record of the epidemic was that given in the Indian census report of 1921, in which the full extent of India’s demographic loss was for the first time revealed along with its “tremendous importance from every aspect of national life.”57 In such circumstances, with a more cautious (even nonexistent) state strategy, it was easier for the leaders of society—the heads of castes and communities, urban magnates, and social service organizations—to mobilize their own resources and networks to assist the sick and poor or to set up temporary hospitals and dispensaries. Indian philanthropists and charity organizations, many of which had first been goaded into action by the state’s culturally and politically insensitive measures against plague, now took responsibility for tending the sick and for supplying food, milk, blankets, and other essentials. “Never before,” wrote Norman White, “perhaps in the history of India, have the educated and more fortunately placed members of the community, come forward in such large numbers to help their poorer brethren in times of distress.”58 The role of the state medical and public services seemed slight by comparison. But, as people had little to fear from the state, they equally had little reason to panic.

55. C. Mactaggart, “Report on the Epidemic of Influenza in the United Provinces during 1918,” Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, 1918 (Allahabad: Superintendent, Government Press, United Provinces, 1919), Appendix D, 15A. 56. “On the Seven Scourges of India,” IMG, vol. 59, 1924, 351–55. 57. “R. K.” [R. Knowles], “The Medical Aspects of the Indian Census of 1921,” IMG, vol. 59, 1924, 466–69 (469). 58. White, Preliminary Report, 12.

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This is not, however, to say that rumor made no appearance. On the contrary, in his preliminary report on the influenza pandemic of 1918, White deplored the “wild rumors” that had become “extremely prevalent” in India. Some of these were related to influenza itself—whether it was an entirely new disease or a rare form of plague. But other rumors circulating were of a more general nature. One attributed the pandemic to “the extensive use of poison gas on the western front”; another blamed “the evil machinations of our unscrupulous enemy” (Germany). White himself indicated that these rumors “would scarcely have deserved mention had they not been so current in India during the months of October and November [1918].”59 But across India as a whole, despite the phenomenal mortality, influenza appears not to have generated the same sense of profound panic that characterized plague scarcely 20 years earlier. This is not to deny that influenza had an enormous social as well as demographic impact but rather to argue that the reaction to it was far more muted than it had been to plague.60 Perhaps the very speed and scale of the catastrophe helps explain this. Writing to his son Harilal in November 1918, Mohandas Gandhi observed how his family, like many others, had suffered deaths from the disease. “But,” he added, “such news is pouring in from everywhere so that now the mind is barely affected.”61 In late 1918, Gandhi was fixated on the coming struggle over the Rowlatt Bills: influenza seemed less perturbing than the anticipated intensification of state repression. Similarly, one response to the plague epidemic had been the familiar practice in Hindu India of representing disease as a female deity, with the power to control as well as inflict disease.62 Thus, in the Worli district of Bombay city in 1903 a woman “posed as a goddess gifted with the power of curing plague.” When large numbers of people crowded around her residence to seek her blessing, the municipal health officer sought to have her prosecuted for endangering the public: she was convicted and sentenced.63 By contrast, there is scant evidence, apart from a passing reference by the sanitary commissioner in Madras, for influenza as the visitation of a disease deity, and even he used that idea to argue for the decline of superstition and the growing popularity among Indians of “modern methods of treatment.”64 59. Ibid., 1–2. 60. But, for a more detailed analysis, see David Hardiman, “The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 and the Adivasis of Western India,” Social History of Medicine, vol. 25, no. 3 (2012): 644–64. 61. M. K. Gandhi, Gandhi to Harilal Gandhi, November 23, 1918, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 17 (Delhi: Government of India, Publications Division, 1965), 247. Gandhi’s apparent indifference to influenza contrasts with the importance he attached to plague during his South African years; see M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography, or the Story of My Experiments with Truth (London: Penguin, 2001), 266–72. 62. Crooke, Religion and Folklore, 118. 63. Administration Report of the Municipal Commissioner for the City of Bombay, 1903–04 (Bombay: “Times of India” Press, 1904), 163. 64. Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner, Madras, 1918 (Madras: Superintendent, Government Press, 1919), 8.

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Likewise, I have seen no evidence in connection with the influenza epidemic of momiai rumors or similar tales of European malevolence. There was a mildly xenophobic attempt to blame the military authorities for the importation of the epidemic in the first place (a claim government sources vehemently denied). There were also complaints about the slowness of the Bombay Corporation and other municipal bodies to react to the unfolding crisis and the inadequate response of the state and the Western medical system in general (to which the response was that governments around the world had struggled to cope with such an unprecedented onslaught).65 There was a rumor that the governor of Bombay, Lord Willingdon, or his wife had succumbed to the disease and that this explained their absence from public engagements.66 But no one accused Willingdon and his government of poisoning the water supply or of spreading the disease in order to cull a large and troublesome populace. Only subsequently, following the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April 1919, was a suggestion made in Gandhi’s Young India that the Government of India, by its indifference to Indian lives, had allowed six million Indians to perish from influenza “like rats without succour.”67 Poverty, the absence of state intervention, and the speed with which influenza spread and incapacitated its victims are more likely explanations in this case for the failure of rumor to translate into widespread panic. On the face of it, this might still appear surprising. Not only was the mortality enormous and the advance of the disease extraordinarily rapid, but the epidemic also occurred at a time of widespread unrest in India. If the anti-plague agitation of the late 1890s was partly fuelled by political discontent, why was not the same true in 1918? Severe wartime shortages had driven the price of basic commodities—food, cloth, kerosene—to abnormal heights and across large swaths of the country drought and poor harvests threatened famine. A shortage of fodder made milk costly and blankets were in short supply—factors that made it still more difficult for the mass of the population to survive the influenza. Across India the impact of underlying malnutrition, poverty and debility was widely recognized as intensifying the deadly impact of the disease. It was generally agreed that “the poor and rural classes suffered most.”68 In the Madras Presidency, where the epidemic was less destructive than in northern and western India, food prices shot up to 50 percent above normal and crime rates soared to their highest levels since the

65. White, Preliminary Report, 1–2. This was not, of course, a purely Indian complaint: see, for example, Sandra M. Tomkins, “The Failure of Expertise: Public Health Policy in Britain during the 1918–19 Influenza Epidemic,” Social History of Medicine, vol. 5, no. 3 (1992): 435–54. 66. Report on the Indian Papers Published in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1918), for October–November 1918. 67. “Public Health,” Young India, April 23, 1919, cited in Ramanna, “Coping,” 98. 68. White, Preliminary Report, 9; “The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 in the Punjab,” xvi; Report on Sanitation in Bengal, 1918, 9–10, 21–23.

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1876–78 famine.69 Popular unrest further took the form of food riots, in which protestors tried to prevent the export of local grain or agitated for prices to be reduced to affordable levels. In some places violent clashes followed.70 Transposing the language of epidemic disorder to the current crisis of subsistence, The Hindu newspaper reported that in Salem an old woman had looted chilies from a market stall. “The epidemic soon spread to a few other domestic articles of necessity and the result was a wholesale panic . . . ”71 But influenza, the real epidemic, elicited no such reaction. The period was also marked by growing political unrest, as nationalist politicians pressed for home rule and Gandhi began the campaign for Indian freedom (swaraj) that would lead him on to the Rowlatt Satyagraha of April 1919 and the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–22.72 Again, however, apart from the comment in Young India previously cited, little connection was made between the menace of influenza and the rising tide of anticolonial protest. If a correlation was posited between disease and politics it lay elsewhere—in likening colonialism to the ravages of tuberculosis, or the rumor that sanitary measures against hookworm disease were part of “an insidious scheme connected with the Rowlatt Act.”73

Conclusion Historically, the term “panic” was ascribed many different meanings, even within the relatively limited context of two catastrophic epidemics—bubonic plague and influenza—that occurred in India approximately 25 years apart. Panic could, at one level, be merely descriptive—a means of recording and relaying, often with empathy, the intensity of the catastrophe that had befallen the mass of the population during a major epidemic and the suffering and bewilderment it had caused. But one function of the term’s use was clearly to distance observers and commentators—whether the British civilian administration, colonial doctors and public health officers, or 69. Report on the Administration of the Police of the Madras Presidency, 1918 (Madras: Superintendent, Government Press, 1919), 10, 13–15. By contrast, influenza received scant notice in the Madras government’s confidential report for the first half of October 1918, despite mortality doubling in some areas: India, Home (Political), no. 23, November 1918, Tamil Nadu Archives, Chennai. 70. David Arnold, “Looting, Grain Riots and Government Policy in South India, 1918,” Past and Present, no. 84 (1979): 111–45. 71. Hindu, September 5, 1918, 6. 72. Judith M. Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power: Indian Politics, 1915–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); R. Kumar, ed., Essays on Gandhi Politics: The Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Several contributors to the latter work refer to the influenza epidemic, but suggest no specific connection with the Rowlatt agitation; see, for example, Donald W. Ferrell, “The Rowlatt Satyagraha in Delhi,” in Essays on Gandhi Politics: The Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919, ed. R. Kumar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971): 189–235 (198). For influenza, popular unrest, and “apocalyptic bazaar rumors” in 1918–20, see C. A. Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad, 1880–1920 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 246. 73. Resolution, May 31, 1920, Bengal, Municipal (Sanitation), no. 1, July 1920, IOR.

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members of the Indian middle classes and the medical elite—from the actions and beliefs of the supposedly uneducated, credulous, and superstitious masses. Panic connoted “wild” rumor and the circulation of “absurd” stories. It signified flight (when such irresponsible action was bound to spread the disease), primitive belief in disease deities, or physical assaults on the very individuals and institutions that were trying to help the sick and dying. Although no class of society might be immune to panic or indifferent to rumor, identifying popular responses as panic served discursively as a means of “othering,” a representation of irrational behavior that reassured the civilized observer of his or her superiority in education, common sense, and scientific understanding. In this it ran counter, in spirit, to the attempts of later historians like George Rudé and E. P. Thompson, to demonstrate the logical response and rational conduct of the “crowd.”74 Panic was a reaction to be condemned by individuals or, where possible, anticipated and contained—whether through coercion or by propaganda and education—by the remedial action of the state. But that was not all. Panic—even if it might only with hindsight be branded with that clearly pejorative term—could be constituted by the overhasty action of the state, compelled by what it saw to be the urgent political or economic necessity to act, or driven by what seemed to be the irrefutable advice of its technical and scientific advisers. In 1896–98, the Government of India and its provincial administrations, acting on the best advice available, adopted a course of action that they later regretted and from which they subsequently retreated. Panic had its uses—not just as a term of condemnation but also a rhetorical device to redress previous excesses or reverse earlier aberrant responses. Again, from a position of political opposition rather than one of colonial control, panic could also be a form of leverage by which interested groups, in the plague case the Indian middle class, could draw attention to actions and beliefs which, while they did not share them or claimed not to share them, highlighted the arrogance, impetuosity, and insensitivity of colonial state policy. In such circumstances, popular rumor and panic were manifestations of discontent that members of the Indian elite had an interest in publicizing, often by means of the press. This ploy served as a means by which the authority of an indigenous elite could be restated and, if successful, reinstated, as largely happened in the wake of the first bout of anti-plague measures. The conclusions to be drawn from this discussion are in one sense banal. Plague and influenza epidemics were very different animals—one “barked,” the other did not. But, methodologically, there is value in comparing one epidemic episode with another, especially when they lay so close in time and tracked much the same physical and social terrain, in order to establish what they shared as well as in what respects 74. George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848 (New York: Wiley, 1964); E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present, no. 50 (1971): 76–136.

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they differed. The responses to plague and influenza in India over a 25-year period were significantly different and so provide clues as to how both state-directed public health and Indian opinion had shifted, how a process of education (or “apathy”) had informed attitudes and responses, away from the reciprocal panics of the late 1890s and early 1900s to the far more muted responses of 1918–19. At the same time, looking at these parallel epidemic episodes highlights the very different nature of the diseases themselves, the speed of their advance, the manner of their transmission and their impact on victims. Comparison encourages us to reflect on why the scale of mortality is not in itself a sufficient guide to the level and intensity of the social reaction—measured through rumor and panic—that a given epidemic occasioned.

6 Panic Encabled: Epidemics and the Telegraphic World Robert Peckham

There is good reason why epidemics make compelling stories: they satisfy a basic requirement for drama. The narrative arc of the “pandemic thriller” moves from discovery of the deadly virus through panic to resolution. In so doing, the plotline traces a recognizably “dramaturgic form.” As Charles Rosenberg has observed in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic: Epidemics start at a moment in time, proceed on a stage limited in space and duration, following a plot line of increasing and revelatory tension, move to a crisis of individual and collective character, then drift toward closure.1

Given the inherently dramaturgic quality of epidemic crises, it is perhaps not surprising that they should feature prominently as a theme in modern fiction. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example, published in 1897 (at the moment when laboratory science was changing how infectious diseases were understood and managed), follows a rhythm of intensifying tension and closure; it is “dramaturgic” precisely in the way that Rosenberg defines the epidemic. Moreover, vampirism is imagined in the narrative as a lethal infection, one caused by a “parasite” and contracted through contaminated blood; a disease that calls for drastic containment measures to prevent it from wreaking havoc in the “crowded streets” of London, a world city characterized by “the whirl and rush of humanity.”2 In June 1897, the capital had been the scene of elaborate pageantry, marking the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee with a “Festival of the British Empire.” Before leaving Buckingham Palace for a service held outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, arrangements had been made for the monarch “to send a simultaneous message to her subjects throughout the world,” the words “transmitted over the private wire from the Palace to the Central Telegraph Department in St. Martinsle-Grand, then to be flashed to the farthest corner of the British Empire: — ‘From my 1. Charles E. Rosenberg, “What Is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective,” in Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 278–92 (279). The historian Richard Evans has also reflected on “a common ‘dramaturgy’ for all epidemics”; see Paul Slack, “Introduction,” in Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence, ed. Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–20 (3). 2. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1897), 19.

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heart I thank my beloved people. May God bless them. V.R. & I.’”3 In Stoker’s narrative, the jubilation of empire and the dynamics of imperial expansion are reversed as the protagonists struggle to halt the diffusion of infection back to the heart of Empire from the borderlands of Europe in the East. What measures are deployed in Dracula to contain this epidemic menace and the panic it threatens to instigate? Above all, the application of modern technologies of communication: trains, steamships, newspapers, phonographs, typewriters—and, preeminently, the telegraph. In this “machine text,” the plot centers on circulation and transmission.4 The media of modern technologies are integrated into the novel’s structure, as the story is told through an assembly of newspaper clippings, telegrams, and shorthand journals. The search to track down the parasite requires an elaborate network of intelligence, the relaying of exhaustive flows of data through instruments of long-distance communication (railway, telegraphy, newsprint), and the collation of facts in a typewritten report.5 In the face of the chaos engendered by the parasite and the burgeoning information produced by technology itself, the characters strive to impose an order: “a whole connected narrative,” as one character puts it.6 The telegraph network plays a critical role in Stoker’s “epidemic” plot. While the characters receive information by telegram, the telegraph system enables them to respond at a distance, assembling dispersed information to preempt the parasite’s actions. The defeat of the invasive alien, in other words, is a consequence of exploiting the divergence between material forms of transportation and the communication of dematerialized news.7 Or, put somewhat differently, the novel suggests that an infectious disease is preventable when forms of technological communication surpass the speed of its transmission. Dracula is, in effect, a race to communicate. This chapter is concerned with telegraphy and infectious disease in the 1890s, at the very moment that Stoker was writing his novel and when telegraphy and “the discovery of steam as a motive power” were bringing a new “contactiveness,” in the 3. Sir Walter Besant, The Queen’s Reign and its Commemoration: A Literary and Pictorial Review of the Period; the Story of the Victorian Transformation, 1837–1897 (London: Werner Company, 1897), 92. 4. Judith Halberstam, “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” in Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 248–66 (251). 5. Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 194–219 (195); see also Christopher Keep, “Technology and Information: Accelerating Developments,” in A Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 137–54; Jennifer Wicke, “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its media,” ELH: English Literary History, vol. 59, no. 2 (1992): 467–93. 6. Stoker, Dracula, 210. 7. Before the advent of telegraphy, communication and transport were inextricably linked; see James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York and London: Routledge, 1992 [1989]), 213–14. In the Oxford English Dictionary the term “communications” refers to the transmission of information, while “transport” refers to the conveyance of people and things.

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words of Sir Francis de Winton (1889), to international relations (Figure 6.1).8 The aim is to consider how the telegraph was deployed to manage public anxieties and, conversely, to explore the extent to which telegraphy in fact helped to produce the panic it strove to manage. The world was understood to be contracting, leading to speculation about what the ultimate result of this “shrinkage” would be.9 As the intercontinental telegraph pushed the global economy onto “real time,” what uses were made of the telegraph for tracking communicable disease threats?10 To what extent did telegraphic technology shape the representation of those threats? In the face of accelerating flows of information and given the fragmented data amassed from different sources, how could “a whole, connected narrative” be produced to make sense of apparently random unfolding events and to forestall panic? And in what ways did epidemic crises impact upon the evolving rationalities and techniques of imperial governance? In addressing these interrelated questions, the chapter seeks to shed light on the operations of a modern telegraphic culture in relation to disease crises: to explore how telegraphy shaped habits and practices, producing a new form of literacy—a new way of “reading” crisis and containing panic. In the 1890s, in the face of global disease threats and as competing conceptualizations of “disease” vied for dominance, the telegraph came to be envisaged as a technology that might help to “pin down” an epidemic’s meanings, fixing its identity, and in so doing neutralizing the menace it posed. Telegraphic pinpointing took place on a number of fronts. While it was a matter of disciplining language (communicating events in a standardized but compressed telegraphic prose), it was also a matter of agglomerating apparently disconnected data in order to map infection, plotting its movement over time and in space. To borrow Paula Treichler’s phrase, disease events were not only epidemics of “real” communicable infections: they were also “epidemics of signification.”11 “Panic” might be understood, in this context, as the result of multiplying and often conflicting interpretations of disease: what it was, where it came from, and how it might be detected. The role of public health was increasingly to manage information, in part by constraining the proliferating meanings of disease, in order to influence public behavior. The emphasis was on the cultivation of “anti-panic”

8. Colonel Sir Francis de Winton, “Address,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography, vol. XI (London: Edward Stanford, 1889), 613–22 (621); see also the discussion in Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 88. 9. “The Effects of the Shrinkage of the World,” Spectator, September 15, 1900, 9. 10. On the shift to “real time,” see Jorma Ahvenainen, “Telegraphs, Trade and Policy: The Role of the International Telegraphs in the Years 1870–1914,” in The Emergence of a World Economy, 1500–1914, 2 vols., ed. Wolfram Fischer, R. Marvin McInnis, and Jürgen Schneider (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden GmbH, 1986), II, 505–18 (514). 11. Paula A. Treichler, How To Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 11.

Figure 6.1 “The Eastern Telegraphic System and Its General Connections, 1894.” © Cable & Wireless Communications, by kind permission of the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum.

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as a corrective to irrational mass behavior.12 Panic was differentiated from the primal fears of premodern society and viewed as a distinctly modern phenomenon. As The Spectator observed in January 1890 when the influenza was sweeping across Britain, inciting widespread anxiety: the “panic” occasioned by the dangers of contemporary infections was fundamentally dissimilar to the “acute terror” manifested in the face of earlier catastrophic events in history.13 The two episodes examined here are, firstly, the so-called “Russian Influenza” which threatened the metropole directly (coming, like Stoker’s parasite, from the “East End of Europe”) and arrived in Britain in three waves: from December 1889 through January 1890, April to June 1891, and the final wave in late 1891 and early 1892.14 Telegraphic newspaper reports were crucial in mapping the influenza and conceptualizing the threat as a “contagion.” State agencies, too, played a key role in this conceptualization: the Local Government Board—a government supervisory body, created in 1871 to oversee local administration in England and Wales—sought to track the epidemic in order to elucidate the disease’s etiology and its mode of transmission.15 Like the race to thwart the parasite in Stoker’s novel, such efforts to follow influenza’s baffling diffusion were predicated on a presumption that the rapid transmission of near “real time” information could overtake and defuse the disease threat itself. Secondly, the chapter considers an epidemic at the “edge” of empire, much further to the East, in Hong Kong. The 1894 outbreak of bubonic plague in the British crown colony is often considered to mark the beginning of the “Third Plague Pandemic,” which may have killed as many as 15 million people globally (see Chapter 5). Specifically, the chapter examines the exchange of information between London and Hong Kong to suggest how the compressed form of the telegraphic message interacted with the more prolix dispatch. The focus is on the tension between immediate, “real time” information and the need to process that information through its contextualization with other data in a “connected narrative.” In this sense, the plague could be said to function as a “sampling device,” in Rosenberg’s words: at once a found 12. “Anti-Panic,” Spectator, December 16, 1893, 13. 13. “The Decrease of Certain Fears,” Spectator, January 4, 1890, 19. 14. There were, however, subsequent recurrences of influenza, including an outbreak in 1893–94. I borrow the term “East End of Europe” from Allen Upward’s account of his travels through the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire, The East End of Europe (London: John Murray, 1908). 15. Mark Honigsbaum has written on the role of the Local Government Board in the influenza, and done much to refocus attention on the importance of the epidemic in relation to the evolving technologies of public health; see, for example: “The ‘Russian’ Influenza in the UK: Lessons Learned, Opportunities Missed,” Vaccine, vol. 29, suppl. 2 (2011): B11–B15; “The Great Dread: Cultural and Psychological Impacts and Responses to the ‘Russian’ Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889–1893,” Social History of Medicine, vol. 23, no. 2 (2010): 299–319. An overview of the influenza in Britain and the attendant panic it produced is provided in his book A History of the Great Influenza Pandemics: Death, Panic and Hysteria, 1830–1920 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014).

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object and a natural experiment “capable of illuminating fundamental patterns of social value and institutional practice.”16 The arguments presented in this chapter are therefore fourfold: firstly, by the final decade of the nineteenth century, telegraphy had begun to function as a vital means of mapping disease. The 1889–92 influenza pandemic stimulated renewed interest in visualizing the global spread of disease through its representation in maps.17 As Tom Koch has observed, while bacteriology made visible hitherto invisible disease agents, maps of disease transformed “individual pathology . . . into a public health event affecting communities and nations.”18 Here, the chapter considers the role that telegraphy played in the production of disease maps, anticipating Nicholas King’s discussion in Chapter 8 on how technologies of visualization have shaped a contemporary iconography of “new” infectious disease and in so doing produced novel forms of collective panic. Secondly, the compressed form and efficiency of the telegram influenced the nature of imperial governance in significant ways, particularly in the context of global crises.19 Thirdly, natural disasters and disease crises acted as spurs to the development of telegraphic communication. Fourthly, panic was not only induced by the specter of mass infection but, ironically, by the very medium of mass communication that held out the key to preventing mass infection: the telegraph. Hong Kong, noted Isabella Bird in 1883, “has telegraphic communication with the whole civilized world, and its trade is kept thereby in a continual fever.”20 This inducement to “fever,” from which the colony clearly profited, could also jeopardize its stability. At the height of the plague epidemic in the summer of 1894, articles in the Hongkong Telegraph advocated a thorough cleansing of the colony with powerful “germicides”: from bodies and the interior of homes to the streets outside. Telegraph cables were no exception. Imagining the “cataclysm of fatal misfortunes” that might lie ahead for a plagueridden Hong Kong, the newspaper envisioned panicky port cities across Asia—from Saigon to Manila—laying “the telegraph cables with bisulphated India-rubber casing” and quarantining telegraph clerks as potential super-spreaders of disease.21 16. Rosenberg, “What Is an Epidemic?” 279. However, for a critique of the notion that cholera epidemics provide “exacting tests of societal strength,” see Christopher Hamlin, Cholera: The Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1–13 (11). 17. Frank G. Clemow, The Geography of Disease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), v. Medical cartography, which originated in eighteenth-century “spot maps” of specific diseases, had become global in scope by the mid-nineteenth century; see Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (London: Reaktion, 2001), 159. 18. Tom Koch, Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 2. 19. As Simon Winchester has noted, the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 played an important role in the consolidation of telegraphy; see Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 (London: Penguin 2004 [2003]), 179–98. 20. Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop), The Golden Chersonese And The Way Thither (London: John Murray, 1883), 40. 21. “The Duty of the Hour” and “Hongkong Six Months Hence,” Hongkong Telegraph, June 15, 1894, 2. The idea of the telegraph or, for that matter, the telephone, as an instrument of infection was a

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Telegraphs could be dangerously infective. As Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury has argued, while a telegraph network was introduced in India from the early 1850s, in part, as a strategic technology for integrating and controlling imperial space, the telegraph also exposed the Empire’s vulnerability to subversion and sabotage, functioning as a conduit for anti-imperial sentiment and action.22 In other words, the telegraph could work backwards, fueling “epidemics of signification” even as it strove to curtail them by disciplining communication and fixing meaning. Surprisingly little has been written about the development of telegraphy in relation to disease threats. In contrast, some attention has been paid to the role of telegraphic technology in military planning and imperial rivalries, in the rise of global markets, as well as in meteorology and weather forecasting.23 In each of these cases, the telegraph is conceived as a “sentinel,” imparting information from advanced outposts, monitoring news, and helping to shape preparedness plans.24 Sometimes the telegraph stations took on the operational modalities of the military camp or the makeshift colonial laboratory. At the turn of the century, arguments were being made for telegraphic stations in remoter parts of the Empire to double up for use as strategic field hospitals serving scattered rural populations.25 However, even as the plague was spreading through southern China in the early 1890s, in the wake of the influenza pandemic, the shortcomings of a global surveillance system were being noted. As one author remarked in January 1894 in the pages of the Lancet, underlining the inadequate responses to the influenza pandemic a few years before: commonplace; see, for example, the note on “The Telephone as a Source of Infection,” British Medical Journal, vol. 1, no. 1360 (January 22, 1887) which reported concerns that “the promiscuous use of the mouth-pieces of public telephones” could lead to infection, requiring their regular sanitizing, 166. 22. Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury, “The Sinews of Panic and the Nerves of Empire: The Imagined State’s Entanglement with Information Panic, India, c. 1880–1912,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 38, no. 4 (2004): 965–1002; Telegraphic Imperialism: Crisis and Panic in the Indian Empire, c.1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). This was an internal telegraphic system. It was not until 1870 that the British-Indian Submarine Telegraph Company linked Bombay to Aden and Suez by cable. 23. See, for example, Javier Márquez Quevedo, “Telecommunications and Colonial Rivalry: European Telegraph Cables to the Canary Islands and Northwest Africa, 1883–1914,” Historical Social Research, vol. 35, no. 1 (2010): 108–24; Byron Lew and Bruce Cater, “The Telegraph, Co-ordination of Tramp Shipping, and Growth in World Trade, 1870–1910,” European Review of Economic History, vol. 10, no. 2 (2006): 147–73; Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); for an account of the importance of the telegraph for meteorology in inter-port China, see Marlon Zhu, “Typhoons, Meteorological Intelligence, and the Inter-Port Mercantile Community in Nineteenth-Century China” (unpublished PhD thesis, Binghamton University, 2012). 24. As Frédéric Keck and Andrew Lakoff note: “The term sentinel has come to describe living beings or technical devices that provide the first signs of an impending catastrophe”; see “Preface,” Limn (Sentinel Devices), no. 3 (2013): 2–3. 25. See, for example, the article in Adelaide’s Advertiser, “The Overland Telegraphic Line: The MedicineChest Question,” March 31, 1904, 9.

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In its absence, the telegraph is imagined, here, as a “frontier” technology, a sentinel and herald of crisis, relaying critical information back to prepare for the disease’s advance. By the mid-1890s, there was widespread appreciation of the telegraph’s value as a key technology in the global surveillance of infectious disease.

Telegraphic Surveillance and the Influenza Outbreak of 1889–92 In Britain, the advent of the telegraph from the middle of the nineteenth century sparked debate about the benefits, dangers, and significance of telegraphic communication. Was the ability to communicate invisibly and at speed with persons in distant places healthy? What were the consequences of this attenuated intercourse? Many forewarned of the hazards it posed: the telegraph would lead to a “perpetual dissipation of the mind,” encouraging a perilous diminishing of the intellect.27 However, while the telegraph was being exploited practically by the railways at least from the 1850s, there was increasing awareness of the role that the telegraph could play in medical services, for example in hospital communications or in relation to ambulances that could be dispatched in response to telegraphic messages.28 By the early 1880s, the cable had begun to transform medical intelligence and practice with physicians making use of the telephone and telegraph in emergencies.29 “The free use of the cable for obtaining medical information of public importance is by no means new to us,” declared an editorial in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) entitled “The Telegraph in Medical Journalism.” The telegraphed accounts of the cholera epidemic in Egypt in 1883 had been impressively “prompt, accurate, and conclusive” and information which they [telegrams] furnished from the earliest moment as to the nature, extent, symptoms, and causation of the malady, proved . . . to be not only of interest and value to the medical profession here, but were of great weight

26. Frank G. Clemow, “The Recent Pandemic of Influenza: Its Place of Origin and Mode of Spread,” Lancet, vol. 143, no. 3673 (January 20, 1894): 139–43 (142). 27. “The Intellectual Effects of Electricity,” Spectator, November 9, 1889, 632. 28. On the development of the “telegraphic railways,” see William Fothergill Cooke, Telegraphic Railways; Or, The Single Way Recommended by Safety, Economy, and Efficiency, Under the Safeguard and Control of the Electric Telegraph (London: Simkin, Marshall, & Co., 1842). Cooke gave up a career in medicine to advocate for telegraphy’s integration into the railway systems. 29. Stanley Joel Reiser, Medicine and the Reign of Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 198–99. On the telephone, see Sidney H. Aronson, “The Lancet on the Telephone, 1876–1975,” Medical History, vol. 21, no. 1 (1977): 69–87.

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in recording the steps taken by the Government here to arrest and check the epidemic . . . which so greatly stirred the fears and panics of Europe.30

The BMJ emphasized the role played by on-the-ground reportage and telegraphy in disease surveillance in contrast to the oft-delayed and perfunctory response of the government to crises. The influenza pandemic in 1889 struck at a moment of transition in medical thinking when different etiological explanations competed for acceptance, causing confusion about the nature of the disease threat: was the influenza contagious, bacteriological, or environmental?31 As one commentator observed: Thus it was stated that the epidemic travelled from place to place with a speed far outstripping that of human communications; that it commenced abruptly by the simultaneous attack of a large proportion of the inhabitants of an invaded place; and that it attacked persons so situated—for example, on board ship at sea far from land—that its transmission by personal communication was out of the question.32

Although the contagious nature of influenza was evident to most commentators, its etiology remained obscure. Infection was attributed to numerous causes. Some were convinced that it was the result of a “colossal earth-commotion” in China, similar to the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, which had disgorged a cloud of noxious and contaminating “dust particles” into the atmosphere.33 In 1892, the physician and bacteriologist Richard Pfeiffer isolated what he presumed to be the causative agent of influenza (known as “Pfeiffer’s bacillus”).34 The elusiveness of influenza seemed to call into question the nature of “disease” itself. As an editorial in the Lancet observed, although the influenza was familiar, there was a “singular lack of precise knowledge” about its identity. The disease spread with “remarkable rapidity” and appeared to have “no geographical limitation,” while the movements of the virus “were so baffling and contradictory to the ordinary conceptions of the transmission of infection as to render any simple explanation of its nature almost impossible.”35 30. “The Telegraph in Medical Journalism,” British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 1187 (September 29, 1883), 645. 31. F. B. Smith, “The Russian Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889–1894,” Social History of Medicine, vol. 8, no. 1 (1995): 55–73; see also Michael Worboys, Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 32. H. Franklin Parsons, “The Influenza Epidemics of 1889–90 and 1891 and Their Distribution in England and Wales,” British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 1597 (August 8, 1891): 303–08 (304). 33. See Clemow, The Geography of Disease, 189. 34. It was not until the 1930s that Richard Shope isolated the influenza virus from infected pigs; see Heather L. Van Epps, “Influenza: Exposing the True Killer,” Journal of Experimental Medicine, vol. 203, no. 4 (April, 17, 2006): 803. 35. Lancet, vol. 134, no. 3460 (December 21, 1889): 1293–96 (1293); see the commentary on this article in Michael Bresalier, “‘A Most Protean Disease’: Aligning Medical Knowledge of Modern Influenza, 1890–1914,” Medical History, vol. 56, no. 4 (2012): 481–510 (490).

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Given the uncertainty about the origins of the disease and its apparently “protean” character, there was a preoccupation with defining and mapping the epidemic.36 Telegraphic reports in newspapers played a critical role in tracking down the disease. As Mark Honigsbaum has argued “the rapid progress of the influenza across Europe via the railways and the near instantaneous reporting of the outbreaks via the worldwide telegraphic network made the Russian flu something of a ‘media sensation.’”37 Commentators were struck by the speed of transmission: the infection spread across Europe and the United States in some four months.38 Julius Reuters had established a news agency in London in 1851, the year that an undersea cable was laid between Dover and Calais. “Reuters” exploited the city’s nodal position to become a leading purveyor of world news in the 1860s, functioning “increasingly as a semi-official institution of the British Empire.”39 During the influenza pandemic, regular reports were filed from affected European capitals. Correspondents for The Times mapped the disease’s inexorable progress westwards.40 On November 25, 1889, for example, The Times announced a “most unusual increase in sickness” in St. Petersburg, which it “supposed to be the influenza.” A few days later, on December 3, the paper reported that its own correspondent, as well as the British ambassador, had succumbed to the flu. And on the December 12, in “The Latest Intelligence,” the paper published simultaneous telegraphic reports from St. Petersburg, Berlin, Vienna, and Paris. In the days, weeks, and months thereafter, the press printed daily reports from affected cities across Europe and the globe, monitoring the disease’s spread, commentating on its relative virulence, on mortality and morbidity rates, and on medical opinions as to its cause and likely transmission routes. While the telegraph produced intelligence, the dissemination of this information fueled panic. The Lancet led the medical press in calling for newspapers to stop provoking “dread” by publishing “sensational telegrams.” Daily newspaper accounts provoked alarm by dramatizing the ominous “approach of a strange and apparently somewhat unknown disease” to British shores.41 Newspapers themselves wrote of the irrational nature of this panic (“the panic about influenza is, like most panic, irrational”). Even as they sensationalized the “epidemic,” they cautioned about 36. Bresalier, “‘A Most Protean Disease.’” 37. Honigsbaum, A History of the Great Influenza Pandemics, 33–81 (33). 38. See Alain-Jacques Valleron, Anne Cori, Sofia Meurisse, et al., “Transmissibility and Geographic Spread of the 1889 Influenza Pandemic,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 107, no. 19 (2010): 8778–81; on the panic in Vienna and Paris, see, for example, “Vienna Is Quite in a Panic about the Influenza,” Spectator, December 28, 1889, 2. 39. On Reuters’ development as an imperial institution and its role in the creation of “world news” between 1865 and the First World War, see Donald Read, The Power of News: The History of Reuters, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 [1992]), 49–117 (49). 40. As Honigsbaum notes, there was also rivalry between the London dailies and the regional papers; A History of the Great Influenza Pandemics, 33. 41. “All about Influenza,” Pall Mall Gazette, December 10, 1889, 7.

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overstating its danger.42 Thus, the Daily News declared in January 1892 that panic was “likely to be even more injurious than the disease itself ”: It is surely time that some vigorous protest was raised against persistent attempts that are being made to get up a scare on the subject of the influenza. Day by day, the public are alarmed by grossly exaggerated statements as to its prevalence and spread, and the wildest rumours are set abroad as to supposed changes in the nature of the disease.43

A journalist for the Pall Mall Gazette, who visited the outpatients of major London Hospitals (including Guy’s, University College Hospital, the Royal Free, and St. Mary’s) to track down the “phantom” disease, concluded that “the influenza is largely a product of the imagination.”44 However, in presenting an accumulation of localized snapshots of infection and integrating specific cases and sites into a unified narrative, the press gave the epidemic a “dramaturgic form,” building up the composite picture of a nation in the grip of disaster. The indiscriminate (“mysterious”) nature of the influenza, which seemed to pick off its victims at random, added to the panic. The wealthy and powerful were susceptible, along with the poor. In 1890, the Queen withdrew to the Isle of Wight in a selfimposed quarantine. As one news notice asserted, “all boxes and documents which are daily forwarded to Osborne from the Foreign Office are most carefully disinfected, and any personal intercourse with individuals from London is avoided.”45 The prime minister, Lord Salisbury, fell ill, while the poets Robert Browning and Alfred Lord Tennyson succumbed to infection, as did the Queen’s grandson, the Duke of Clarence, who died of pneumonia at Sandringham in January 1892, weeks before his wedding.46 The epidemic threw into relief increasingly interconnected mass networks: railways, steamships, and the postal service were identified as major pathways of trans­ mission. As the Lancet declared: “[T]here does appear to be an abundance of evidence to show that it [the epidemic] travelled mainly along the lines of human intercourse, attacking large towns and centres of population first . . . and that the disease travelled only just as fast as any humanly conveyed infection . . . might have been expected to travel.”47 Employees stayed away from the General Post Office’s telegraphic department. 42. “The Influenza Epidemic,” Daily News, December 11, 1889, 5; “Lord Salisbury and the Epidemic,” Daily News, January 4, 1890, 4. 43. “The Influenza Panic,” Daily News, January 29, 1892, 5. 44. “The Phantom influenza,” Pall Mall Gazette, January 11, 1890, 3. 45. Truth, vol. 27, no. 681 (January 6, 1890), 93. 46. Aside from Lord Salibsury, the Duke of Richmond, Lord Derby, and the Archbishop of York were amongst those who fell victim to the flu; see Honigsbaum, A History of the Great Influenza Pandemics, 39–40, 58. 47. Lancet, vol. 138, no. 3541 (July 11, 1891): 78–79 (78).

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Workers at the London Stock Exchange appeared disproportionately affected. Evidence suggested that the infection was transmissible through the post, as recipients of “contaminated” letters got sick. The railway system, in particular, was singled out as a conduit for the flu. Because the epidemic occurred as it did at Christmas, commentators noted the importance of travel in spreading the disease: commuting city workers, tradesmen, and children returning from school were singled out. As in Stoker’s novel, the motif of rapid, long-distance communication became central to the plotline of the outbreak. Medical and public health experts sought to distance themselves from the newspapers. As one eminent physician (Dr. Robson Roose, Randolph Churchill’s doctor) was reported as saying in the Pall Mall Gazette: “This influenza is becoming such a panic; everybody fancies that they will be the next afflicted. I am run nearly off my legs with influenza patients. I am attending sixty at present—from Cabinet Ministers downwards . . . I have been trying to impress on the newspapers . . . the necessity of keeping down the panic.”48 Another publication declared in January 1890: The newspaper literature in relation to the invasion is colossal, but not much new comes forth day by day. No one can doubt that to these articles in the daily papers almost as much of the epidemic in this country is due as to poisonous germs. Many of the cases, indeed, might be more correctly described as daily-telegraphia than influenza.49

Panic is suggestively diagnosed as the symptom of a new infection (“telegraphia”) brought on by contact with the mass media. The medium, which purports to inform and forewarn the public about a genuine epidemic, ends up producing another form of pathogenic hazard: panic.50 There was, then, increasing awareness that while the telegraph served as a public health tool, it could also function as an amplifier of risk—a conduit for other forms of economic and social “contagion”: speculation, financial turbulence, and social unrest.51 The telegraph was both a force of unification and “declension.”52 During the crisis, the telegraph and the post provided a “mass of material” which appeared contradictory and often bewildering.53 Public health officials endeavored to give shape to this information, “fixing” the epidemic’s commencement, delineating 48. “Influenza,” Pall Mall Gazette, January 9, 1890, 1–2 (2). 49. “The Influenza Epidemic,” Monthly Homeopathic Review, vol. 24, no. 2 (1890): 113–17 (113–14). 50. James Mussell, “Pandemic in Print: The Spread of Influenza in the Fin de Siècle,” Endeavour, vol. 31, no. 1 (2007): 12–17. 51. Robert Peckham, “Infective Economies: Empire, Panic and the Business of Disease,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 41, no. 2 (2013): 211–37. 52. Carey, Communication as Culture, 8. 53. Richard Sisley, Epidemic Influenza: Notes on Its Origin and Method of Spread (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1891), x; on the varying quantity and quality of information received, see Henry Parsons, Report on the Influenza Epidemic of 1889–1890 (London: H.M.S.O., 1891), 121.

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its contours with statistical evidence, and comparing it with earlier epidemics.54 The physician Edmund Symes Thompson noted in 1890 that the influenza epidemic was exemplary, demonstrating the “causes which affect human life in the aggregate.” “Unlike cholera,” he noted, “it often outstrips in its course the speed of human intercourse.”55 Significantly, the epidemic took place precisely at the moment that attempts were being made to reform and “fix” or standardize international telegraphy itself with the imposition of uniform transnational tariffs and the regulation of international services. Organized by the Telegraphic Union (which had been established in 1865), the International Telegraph Conference in Paris in the summer of 1890 was held during the height of the influenza epidemic, and sought to continue the work of preceding conferences in technological standardization. Sir John Pender, the British cable pioneer who presided over the meeting, extoled the benefits of the “great network of communications” for “the teeming millions of the world.”56 While the Russian army’s medical department had put together a voluminous report on the influenza by means of a telegraphic circular, in Britain there were concerted efforts to leverage London’s “position at the center of the telegraphic and railroad networks to ensure that the department’s epidemiological gaze moved with the epidemic.”57 The experience of the influenza in 1890, as Honigsbaum has noted, established a precedent for similar collective-style investigations for other epidemics (cholera and plague) in 1893 and 1898–1901, although preventive measures were wholly inadequate and would have devastating consequences during the influenza pandemic of 1918.58 The influenza outbreaks in 1889–92 were extensively reported and marked a turning point in what might be called the “mediatization of crises.”59 While the Medical Department of the Local Government Board sought to track the infection, medical practitioners across the country were also coopted into the effort. In January 1890, under the direction of George Buchanan, medical officer of health of the Board, 54. Parsons, “The Influenza Epidemics of 1889–1890 and 1891,” 305. 55. E. Symes Thompson, Influenza, or Epidemic Catarrhal Fever: An Historical Survey of Past Epidemics in Great Britain from 1510 to 1890 (London: Percival and Co., 1890), vii. 56. “The International Telegraph Conference,” Times [London], June 18, 1890, 5. 57. Honigsbaum, “The ‘Russian’ Influenza in the UK,” B11; see also “The Great Dread: Cultural and Psychological Impacts and Responses to the ‘Russian’ Influenza”; Honigsbaum, A History of the Great Influenza Pandemics, 37. 58. Honigsbaum, “The ‘Russian’ Influenza in the UK,” B14; Honigsbaum, A History of the Great Influenza Pandemics, 47–54. On the LGB, see Anne Hardy, “On the Cusp: Epidemiology and Bacteriology at the Local Government Board, 1890–1905,” Medical History, vol. 42, no. 3 (1998): 328–46 (331). 59. See K. D. Patterson, Pandemic Influenza, 1700–1900: A Study in Historical Epidemiology (Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield, 1986), 49–82; Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). For an overview, see Further Report and Papers on Epidemic Influenza, 1889–1892 (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1893).

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a request was published in the BMJ entitled “The Influenza Epidemic: Requests for Information.” Readers were solicited to assist in mapping the epidemic, which was threatening the heartland of Britain’s industry. The aim was to gather information on influenza as part of a “uniform plan,” and the local Government Board circulated a questionnaire about the influenza to the medical officers of health in the sanitary districts across England and Wales.60 As Honigsbaum has observed, this collective endeavor represented “one of the most comprehensive surveys ever conducted into an influenza pandemic,” and an early example of a concerted public health effort to “pin down” disease employing a “life course” epidemiological approach.61

Hong Kong and the Telegraphic World Even as the influenza epidemic was abating in Europe, attention was turning to another epidemic in the East, where many commentators were convinced the influenza had, in fact, originated. In early 1894, bubonic plague spread to Hong Kong from the Guangdong province of southern China.62 News of the disease was conveyed globally by telegraph, which played a key role in the unfolding “drama” of the “Third Plague Pandemic.” Not only was information transmitted through the wires, apprising the public of unfolding events in Asia and globally, but scientific research was also rushed to press, and telegraphic communications between London and the colonies during the crisis impacted upon local governmental decision-making processes. Late nineteenth-century British commentators tended to conceptualize Hong Kong as a strategic hub, with networks radiating out across the globe. As The Times noted in 1890, reporting a lecture on “Hongkong and its Trade” delivered by William Keswick at a meeting of the Royal Colonial Institute, the crown colony was “a great distribution centre” and it had become “the terminus of many mail lines, and the juncture from which new departures were taken.” The Qing Empire was evidently decaying, however even there, “the intercourse brought about between distant parts

60. Parsons, Report on the Influenza Epidemic of 1889–1890, 120. 61. Honigsbaum, “The ‘Russian’ influenza in the UK,” B15. The collective investigation was undertaken by Dr. Henry Franklin Parsons, Buchanan’s assistant. On Parsons’s career, see his obituaries: “Henry Franklin Parsons,” British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 1253 (November 8, 1913), 1263–64; “Henry Franklin Parsons,” Lancet, vol. 182, no. 4706 (November 8, 1913), 1354–56. 62. See Carol Benedict, Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 131–49. In fact, the influenza of 1889–92, was called the “Chinese” or “Asian” flu in Russia, and was thought to have diffused through the Russian Empire from China, following the flooding, in 1888, of the Yellow River, in which up to two million humans and animals were drowned. Hong Kong itself was conjectured to have been a likely source; on the global diffusion of the plague, see Myron Echenberg, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901 (New York: New York University Press, 2007).

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of the Empire by steam communication had broken down barriers,” and “[t]elegraph lines were now pretty general throughout the country.”63 Descriptions of Hong Kong as a networked hub were echoed in the enthusiastic tones of turn-of-the-century commentators such as Charles Bright (the namesake son of the famous electrical engineer who had managed the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable), an advocate of telegraphy’s further promotion: It may be safely averred that railways, steamships, and telegraphs are combinedly our most powerful weapon in the cause of Inter-Imperial Commerce. It has, however, yet to be realised how much can be done towards Imperial unity and fostering trade betwixt the scattered units of the Empire by direct, efficient and cheap telegraphic communication.64

In the words of the journalist and postal reformer Sir John Henniker Heaton, the telegraph offered “the means of intensifying and perpetuating the sympathy that is the basis of union.”65 In the mid-1860s, it was possible for the governor of Hong Kong to send a telegram to London but this entailed a mail steamer calling at Singapore, Penang, and Galle in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from whence the message was transmitted by cable, taking two weeks in all to reach London.66 In March 1869, the China Mail had dismissed as “bunkum” the American telegraph talk that claimed the ports of China would soon be connected and that the British were “vigorously pushing their telegraph lines” to monopolize the China trade.67 However, the following year Hong Kong was connected to the world telegraphically when the Danish Great Northern, China, and Japan Extension Company began laying a cable joining Hong Kong to Shanghai. The first message was cabled to Shanghai from Hong Kong on April 18, 1871. In June, Sir John Pender’s China Submarine Telegraph Company linked Hong Kong to Singapore via Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and from thence to India and London. On the completion of the link, Pender (whose daughter was married to George William Des Voeux, appointed governor of Hong Kong in 1887), sent a telegram from London to Hong Kong, which took 53 minutes: “Completion of the submarine telegraphic system between Singapore, Saigon, and Hong Kong, brings the Chinese Empire into immediate connection with India and Europe.”68 63. “Hongkong and its Trade,” Times [London], January 15, 1890, 11. 64. Charles Bright, Imperial Telegraphic Communication (London: P. S. King & Son, 1911), xiii. 65. Quoted in Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 88. On the telegraph and “globalization,” see Roland Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 66. Although this had been reduced to five days by 1870, when Singapore was linked by cable, see Austin Coates, Quick Tidings of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1990), 3–4, 33. 67. “The Talked-of Telegraph,” China Mail [Hong Kong], March 28, 1869, 3. 68. London and China Telegraph, vol. 13, no. 406 (June 12, 1871): 431. For histories of the telegraph in China, see Jorma Ahvenainen, The Far Eastern Telegraphs: The History of Telegraphic Communications between the Far East, Europe and America before the First World War (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1981); Erik Baark, Lightning Wires: The Telegraph and China’s Technological Modernization, 1860–1890

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In a lengthy article on Hong Kong in The Times a few years earlier, the role of “telegraphic communication” was considered in some depth. The telegraph had brought the colony into “intimate connexion with all quarters of the globe.” Aside from “the advantages offered in facilitating business,” ongoing Sino-French conflicts had further underlined the “great value of telegraphs in case of emergency.” The journalist Wingrove Cooke was quoted with approval when he averred that “in matters of Government nothing was so expensive as ignorance, and that telegraphic communication is one of those essentials wherein money is no measure of value.”69 In China itself, commentators noted the widespread prejudice toward foreign technologies. Many, like the American missionary Gilbert Reid, pointed to local misconceptions about how telegraphic lines communicated. The Chinese, Reid observed in 1892, “imagine that the line is used to actually carry the letter rather than the message.”70 Despite the magnitude of the occasion, the advent of the cable in the crown colony was something of an anticlimax. As the Hongkong Daily Press noted: “So gradual has been the approach of the telegraph to Hongkong, that now that it has at last become a fait accompli, people almost think of it as quite in the ordinary course of events.”71 Yet, as the newspaper conceded, the telegraph had transformed the nature of news and the exchange of information not only between Hong Kong and the metropole, but between colonies, as well. Whereas around 1870, news from Europe took 25 to 30 days to reach the Hong Kong press, the opening of the telegraph meant that news items could be read even in the East only a couple of days after the event. In 1872, Reuters—the “key information brokers of the British Empire”—established an office in Hong Kong.72

Communicating Crisis: Telegraphic Prose Many commentators extoled the telegraph’s practical value as a tool for managing the expansive dominions of empire, exalting the technology as “one of the greatest factors (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997). The first telegraph system in Hong Kong was a private one set up in 1863 by Jardine, Matheson & Company—running from their headquarters in East Point (Causeway Bay) to the firm’s town offices in Victoria, one-and-a-half miles away. In 1869, a police telegraph system was installed linking the Central Police Station beside the Victoria jail with the other town stations, and with the police posts on the south side of the island; on the development of telegraphy in Hong Kong, see Coates, Quick Tidings of Hong Kong. 69. “Hongkong,” Times [London], October 9, 1883, 8. 70. Gilbert Reid, Peeps into China (London: Religious Tract Society, 1892), 183. Similar misconceptions, however, characterized metropolitan attitudes to the telegraph. 71. Hongkong Daily Press, Tuesday, June 6, 1871, 2. By 1894, telephonic communication had replaced the telegraph between police stations and government buildings on Hong Kong; see the brief report issued on the progress of public works by the Public Work Office (July 31, 1894), Hongkong Government Gazette, September 1, 1894, 745–48 (745). 72. Simon J. Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 88.

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in the realization of the Imperial idea” that “defies time and annihilates space.”73 The speed of communication, it could be argued, fundamentally changed the relationship between the Colonial Office and “the man on the spot.”74 The success of the British Empire was attributed to the absence of bureaucratic red tape, although, as Archibald Colquhoun noted in 1902, “this halcyon time is over, and with improved communications the work of the man on the spot who knows is to be continually spoilt by the men at home who don’t.”75 The arrival of the telegraph meant that London could exert its control in a more immediate way over specific matters, giving the secretary of state a say in the routine affairs of the colonial administration. William Des Voeux, colonial secretary in St. Lucia before his appointment as governor of Hong Kong in 1887, acknowledged that he “dreaded the telegraph as likely to curtail [his] freedom of action.”76 The controversy of the Kwok A-Sing case in 1871 (an alleged murderer detained in custody in Hong Kong who was wanted for extradition by the Chinese), had underscored the way in which telegrams could be used by the executive authorities in Hong Kong to pressurize the colony’s chief justice.77 Telegraphy also encouraged the colonial government to seek the authority of London for its decisions, even as it “provided the governor with the capacity to . . . enquire and question the Secretary of State.”78 As David Paull Nickles has observed, in eroding the autonomy of diplomats, the telegraph acted as a spur to the centralization of foreign ministries, while increasing the importance of signals intelligence.79 73. Quoted in Potter, News and the British World, 28. 74. For the “man on the spot,” see J. S. Galbraith, “The ‘Turbulent Frontier’ as a Factor in British Expansion,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 2, no. 2 (1960): 150–68; on the telegraph and the diminishing autonomy of the “man on the spot” in China, see Ariane Knuesel, “British Diplomacy and the Telegraph in Nineteenth-Century China,” Diplomacy & Statecraft, vol. 18, no. 3 (2007): 517–37. As Knuesel notes, the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 demonstrated the importance of the telegraph in diplomatic and strategic communications. 75. Archibald R. Colquhoun, The Mastery of the Pacific (New York and London: Macmillan, 1902), 247. 76. William Des Voeux, My Colonial Service in British Guiana, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Fiji, Australia, Newfoundland, and Hong Kong, with Interludes, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1903), I, 180. Although Des Voeux observed that his fears of the telegraph “proved groundless, while the daily arrival of news, however scanty, tended to lessen the isolation. And the cable proved to be in many ways useful both to the Government and people”; Des Voeux first used the telephone (“then only beginning to come into general use”) in 1880 in San Francisco on his way to Fiji; see Des Voeux, My Colonial Service, 180, 328. Telephones were in use in Hong Kong by 1881, see Historical and Statistical Abstract of the Colony of Hongkong (Hong Kong: Noronha, 1911), 14. 77. For details of the case, see Peter Wesley-Smith, “Kwok A-Sing, Sir John Smale, and the Macao Coolie Trade,” Law Lectures for Practitioners (1993): 124–34 (130). My thanks to Christopher Munn for drawing my attention to the use of the telegram in this case. 78. Paul Fletcher, “The Uses and Limitations of Telegrams in Official Correspondence between Ceylon’s Governor General and the Secretary of State for the Colonies, circa 1870–1900,” Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, vol. 35, no. 1 (2010): 90–107 (97). 79. David Paull Nickles, Under the Wire: How the Telegraph Changed Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

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Telegrams were social equalizers to a degree, since their brevity (usually up to 20 words) meant that etiquette was unavoidably dispensed with: “Your lordship” was rendered simply as “you” or omitted altogether. In contrast to the dispatches, telegrams required a compressed, abbreviated style often identical to the Reuters news reports published in the newspapers. News and official state correspondence, diffused along the same pathways, began to sound much the same. Indeed, outbound and inbound information was filtered through the international news agencies, with Reuters, Wolff, and Havas serving as “‘gatekeepers’ of nearly all cable intelligence, whether headline political news, market data, palace gossip, or cricket scores.” The agencies “served as important magnifiers of distant crises, multiplicators of imperialist sentiment, and weapons of imperialist rivalries.”80 The style and content of the first report of the plague (66 words) in The Times on June 13, 1894, for example, is indistinguishable from a government telegram.81 Converging flows of official, media, and public message traffic led to a host of concerns about confidentiality, authenticity, and secrecy—and the role of the human signaler in the process—prompting legislation aimed at extending the role of the state in controlling information. Thus, the Telegraphic Messages Copyright Ordinance, 1894, in Hong Kong aimed “to secure, in certain cases, the rights of property in telegraphic messages, and to prevent the forgery and improper disclosure of telegrams.”82 For Rudyard Kipling, who had trained as a journalist, the condensed telegraphic idiom was to be celebrated as an antidote to the “vice of verbosity” which had “infected” communication. Modern journalism, underpinned by telegraphic technology, constituted “an essential part of the new imperialism.”83 This was a novel, terse, and “muscular” idiom that reflected both self-restraint and authority.84 Yet, the very terseness of telegraphic communication gave rise to constellations of challenges. Compression (to increase speed and reduce transmission cost) and coding led to issues of comprehension and the possibility of misreadings and mistakes. In 1869, 80. Alex Nalbach, “‘The Software of Empire’: Telegraphic News Agencies and Imperial Publicity, 1865– 1914,” in Imperial Co-histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press, ed. Julie F. Codel (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 68–94 (68–9). 81. “The Plague in Hongkong,” Times [London], June 13, 1894, 5. 82. Hong Kong Hansard, December 12, 1894, 13. Issues of confidentiality and accuracy foregrounded the role of the telegraph signaler as a translator and transmitter of information within the telegraph network; see Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury, “Of Codes and Coda: Meaning in Telegraph Messages, circa 1850–1920,” Historical Social Research, vol. 35, no. 1 (2010): 127–39; see also Gregory J. Downey, Telegraph Messenger Boys: Labor, Technology and Geography, 1850–1950 (New York: Routledge, 2002). The issue of copyright and telegrams was increasingly an issue—and one discussed in Hong Kong; see “Copyright Telegrams,” Hongkong Daily Press, September 28, 1900, 3. 83. Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 217–18. 84. The “masculine” telegraphic idiom existed in tension with the role of women in the telegraph, on which, see Thomas C. Jepsen, My Sisters Telegraphic: Women in the Telegraph Office, 1846–1950 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000).

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Reuters’ agent in Galle defended himself in a letter to the China Mail against the charge of slapdash reporting. The blunder, he argued, was due entirely to the “singallers of the Government Telegraph Offices en route, who must have omitted to wire an entire line, not at all an uncommon occurrence.”85 Institutions and offices were established to overview departmental functions and root out the sources of telegraphic errors. 86 Although the Colonial Office, perennially conscious of cost, encouraged brevity, terseness could lead to obfuscation. As one Colonial Office administrator noted of an elliptical telegram received by Sir Frederick Lugard, governor of Hong Kong: “The telegram is so economically worded as to be difficult to understand.”87 While the object was economy and the elimination of superfluous detail, the lack of context that this entailed was also an issue. The Spectator admonished its readers in 1898 “against the growing habit of believing the telegrams of each day as if they stood alone, or could contain anything but accounts of momentary incidents in dramas which may take years to display themselves fully.” 88 On May 10, 1894, the government of Hong Kong, on the advice of the colony’s Sanitary Board, issued a proclamation that the crown colony was an infected port. As cases of the plague rose amongst the Chinese population, the colonial state embarked on draconian sanitary interventions, including the forced eviction and demolition of plague homes—measures that induced “panic” in the local population. Telegraphic correspondence determined, to a large degree, the shape of the crisis. The Times received its first cable through the Eastern Extension, Australasia and China Telegraphy Company on June 13. Reports followed on June 18, 21, and 30 with later coverage appearing from the newspaper’s correspondent that gave readers “careful observations taken on the spot” (August 28).89 The latest “on the ground” scientific research was likewise sent by telegram to the medical press. The Japanese bacteriologist Shibasaburō Kitasato and his team had begun their investigative work in Hong Kong on June 14. On June 23, the latest findings on the plague microbe were transmitted “by telegraphic communication … direct from the infected area.” 90 The telegraph was central to the handling of the crisis, specifically in terms of the exchanges between the Colonial Office in London and the government in Hong Kong. On May 16, the Foreign Office received a telegram from the British Ambassador in Lisbon, with information that Hong Kong had been declared an infected port.91 85. “A Telegraphic Blunder,” China Mail, June 16, 1869, 3. 86. Lahiri Choudhury, “Of Codes and Coda,” 132. 87. Quoted in Bernard Mellor, Lugard in Hong Kong: Empires, Education and a Governor at Work, 1907– 1912 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006), 22. 88. “Topics of the Day,” Spectator, January 29, 1898, 20. 89. “The Plague in Hongkong,” Times [London], August 28, 1894, 6. 90. “The Plague at Hongkong,” Lancet, vol. 143, no. 3695 (June 23, 1894): 1581. Kitasato’s research paper appeared a few weeks later, “The Bacillus of Bubonic Plague,” Lancet, vol. 144, no. 3704 (August 25, 1894): 428–30. 91. “Foreign Office to Colonial Office” (received May 17, 1894) in British Parliamentary Papers: China,

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The Foreign Office contacted the Colonial Office with the news and Lord Ripon immediately cabled the governor of Hong Kong, Sir William Robinson, for urgent confirmation.92 Dispatches and telegraphic messages crossed, creating some confusion. Robinson had in fact already sent an unsolicited dispatch notifying Ripon of the plague outbreak. A medical report by James A. Lowson of the Government Civil Hospital was appended as an enclosure. The dispatch reached London approximately six weeks later, on June 25. Having received Ripon’s cable, however, Robinson responded promptly by telegram, as well as sending through a further follow-up dispatch.93 Such time lags could cause misunderstandings: the dispatch stated that 130 cases of plague had been reported up to May 15, while the telegram asserted that there were “nearly two hundred.”94 Even though the language of telegraphic messaging could sometimes be misconstrued as impatience—even rudeness—there was a discernible brusqueness in the Colonial Office’s tone of questioning: Is it true that Hong Kong infected with bubonic plague, also other ports in neighbourhood?95

Governor Robinson responded by return: Hong Kong; nearly two hundred cases of bubonic plague to date; confined to lower classes of Chinese; great mortality. Rainy season commenced after prolonged drought; cases of sickness considerably diminishing. Canton, Pakhoi affected. Dispatch follows by mail.96

An attitude of mild irritation and frustration at the delayed information is evident in telegrams from London with injunctions for Robinson to keep the Colonial Office fully apprised of the situation. On June 15, following three days of silence, Ripon wired the governor with a series of requests for further information, much of which had already been provided: Keep me informed as to the progress of bubonic plague and names of any Europeans dying or attacked. Report numbers of departures, and what arrangements you contemplate as to Chinese quarter. Did plague originate in China, and if so, did you take any preventive measures against its introduction? Telegraph reply.97 vol. 26; Correspondence, Annual Reports, Conventions, and Other Papers Relating to the Affairs of Hong Kong, 1882–99 (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1971), 387. 92. “The Marquess of Ripon to Sir William Robinson” [telegraphic] (sent May 17, 1894), ibid. 93. “Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon” [dispatch] (sent May 18, 1894), ibid., 394. 94. “Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon” [dispatch] (sent May 17, 1894), ibid., 390; “Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon” [telegraphic] (received May 18, 1894), ibid., 388. 95. “The Marquess of Ripon to Sir William Robinson” [telegraphic] (sent May 17, 1894), ibid., 387. 96. “Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon” [telegraphic] (received May 18, 1894), ibid., 388. 97. “The Marquess of Ripon to Sir William Robinson” [telegraphic] (sent June 15, 1894), ibid., 389.

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Robinson responded directly with an expansive telegraph that was reminiscent, in fact, of a dispatch.98 In his next cable, dated June 27, Ripon’s tone was more insistent: Telegraph at once as to progress of bubonic plague since your telegram 16th June. Keep me informed bi-weekly.99

This called forth a flurry of responsive telegraphs from Hong Kong. The dispatch was explicitly conceived as a genre of “meta” narrative, in contrast to the laconic telegram. Robinson expressly used the term “narrative” in a dispatch dated June 20: At the risk of repeating some of the statements I have made in those communications, it may be convenient to your Lordship that I should forward to you a narrative, disjointed though it may be, of the principal incidents that have occurred in connexion [sic] with the plague during the last month.100

A dispatch would pick up the “story” where another dispatch stopped, creating a sense of overarching continuity and in so doing implying an order to unfolding events on the ground, in contrast to the disjointed telegraphic articulations. Selected details were presented in well-structured, numbered, and paragraphed compositions. Six days after the dispatch of May 17, Robinson sent another dispatch with enclosures, including the proclamation declaring Hong Kong an infected port, an article on the plague from the Daily Press, medical remarks on the disease, and a report from the Education Department on the nature of the panic in the Chinese schools.101 Other dispatches contained copies of telegraphic exchanges, for example, with Canton. The dispatch proper, read in conjunction with the enclosures, contextualized events in a “bigger picture,” multi-perspectival narrative, underpinned by the authority of experts (journalists, scientists, colonial officials). Dispatches offered the governor a way of “covering his back” through the enumeration of previous telegraphic correspondence with London that emphasized decisive action and justified policy. They provided an opportunity for the governor to dramatize the situation and, particularly, his role in imposing order. By the same token, telegrams could give the governor an opportunity of delegating responsibility (and shifting liability) onto the Colonial Office. On June 1, for example, Robinson wired Ripon asking whether he might be permitted to employ 100 short-sentence convicts in cleansing and disinfecting (the answer was not without the Colonial Office’s consent).102

98. “Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon” [telegraphic] (received June 16, 1894), ibid., 389. 99. “The Marquess of Ripon to Sir William Robinson” [telegraphic] (sent June 27, 1894), ibid., 399. 100. “Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon” [dispatch] (received June 23, 1894), ibid., 411. 101. “Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon” [dispatch] (sent May 23, 1894), ibid., 394. 102. “Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon” [telegraphic] (received June 1, 1894), ibid., 388.

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If telegraphic messages could influence the language of dispatches, reciprocally, telegrams sometimes echoed the tone of the formal dispatch. The crossover of dispatches and telegraphic communications often created awkward time-lapses. Thus, in a dispatch dated May 18, Robinson sought to add to his dispatch of the previous day in the light of a telegram he had just received.103 It led to repetition and elaboration between formal dispatches and telegraphic communications, creating a tension between immediacy and considered action. Indeed, the immediacy of telegrams could result in mistakes, prompting the resending of a further telegram that cancelled the content of the preceding message.

Conclusion: Beyond Dramaturgy Many historians have argued that telegraphy significantly reduced the autonomy of “the man on the spot” and initiated a “revolution” in communication. Others have argued the opposite. Given the practical issues of cost and reliability, as well as resistance from colonial officials, telegraphy did not substantially intensify government control across the Empire. “It is tempting to believe,” Daniel Headrick has written, “that putting colonies into rapid contact with London,” the telegraph enabled Colonial Office administrators to tighten the grip on “their distant subordinates, thus substituting centralized control for the little subimperialisms of the periphery. The evidence, however, points the other way.”104 Yrjö Kaukiainen has further suggested—based on his analysis of the Lloyd’s List—that global dispatch times had already shrunk before the advent of telegraphic technology as the impact of steamships from the 1820s and of railways from the 1840s and 1850s speeded up communications.105 To be sure, notions of a technological revolution in the late nineteenth century, as James Carey has noted, may be misleading. Rather than considering the telegraph as a radical break with older forms of communication, it may be more useful to conceptualize the history of communication as a complex layering; to view communication, as Carey articulates it, as “scar tissue.” Old forms transmigrated into new forms, shaping the use of language, the ordering knowledge, and the “structure of awareness.”106 By the same token, technology did not simply impact upon society, but rather social conditions (themselves shaped by earlier technologies) determined what technology was created and how it was used.107 Finally, although the “global media system” may 103. “Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon” [dispatch] (sent May 18, 1894), ibid., 394. 104. Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 107. 105. Yrjö Kaukiainen, “Shrinking the World: Improvements in the Speed of Information Transmission, c.1820–1870,” European Review of Economic History, vol. 5, no. 1 (2001): 1–28. 106. Carey, Communication as Culture, 202. 107. See, Lynne Hamill, “The Social Shaping of British Communications Networks prior to the First World War,” Historical Social Research, vol. 35, no. 1 (2010): 260–86.

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have been interwoven with globalization as a process in the late nineteenth century, globalization and new forms of communication were not synonymous with the new imperialism.108 Nonetheless, telegraphy certainly changed the way in which disease threats were conceptualized, even as it drew on inherited assumptions about disease identity. As responses to the influenza pandemic from 1889 to 1892 demonstrate, the “real time” mapping of epidemic episodes suggested new ways of collating proliferating and disparate information in order to “fight” epidemic threats and the panics they induced. An analysis of the official correspondence between London and Hong Kong in relation to the plague pandemic, similarly underscores the critical role that telegraphy played in producing what might be called a new language of “panic.” The telegram functioned as a means both of asserting order, at the same time as it created, through its very immediacy, a sense of the unmediated “now.” Although the telegraph marked “an imaginative revolution” in a way of thinking about the globe and “the new imaginative possibilities engendered” by technology,109 it also drew attention to the dangers of those possibilities: in particular, it accentuated the double jeopardy of producing panic in the very effort of controlling it. Reversing the directionality of Rosenberg’s argument that an epidemic is constructed, like a drama, in responses to an epidemic crisis, the anthropologist Charles Briggs has suggested that epidemics are responses to processes of representation. That is, epidemic narratives often develop not in response to but before any humans become infected. Briggs’s interest is in disease events as “mediatized objects”—the way in which “people who experience [plagues] bodily have generally come to know them previously through the media.” 110 A study of the role of the telegraph in constructing epidemic crises in the late nineteenth century (as the foundations of a rapid global communication network were being consolidated), may provide a useful historical perspective on the role of communication technologies in the making of pandemics. It may also shed light on the “protean” nature of the compounded panics produced by disease and their representations across the expanding networks of global media.

108. See the argument developed Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike, Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 2. 109. Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 76. 110. Charles L. Briggs, “Pressing Plagues: On the Mediated Communicability of Virtual Epidemics,” in Plagues and Epidemics: Infected Spaces Past and Present, ed. D. Ann Herring and Alan C. Swedlung (Oxford: Berg, 2010), 39–59 (39, 56).

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Acknowledgements The research for this chapter was supported by a GRF grant from the RGC (Grant Code HKU 752011H; Project Title: “Infective Economies: Plague and the Crisis of Empire”). My thanks to Charlotte Dando at the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum.

7 Don’t Panic! The “Excited and Terrified” Public Mind from Yellow Fever to Bioterrorism Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns

As the wind whips around the reporter and the flash of emergency vehicle lights colors the surrounding darkness, the scene looks at first like classic disaster television from the Weather Channel: a tornado has struck Kansas, or a hurricane threatens the Gulf Coast. It quickly becomes clear from the video footage, however, that a far different kind of emergency is afoot. “Oklahomans by the carload can be seen leaving the state in every direction trying to escape this deadly smallpox outbreak,” reports a newsman stationed on the Texas border. He glances nervously over his shoulder at the sound of gunfire. Vigilantes are vying for control of the border with the National Guard and Oklahoma state troopers. “It’s starting to sound like a war zone,” he says grimly. The drama unfolds like a Hollywood thriller—perhaps Contagion (2011), with its brain-eating viral plague, or the zombie apocalypse depicted in the movie World War Z (2013). But the video is not a product of Tinseltown; it is a different kind of fiction: a tabletop emergency-preparedness simulation exercise called Dark Winter, born in the imaginations of public health planners in and around Washington, DC. This fake news clip was meant to make Day 6 of a terrorist attack with weaponized smallpox feel as real as possible. Dark Winter was conducted at Andrews Air Force Base on June 21–22, 2001, just three months prior to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The anthrax mailings followed three weeks thereafter. A product of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Analytic Services Inc., a not-forprofit institute based in Arlington, Virginia, the drill was, in the words of Ronald Barrett, “one of the most influential of simulated models for a deliberately engineered infectious disease pandemic.”1 Major public figures participated, including former directors of the FBI and CIA, current FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg, and former senator Sam Nunn in the role of president. Although the creators of Dark Winter assigned no responsibility for the simulated attack, the exercise played on emerging concerns about terrorism and involved both 1. Ronald Barrett, “Dark Winter and the Spring of 1972: Deflecting the Social Lessons of Smallpox,” Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, vol. 25, no. 2 (2006): 171–91 (176).

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the movement of Iraqi troops to the Kuwaiti border and an Al Qaeda agent believed to have acquired nuclear material in Russia.2 The scenario blended Cold War concerns about the USSR, once thought to be capable of producing 80 to 100 tons of smallpox a year,3 with mounting concerns regarding the Middle East and the possibility that biological weapons might fall into the wrong hands.4 In a remarkable foreshadowing of fevered nightmares yet to come, the simulated newscast shown during the Dark Winter meetings reported that, “Iraq may have provided the technology behind the attack to terrorist groups based in Afghanistan.”5 Not only were participants facing a domestic smallpox outbreak of incredible magnitude, they were simultaneously led to consider a possible military response to the event.6 Dark Winter played upon deeply held beliefs that, in the face of epidemic disease, mass panic was a likely outcome. There exists a long sociological literature, extending from the end of the nineteenth century through the end of the Great Depression, which provided a theoretical basis for such imaginations. One of the earliest popular theorists, Gustave Le Bon, a French social psychologist and sociologist, put forth an influential idea in his 1895 book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.7 The kernel of what would be labeled “contagion theory” was that emotions could be transmitted from person to person in a crowd, which could develop a kind of “collective mind” capable of irrational action. But during the cold sweat of the Cold War, a new strand of scholarly thinking on panic took root. This new view held that panic was, in fact, a rare behavior and not necessarily irrational.8 Yet despite this growing academic consensus, the older belief that unbridled social chaos was a likely outcome in the case 2. Christian W. Erickson and Bethany A. Barratt, “Prudence or Panic? Preparedness Exercises, Counterterror Moblization, and Media Coverage—Dark Winter, TOPOFF 1 and 2,” Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, vol. 1, no. 4 (2004):1–21 (6). 3. Tara O’Toole, Michael Mair, and Thomas V. Inglesby, “Shining Light on ‘Dark Winter,’” Clinical Infectious Disease, vol. 34, no. 7 (2002): 972–83 (972). 4. William J. Bicknell, “The Case for Voluntary Smallpox Vaccination,” New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 346, no. 17 (2002): 1323–25 (1323). 5. Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies, Center for Strategic and International Studies, ANSER Institute for Homeland Security, Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, Dark Winter, Newsclip, Day 6. http://www.upmchealthsecurity.org/website/events/2001_darkwinter/ (accessed June 1, 2014). 6. Barrett, “Dark Winter and the Spring of 1972,” 177. 7. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1896). See also William McDougall, The Group Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 24; Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924), 867–69. 8. The literature here is extensive and has roots in the late 1930s in Richard Tracy LaPiere, Collective Behavior (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1938). See, for example, Duane P. Schultz, “Panic in Organized Collectivities,” Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 63, no. 2 (1964): 353–59; Alexander Mintz, “Nonadaptive Group Behavior,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 46, no. 2 (1951): 150–59; Enrico L. Quarantelli, “The Nature and Conditions of Panic,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 60, no. 3 (1954): 267–75; Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1962), 131–69.

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of a disaster still held sway in both Washington and in the public imagination. The eminent psychologist Hadley Cantril had forcefully propounded this position, based on his analysis of the panic that supposedly gripped the nation as listeners tuned in to Orson Welles’s 1938 radio depiction of The War of the Worlds. “Of course [mass panic] could happen again today and even on a much more extensive scale,” asserted Cantril.9 As Robert Peckham notes in the introduction to this volume, a substantial literature now takes arguments about panic a step further and openly challenges the myth of the raving mob; the existing empirical evidence suggests populations do not actually tend to panic during mass disasters, and, if they do, it is exceedingly rare. Moreover, behaviors that are casually labelled as “panic” are not necessarily unproductive or antisocial. Social attachments often drive people to help others get out of danger, which may involve rushing into harm’s way.10 However, while it is now popular to talk about the “myth of panic,” such arguments do not deny the force of panic as a concept or reaction, but simply remove it from a hyperbolic and distorted realm: the things we so often call panic are normal behaviors, and may even be productive reactions to desperate situations.11 But if mass panic is more phantom than objectively diagnosable social response, like any good myth it has many believers—and therefore shapes real-world social and political responses.12 Key sociological theories have sought to map the conditions required for panic to take hold.13 But this approach, which embraces a rather static “analytic order of determinants which eventuates in panic,”14 overlooks not only the actors who generate, respond to, worry about, and manipulate panic, but also the political framing process that occurs when policymakers (or their critics) make determinations about panic. It stops short of helping to tell a history of panic where 9. Hadley Cantril, The Invasion from Mars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982 [1940 and 1966]), vi. 10. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior; Norris R. Johnson, “Panic and the Breakdown of Social Order: Popular Myth, Social Theory, Empirical Evidence,” Sociological Focus, vol. 20, no. 3 (1987): 171–83 (172); Lee Clarke, “Panic: Myth or Reality?” Contexts, vol. 1, no. 3 (2002): 21–26; Anthony R. Mawson, “Understanding Mass Panic and Other Collective Responses to Threat and Disorder,” Psychiatry, vol. 68, no. 2 (2005): 95–113. 11. Alan Blum, “Panic and Fear: On the Phenomenology of Desperation,” Sociological Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 4 (1996): 673–98 (675–78). 12. Marshall Sahlins, “The Return of the Event, Again: With Reflections on the Beginnings of the Great Fijian War of 1843 to 1855 between the Kingdoms of Bau and Rewa,” in Clio in Oceania: Toward a Historical Anthropology, ed. Aletta Biersack (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 37–99 (43). 13. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior, 131–69; Johnson, “Panic and the Breakdown of Social Order,” 172. 14. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior, 169. There are, of course, other theories. See, for example, Blum, “Panic and Fear,” 675–78; P. B. Foreman, “Panic Theory,” Sociology and Social Research, vol. 37 (1953): 295–304.

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the ordering might change or the determinants may vary. Likewise, the very few historical works that explicitly explore collective panic tend to focus on the biology and epidemiology of disease itself.15 There is, of course, a well-developed literature on moral panic, which emphasizes the process of stigmatization and hence the social aspects of panics associated with deviant behaviors or marginalized groups. At the heart of collective panic is the idea, whether true or not, that it is not just social. Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) provides an example. There may be a threat from outside our borders, specific populations within our borders may be targeted (hence the avoidance of places like Chinatown and efforts to exclude some Asian visitor groups), but moral panic is only a small part of a more generalized or collective panic. The virus is in the air. Not only do we lack the socially stigmatized group of behaviors, the “folk devil”—to use the term that Stanley Cohen made famous in his analysis of moral panic—to blame for an outbreak, but we also assume that panic is in the air and will spread. The devil tends to be everywhere.16 We have to begin to unpack the social conditions that make us believe in, fear, and even manipulate collective panic. The cultural anthropologist Victor Turner coined the term “social drama” to capture what he believed were the “regular series of phases” that characterized “crisis situations,” or “moments of danger and suspense.”17 Social actors engaged in such situations might deliberately “put past and present together” in order to manage a crisis, whether impending, unfolding, or imagined.18 Turner was particularly concerned with social conflicts involving a public breach of established rules or norms, or a clash of factions contesting for authority. The subsequent crisis of unity demanded redressive action. These attempts at some sort of melioration produce either irreparable schism, a widening of the fissure, or restoration—a return to order. Although Turner was careful to note that a clear resolution to social drama isn’t always achieved, this final climactic phase provided “an opportunity for taking stock.”19 Whether agreement had been reached about the conflict or not, something likely had changed. Institutions 15. Margaret Humphreys, “No Safe Place: Disease and Panic in American History,” American Literary History, vol. 14, no. 4 (2002): 845–57 (847). Standing out in the historical literature is the work of Nancy Tomes; see “The Making of a Germ Panic, Then and Now,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 90, no. 2 (2000): 191–98 (193) and “‘Destroyer and Teacher’: Managing the Masses During the 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic,” Public Health Reports, vol. 125, no. 3 (2010): 48–62. 16. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and the Rockers (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972); David Marsland, “Sociological Analyses of Youth and Community Services,” Paedagogica Europaea, vol. 10, no. 2 (1975): 93–106. 17. Victor Turner, “An Anthropological Approach to the Icelandic Saga,” in On the Edge of the Bush, ed. Edith Turner (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 71–93 (74); Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 39. 18. Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 13, 33–43; Jerry D. Moore, Visions of Culture: An Introduction to Anthropological Theories and Theorists (Walnut Creek, CA, London, and New Delhi: Altamira Press, 1997), 231. 19. Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 33–43.

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were reconceived or realigned, relations between stakeholders had shifted, power and authority were rechanneled.20 Drawing upon Turner’s blueprint, in this chapter we propose a related concept called the “panic drama” that will allow us to construct a historically contingent analysis of panic that maintains a recognizable and intact narrative profile over time. We consider three episodes—yellow fever in the nineteenth century, influenza in the early twentieth century, and the threat of biowarfare (later called bioterrorism) in the years of the Cold War through the War on Terror—through the lens of Turner’s framework. The notion of a “panic drama,” we argue, can help us understand collective panics as social and political events and reveal how and under what circumstances the panic “script” varies.

Yellow Fever In September of 1873, Senator J. R. West of Louisiana received a telegram from his home district whose terse lines spoke of abject desperation: The people are panic-stricken. All that could have left. The poor are nearly all on our hands; no money in the city treasury. All pecuniary aid will be thankfully received. Fever increasing. (Signed) Samuel Levy, Mayor

A wave of yellow fever had swept through Shreveport, Louisiana, leaving in its wake a gash of death and disorder. It was one of many unwanted visits from Yellow Jack in the years after the Civil War—a plague whose cause was unknown but popularly connected to the exchange of infected bedding and clothing. What was certain was that death from yellow fever arrived in a horrible fashion, transforming the human body, whether dead or still clinging to life, into something almost unrecognizable. Yellow fever caused internal hemorrhages brought on by organ failure. This gave rise to projectile vomiting of a dark mix of mucus and blood that looked to many observers like black coffee grounds. Any building that served as a hospital became little more than “a great human slaughter house,” where “the ordure and other excavations of the sick were allowed to remain in the most offensive state imaginable,” while “the dying and dead were indiscriminately mingled together.”21 Victims sometimes wandered from their homes as the last stages of delirium set in, and, in the worst of cases, it was not uncommon to find dead bodies putrefying in the

20. Ibid. 21. Mathew Carey, A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia: With a Statement of the Proceedings that Took Place on the Subject in Different Parts of the United States (Philadelphia: Printed by the Author, November 23, 1793), 61.

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streets, “crawling with maggots, and in such a state as to be ready to fall in pieces.”22 Discoveries of the dead and dying generated a daily, “dreadful spectacle.”23 Margaret Humphries argues that such grotesque death was a primary cause of panic, fright, and flight. But while an exodus was one of the few means that citizens had to take redressive action, it was that very action, ironically, that marked the panic. It typically left a locale in economic ruin. In Jacksonville, Florida, yellow fever in 1888 inspired a run on the banks, leaving business at a standstill.24 The situation in Memphis in 1879 was similar. Even after the fever abated, many of those who remained were determined to leave the town, which had been “injured to the amount of hundreds of thousands of dollars.” Communities as far removed as Galveston declared a quarantine against all peoples and products from Memphis, which found that “Many firms have received telegrams countermanding heavy orders for goods, and all the surrounding towns, villages, and hamlets have declared their intention of enforcing a rigid quarantine against persons and goods from Memphis.”25 Reacting as much to panic as to the disease that triggered it, places not yet touched by disease often went into lockdown. Social isolation—at all costs—was embraced as the means of defense. Citizens living in uninfected areas sometimes took up arms to impose “shot gun” quarantines to fend off outsiders. In Jackson, Mississippi, residents ripped up railroad tracks leading into the city.26 “Indignation is at fever heat here,” stated a news account, “and the people say that if necessary to compel observation of their reasonable quarantine regulations they will burn every bridge between here and Vicksburg.”27 Terror radiated from the Deep South. An 1888 telegram received by the Post Office Department in Washington DC, from the Postmaster in Cairo, Illinois, warned that the “country below is in the hands of a howling mob.”28 Notably, the targets of such reactionary “shot gun” quarantines were middle- and upper-class citizens with the resources to attempt to flee, not the immigrant or racial other. In Jackson, Mississippi, even the governor was barred from entering “his own capital,” as “the public officers had no respect of persons in enforcing the rule.”29 For Turner, the starting point for analysis was the breach in the social order. It may seem obvious that panic requires a precipitating event, a powerful threat. But in a context in which the response to disease was primarily reactive—there were almost no permanent health structures empowered to control outbreaks before the 1870s—panic and disease become hard to disentangle. Disease flared in one locale, 22. Ibid., 25. 23. Ibid., 32–33. 24. “The Scourge in Florida,” New York Times, August 14, 1888, 2. 25. “The Memphis Fever Panic,” New York Times, July 12, 1879, 1. 26. “Railroad Track Destroyed,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 19, 1897, 3. 27. Ibid. 28. “The Mail Service is Demoralized,” Atlanta Constitution, September 25, 1888, 1. 29. “Gov. M’Laurin Barred Out,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 19, 1897, 3.

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citizens took flight as a way to protect themselves, and surrounding areas reacted as strongly to the spreading social panic as to the epidemic itself. Disease may represent the “breach” in the first instance; panic appears when the community takes action by escaping in the second. Thus, even as panic was construed as something contagious and universal, in the nineteenth-century United States it manifested with a specific American character. Where political riots in the midst of epidemics fueled the imaginations of early European theorists of panic—riots that US observers watched with anxious eyes—the narrative in a far less urban America was different. As the nation expanded westward, the seemingly boundless frontier seemed to offer the prospect of a safe place for retreat. Panic in America was threatening, but it was not construed as either irrational or politically charged: the flight itself may have been chaotic and disruptive but the social imagery of panic in which the nation was inexorably expanding its North American empire was never tarred as a kind of class-based uprising (indeed, the poorest were almost always passive actors without agency in these early accounts) or an act of illogic on the part of those with the wealth to retreat. This early history helps bind the idea of panic into the very construction of epidemics. The word “panic” carries, as Sander Gilman has argued, ideas about the unfettered, catastrophic spread of deadly disease that sparks an emotional reaction, which shapes both the personal and social experiences of illness.30 Once panic and epidemics were intertwined in memory, the conditions for panic to actually precipitate an event (a rumor of disease, a concern about an approaching flu season based on the prior year that might trigger panic or the perceived need to anticipate it) were set. The nineteenth century set the stage for future dramas. Created was a desire for a structure to manage disease and disorder.31 From the colonial era to the Second World War, a period which historians have denoted as the age of tropical medicine,32 enormous energy was put toward managing disease and disease panics abroad in the name of new imperial orders.33 Disease panics served as routine and recurrent, perhaps even necessary, catalysts for public health institution-building at home and imperial development and consolidation abroad.34 New colonial structures assumed 30. Sander Gilman, “Moral Panics and Pandemics,” Lancet, vol. 375, no. 9729 (2010): 1866–67. 31. Humphries, “No Safe Place”; Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987 [1962]). 32. T. M. Brown, M. Cueto, and E. Fee, “The World Health Organization and the Transition From ‘International’ to ‘Global’ Public Health,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 96, no. 1 (2006): 62–72; A. E. Birn, “The Stages of International (Global) Health: Histories of Success or Successes of History?” Global Public Health, vol. 4, no. 1 (2009): 50–68. 33. See, for example, Marisola Espinosa, Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 34. Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Thomas A. Birkland, After Disaster: Agenda Setting, Public Policy, and Focusing Events (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1997); Daniel Nohrstedt and Christopher M. Weible, “The Logic of Policy Change after Crisis: Proximity and Subsystem Interaction,”

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the mantle of an imperial biopolitics of disease control at the same time that nascent public health institutions at home provided panicky publics with a place to appeal, someone to call on, endowed with scientific authority and the capacity to move toward restoration. Restoration ultimately involved making the case for new state structures that could alter, prevent, or even eradicate the dreaded panic dramas altogether. These new institutions would be staffed by influential actors who would give schisms following social disruptions added complexity.

Influenza, Smallpox, and Swine Flu If yellow fever helped to establish the idea of collective panic as both expected and dreaded, that narrative would begin to change in important ways by the end of the twentieth century. Thus, one of the other striking features of the yellow fever panic drama is that while panic was viewed as a threat to the social order, in the absence of actors endowed with the power to prevent disaster, it appeared almost natural and could even be seen as protective—helping to ensure the removal of kindling that might fuel an epidemic fire.35 As noted above, even if flight generated chaos, it was the chief option in the face of epidemic disease. But even in the years before 1900, when Walter Reed identified the mosquito as the vector through which yellow fever spread, broad quarantines, particularly of the shotgun variety, and panic, in general, began to get a bad name. Panic was to be expected of the “frenzied” Italians of New Orleans or the “illiterate” immigrants in places like New York’s Lower East Side, but not of “respectable and cultivated citizens” who ought to know better.36 Disease came to be viewed as something that could be controlled by bacteriology, the new science that identified germs, which could be transmitted from person to person, as the source of infectious epidemics. To the elite, proud and content in their new microbial expertise, it seemed that groups of people who lacked education, or English language reading skills, simply did not know enough not to panic in the face of an outbreak. And it was no coincidence that that shift was marked by a collective sense, given the imprimatur of the Census Bureau in 1893, that the western frontier was now “closed”—the American Empire had expanded across the continent. In Progressive Era America there thus emerged a great faith in “modern scientific methods.”37 It was, in part, justified: there was real progress against the threat of contagious diseases. William Sedgwick, one of the nation’s leading bacteriologists, who helped to professionalize public health education in the early twentieth century, Risks, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy, vol. 1, no. 2 (2010): 1–32. 35. Carey, A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, 54–55, 58, 95–96. 36. “Threat to Burn a Fever Hospital,” New York Times, September 3, 1905, 1; “A Senseless Protest,” New York Tribune, August 30, 1916, 8. See also “Paralysis Hysteria,” New York Times, July 16, 1916, E2. 37. “They Died of Smallpox; The Mauri Family Mystery Cleared Up. Malignant Nature of the Disease— Panic and Flight of People from the Neighborhood,” New York Times, January 7, 1887, 8.

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summed up the scientific triumph of the bacteriological age: “Before 1880 we knew nothing; after 1890 we knew it all; it was a glorious ten years.”38 Noting the declining toll of infectious disease, not only did health officials argue in 1912 that “it may be truly said that within certain limits public health is purchasable,”39 but the public believed them.40 By the turn of the century, “the freedom from fear” was viewed as another of the “triumphs” of modern medical and sanitary science. “So many things have been done for the protection of the health of mankind that fear is being driven further and further into the background,”41 asserted one satisfied newspaper writer. Within the borders of the United States, panic began to be framed as a kind of “state of exception,” a departure from the “normal,” quotidian confrontations with disease, debility, and death. Yet the new paradigm and new structures did not fundamentally disrupt or undermine public belief and adherence to the panic drama. Rather, they suggested that the drama could be managed; that panic could be contained. Indeed, trying to keep panic out of the picture became part of the script. Just as the laboratory was the key to combating disease, openness and transparency emerged as key tools in preventing widespread panic. Sociologist Robert E. Park, writing in 1904, made the case for a “new method of communication” relying on the “power of facts,” which, when disseminated, transformed the chaotic crowd into a pondering public.42 Publishing “honest and complete records” was touted as a means of fighting both pestilence and panic during the 1907 outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco.43 The greatest test of the state’s ability to control not only disease but panic came with the 1918 flu pandemic, which claimed the lives of some 40 million worldwide and 550,000 in the United States.44 In the face of the “tidal wave” of morbidity and mortality that the flu visited upon cities,45 health officials instituted a wide range of new tactics for limiting the spread of disease. 38. Quoted in Elizabeth Fee, “History and Development of Public Health,” in Principles of Public Health Practice, 2nd ed., ed. F. Douglas Scutchfield and C. William Keck (Clifton Park, NY: Thomson Delmar Learning, 2003), 10–30 (17). 39. Annual Report of the Department of Health of the City of New York for the Years 1910–1911 (New York, 1912), 12. 40. Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 41. “Bubonic Plague Invades England Once More, But Causes No Panic,” New York Tribune, November 20, 1910. 42. Quoted in Jackie Orr, Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 44. 43. “The Bubonic Plague—and Others,” Outlook, October 12, 1907. 44. Alexandra Minna Stern and Howard Markel, “Influenza Pandemic,” in From Birth to Death and Bench to Clinic: The Hastings Center Bioethics Briefing Book for Journalists, Policymakers, and Campaigns, ed. Mary Crowley (Garrison, NY: The Hastings Center, 2002), 89–92 (89). 45. Annual Report of the Health Department of the City of Richmond, Va. for the Year Ending December 31, 1918 (Richmond, VA: Clyde Saunders, 1919).

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What is striking is that in the context of a pandemic outbreak in a period in which threats from outside US borders had, for several decades, been the subject of a kind of paranoid national debate and a tightening of the borders,46 containment efforts in this instance were focused within rather than at the US borders. Sweeping “social distancing” measures did not trigger outbreak anxieties stirred by disease from abroad but rather a new level of protest against the US state. Mask ordinances were considered particularly burdensome.47 Likewise, efforts to close churches could also spark complaints that public health measures violated “freedom of worship.”48 Yet the more typical response was acceptance, testifying to both the power of and the popular faith in government, particularly in matters of disease control. When the so-called Spanish flu arrived in 1918, intersecting as it did with the First World War and “heightened patriotism” which had followed the intense public debates over getting involved in the war and becoming entangled in foreign affairs, public officials found Americans “particularly inclined to heed government mandates.”49 A kind of ascending legitimacy of the state for dealing with both threats to public health and threats to international interests allowed the government to engage in panic prevention and social disorder control on both the global conflict stage and at home in the face of pandemic flu. As the health officer in the District of Columbia reported in 1919, “the people were panic-stricken and appeared willing to cooperate to any extent with the health authorities in the efforts being made to suppress the disease.”50 Thus, even when citizens disagreed with public health interventions, it was not uncommon to find that “patriotic citizens” agreed to “obey the order” even as they expressed their “solemn protest.”51 It is admittedly difficult to discern how much of this description of faithful citizen-subjects, willing to do their collective duties, was the newspaper reporter’s

46. Amy L. Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 47. Journal of Proceedings Board of Supervisor, City and County of San Francisco, 1919, 50. On meeting attendance see “New Cases of Influenza at Low Record,” San Francisco Examiner, January 26, 1919. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014). 48. “The Closing of the Churches,” Evening Star [Washington, DC], October 26, 1918. See also Bulletin of the State Board of Health of Kentucky, 1919, RG 155, October 1919, 18. As it was continued the argument was limited to rights, see “Opposes Further Church Closing,” Evening Star [Washington, DC], October 28, 1918. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014). 49. Stern and Markel, “Influenza Pandemic,” 90. 50. Annual Report of the Commissioners of the District of Columbia Year Ended June 30, 1919, Vol. III, Report of the Health Officer. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014). 51. “Pastors Protest Church Closings,” Evening Star [Washington, DC], October 15, 1918. http://www. influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014). In St. Louis, the Chamber of Commerce likewise railed against that forced closures yet still “assure[d] the city authorities that its members are in full support of all wise efforts of the public health officers to prevent an increase on the influenza” in St. Louis. “Quarantine Order is Modified to Extend List of Exemptions,” St. Louis Globe Democrat, November 19, 1918. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014).

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own editorializing in an effort to promote the party line. But such rhetoric would also indicate the broad power of centralized authorities to organize the behavior of others. What is so important about this transformation is that people began to turn to government for protection from disease and the disorder of panic. This change would lay the groundwork for later theoretical models that suggested that people would not panic so long as there was not a void in leadership. In a moment of crisis, social theorists posited, people temporarily turn inward and touch base with deeply rooted, atavistic self-interests, but could be quickly drawn back to the collective by the influence of “regimental leadership.”52 In other words, when provided with a canopy of respected and credible structures of authority, the group would ultimately respond by falling in line rather than falling apart. This made it all the more critical to seek redressive and preventive action for both outbreaks and panic itself; flight would no longer do. But as panic became a part of what required management, the new paradigm gave those who challenged aggressive state action more targets, and created new alliances and fissures. Charges that preventive health measures aroused panic—that “primal cause of disease”53—abounded. Indeed, even when citizens protested that disease control measures (such as ordinances requiring everyone to wear a mask) violated their civil rights, they often relied on instrumental arguments that claimed any measure that limited liberty introduced panic, “the most powerful ally of disease.”54 “The authorities seem to be going daft,” charged the Philadelphia Inquirer. “What are they trying to do, scare everybody to death?”55 Some critics explicitly accused health officials of panicking themselves, chastising those who “lose their heads” and “talk excitedly and propose all sorts of extravagant conditions as the only possible means of preventing the decimation of the city’s population.”56 The health commissioner in Baltimore took 52. Notably, it would not be until the late 1930s that Richard Tracy LaPiere set forth the most extended treatment of panic. With roots in Freud’s work from the 1920s, LaPiere’s ideas would be elaborated on into the 1960s. LaPiere, Collective Behavior, 441. See also Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego (London: Hogarth Press, 1922), 46 and D. P. Schultz, “Panic in Organized Collectivities,” Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 63, no. 2 (1964): 353–59 for theories that elaborate a similar idea but in military settings as a way to make the distinction between panic in organized, where leadership and social cohesion are more determinative, versus unorganized groups. 53. “Aver That Influenza Is Spread by Fear and Panic,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 13, 1918. http:// www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014). 54. “The Closing of the Churches,” Evening Star [Washington, DC], October 26, 1918. See also Bulletin of the State Board of Health of Kentucky, 1919, RG 155, October 1919, 18. As it was continued the argument was limited to rights, see “Opposes Further Church Closing,” Evening Star [Washington, DC], October 28, 1918. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014). 55. “Spanish Influenza and the Fear of It,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 4, 1918. See, also, “Calls for Opening of Local Churches,” Charleston News and Courier, October 30, 1918. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014). 56. “Be Sane,” New Orleans States, October 17, 1918. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014).

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this position. Dr. John D. Blake hewed fast to his decision not to close theaters and other public places to avoid “causing shock,” which he and leading physicians in the city surmised “would have an alarming effect upon the people, and probably make them more susceptible to the disease.”57 At the same time, the failure to act quickly and hence forestall panic also drew fire. Thus, James E. Cassidy wrote in the Fall River Evening Herald in 1918 that had health officials closed more public gathering places early in the epidemic, “We might have had panic . . . but now we have panic stalked by widely-devastating death.” Why, demanded the author, do officials not take those steps now and close the saloons?58 Historians have argued that while there was a surge of panic that accompanied the devastating and swiftly moving 1918 influenza outbreak, it prevailed only for “a brief period.”59 In fact, though, there was widespread talk of panic throughout the epidemic. What made it seem fleeting was that panic appeared in different forms than it had in the nineteenth century. To be sure, there were some reports of overt chaos that recalled the old fright and flight response. In Colorado, for example, 100 miners were reported to be “stampeding” toward a town free from disease. A “battle between armed guards” and the “panic stricken miners [seemed] imminent.” Yet, continued the account, this incident was “the nearest approach to panic that has yet been reported.”60 Far more frequent were descriptions of panic manifesting as the worried well descending upon doctors and drug stores.61 Institutional structures designed to

57. “Blake Will Not Close Theaters,” Baltimore America, October 7, 1919. See, also, Minutes, Special Meeting of the San Francisco Board of Health, MS 1818, October 17, 1919; “Flu and Theater,” New Orleans States, January 6, 1919; “No Fear of Flu Here,” Oakland Enquirer, December 10, 1918. http:// www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014). Some officials took measures to counter rumors that they were acting precipitously. The Mayor of Cincinnati ran an ad to assure other locales that there was no quarantine in effect that prevented entry into his city: “All are free to come and go as they wish. Let there be no misunderstanding about this.” “No Quarantine!” Cincinnati Enquirer, October 7, 1918. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014). 58. James E. Cassidy, “Shut the Saloons,” Fall River Evening Herald, September 28, 1918. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014). Polio provided a similar story; “A Senseless Protest,” New York Tribune, August 30, 1916, 8. See, also, “Paralysis Hysteria,” New York Times, July 16, 1916, E2. 59. Alexandra Minna Stern, Martin S. Cetron, and Howard Markel, “The 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic in the United States: Lessons Learned and Challenges Exposed,” Public Health Reports, vol. 125; suppl. 3 (2010): 6–8. 60. “100 Miners Flee from Influenza,” Rocky Mountain News, October 22, 1918. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014). 61. “Stop the Senseless Influenza Panic,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 1918; “Flu Folk Rush to Drug Stores,” Spokesman-Review, October 26, 1918. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014). See also Tomes, “‘Destroyer and Teacher,’” 53. The experience of the worried well turning to medicine is also a function of the rising cultural status of medicine. David J. Rothman, Strangers at the Bedside: A History of How Law and Bioethics Transformed Medical Decision Making (New York: Basic Books, 1991); David Rosner, A Once Charitable Enterprise: Hospitals and Health Care in Brooklyn and New York, 1885–1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

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manage disease and disease-related social disorder had fundamentally transformed the nature of the panic response. Panic, particularly during the flu pandemic of 1918, consequently began to be described less as a mass phenomenon and more as an individual event: “every little ache or pain that may be harmless in itself ” might cause a person to “give himself over to dismal imaginations,” thus “providing a fertile field for attack.” Concluded one clinician, the “mind fears [disease], becomes receptive to it, invites it.” In contrast, “the mind that stolidly refuses to entertain the thought of disease, that rejects it, that repels panicky conditions, is far better prepared to ward off disease.” Such emphasis on a “refusal to worry” was a new feature of epidemic responses: again and again physicians (and salesmen) advised the public to “keep the mind clear of superfluous apprehension.”62 Health officials joined in the chorus, cheerfully coaching the public to believe that one of the best preventives was maintaining “a fearless and hopeful attitude of mind.”63 This effort to take panic out of the public realm and make it an internal experience reflected an increasingly narrow professional focus on individuals and their bad habits as the cause of disease.64 With the dawn of the Great Depression, talk of panic—and judgments about who or what was responsible for its eruption—shifted decidedly to the financial crisis. Within the realm of public health, polio, an infectious disease that eluded control, seemed to be panic’s last stronghold and could set communities into flight.65 By the 1940s, health officials began to claim a mastery over disease-related panics. No doubt, this was because infectious disease continued to decline: there was increasingly less reason to panic over epidemics because they were fewer and farther between. Likewise, as outbreaks grew less frequent and less deadly, editorialists inevitably had less cause to criticize the disease-management skills of presiding health authorities. And, in general, epidemics were less deadly. On the one hand, this epidemiologic transition revealed that for the panic drama, the size of the threat mattered. Spanish flu was an enormous epidemic and killed millions worldwide. The public was bound to be more concerned about what governments were doing, and whether they were 62. “Stop the Senseless Influenza Panic,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 8, 1918; “No Need of an Influenza Panic,” Providence Daily Journal, October 10, 1918; “Sunshine and Influenza,” New Orleans States, October 23, 1918; “Keep Cool and Smash the ‘Flu,’” Baltimore Sun, October 10, 1918; “The Flu Situation,” New Orleans States, January 20, 1919; “Let Recoveries Too Be Reported,” Albany Evening Journal, October 10, 1918. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014). 63. Dr. W. T. Howard, Assistant Commissioner of Health, “The Truth about Influenza,” Municipal Journal, October 18, 1918; “Deplores Epidemic Fear,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, October 9, 1918. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014). 64. Amy L. Fairchild, David Rosner, James Colgrove, Ron Bayer, and Linda Fried, “The Exodus of Public Health: What History Can Tell Us about Its Future,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 100, no. 1 (2010): 54–63. 65. Naomi Rogers, Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

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doing too much or too little, in a disaster of such grand scale. On the other hand, the element of surprise began to figure into the panic drama. Even epidemiologically minor events that deviated from the idea that infectious disease had been conquered might now register on the panic meter.66 For example, the New York City Department of Health proclaimed victory over both disease and panic in the wake of the 1947 smallpox outbreak. Interestingly, though, even while the health commissioner stressed that there was no cause for “undue alarm” in a number of radio addresses, he used panic to push an agenda. Without vaccination, Dr. Israel Weinstein warned millions of listeners, smallpox would spread like wildfire.67 He set up this doomsday scenario by describing the clinical experience of smallpox in grizzly detail. With this not so subtle warning he gained the “intelligent cooperation of the public” in the administration of more than six million vaccines in the space of just a month.68 Yet the campaign stirred little hysteria. Smallpox was limited to 12 individuals; two died. “There has been no panic,” reported the New York Times. “At no time was there any cause to fear an epidemic—such is the vigilance of the Department of Health.”69 But in the 1947 smallpox outbreak it was easy to declare victory and claim that disease (and panic) had been prevented when so few people died or were affected. Half a million deaths, as the nation had experienced in the Spanish flu, did not make for propitious political chest thumping. A handful of deaths (including the few unfortunate victims of the massive vaccination campaign) in a battle with a fearsome enemy such as smallpox, by contrast, could be presented as a stunning victory. After all, New York’s subjugation of smallpox was not only a triumph over a dreaded pestilence; it also showed how state actors could protect citizens from diffuse “foreign threats” emerging from peripheral regions of the globe.70 In this case, the danger had come from a single “man from Mexico” who imported smallpox on a bus that had traveled across America’s insecure southern border.71 The saga fit with the emerging narrative in a period of what historians have described as “international health,” the period of international institution-building in the name of health. Vigilant surveillance of the borders, not only on the part of new international institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO), but also organizations with international disease-control 66. Amy L. Fairchild, “The Polio Narratives: Dialogues with FDR,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 75, no. 3 (2001): 488–534. 67. Emphasis in original. http://www.nyhistory.org/node/63842 (accessed June 1, 2014). 68. Israel Weinstein, “An Outbreak of Smallpox in New York City,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 37. no. 11 (1947): 1376–84. 69. “Control of Smallpox,” New York Times, April 16, 1947, 24. 70. Raymond B. Fosdick, “Public Health as an International Problem,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 34, no. 11 (1944): 1133–38; Thomas Parran and Frank G. Boudreau, “The World Health Organization: Cornerstone of Peace,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 36, no. 11 (1946): 1267–72. 71. Berton Roueché, “The Case of the Man from Mexico,” New Yorker, June 11, 1947, 70.

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aspirations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), offered a solution to increasingly porous borders.72 But if the smallpox episode hinted at what Bashford, in her epilogue, calls the “global dynamics of power” that involved the eclipse of East-West tensions with the rise of the global North and South, very different was the swine flu debacle in 1976, which threatened to undermine the legitimacy of the CDC. In response to an outbreak at Fort Dix that resulted in the death of one army recruit, the CDC launched a sweeping federal immunization campaign—the first of its kind—that would result in some 40 million vaccinations. Convinced that the nation was facing a strain of the flu virus that might well reprise the 1918 pandemic, President Gerald Ford, as part of a $135 million effort, made a personal plea on national television “to inoculate every man, woman, and child in the United States.”73 In the face of questions about who would bear the liability for vaccination, a lack of credible epidemiological evidence on the magnitude of the swine flu threat, and only a single verified death, the Ford administration’s “grandiose universal immunization program” began to be framed as a “panic measure.”74 Three articles in the Lancet called those spearheading the program “panic mongers.”75 But it was the New York Times that used the concept of panic to make a pointed accusation. The paper asserted that the public health panic over swine flu had been a political ploy. “The Centers for Disease Control in particular has long wanted to increase the size of its empire and multiply its budget.”76 Ford, who was losing ground to Ronald Reagan as the republican primary approached, also found himself the target of attack as the vaccination scheme was derided as a political decision meant to sway an election.77 Here, panic was framed as a tool for advancing agendas that had nothing to do with the immediate need to address a crisis. Postmortems on the controversy, however, have often concluded that health officials had indeed lost their heads; one writer called the aggressive swine flu campaign a “panicky overreaction to a minimal threat.”78 The swine flu story reveals that timing matters in addition to scale in the panic narrative. Responding to the unfolding smallpox epidemic in 1947 had allowed health officials to be seen as restoring order; swine flu, in contrast, set into bold relief the risks of anticipating an epidemic (and the political panic that might ensue). From a policy standpoint, the lesson of these panic dramas may be that at least some deaths 72. Kirsten Ostherr, Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 121–54. 73. Quoted in Richard E. Neustadt and Harvey Fineberg, The Epidemic that Never Was: Policy-Making and the Swine Flu Affair (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 46. 74. Editorial, “Light on Swine Flu,” New York Times, July 20, 1976, 30. 75. See, also, “Swine Flu Threat,” Times of India, July 9, 1976. 76. Harry Schwartz, “Swine Flu Fiasco,” New York Times, December 21, 1976, 33. 77. Editorial, “Light on Swine Flu,” New York Times, July 20, 1976, 30; Editorial, “Doubts About Swine Flu,” New York Times, August 9, 1976, 16. 78. “Soft Evidence and Hard Sell,” New York Times, September 5, 1976, 137.

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are required as a warrant for aggressive public health action (particularly action that could, itself, cause some loss of life) to avert mass disease and mass panic. But perhaps, too, such a muscular policy response simply seemed anachronistic or out of place at a time when infectious diseases, at least within the confines of the United States, were seemingly conquered. As the era of international health gave way to the era of global health, with the increasing pace of global travel, migration, trade, and concerns about new kinds of contagious threats that Nicholas King describes in this volume (Chapter 8), policy entrepreneurs would cast into bold relief the costs of complacency.79 Above all, though, the genealogy of panic and the costs of panic prevention had subtly shifted in ways that, by the 1970s, worked against the CDC.

From Cold War to the War on Terror We have to take a step back to understand the roots of the judgment against the CDC. From the early 1950s onward, panic has been framed more neutrally within scholarly circles. Panic, the literature argued, should be thought of as nonsocial rather than antisocial, nonrational rather than either irrational or rational.80 It was simply maladaptive behavior. 81 But most critically, it was viewed as exceedingly rare—the reaction of nuclear survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki served as a prime example. Yet the entire civil defense apparatus that was erected in the United States during the Cold War years was driven by fears of a Soviet nuclear attack and sustained by older panic theories that led to the conclusion that nuclear and, in particular, biological war would send the nation spinning into chaos.82 In the popular media there was enormous speculation about what life would be like in the last days of post-nuclear holocaust Earth.83 Philip Wylie, a science fiction writer whose novels included Tomorrow, an account of post-apocalypse America, and consultant for the newly created Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA), argued that the American people already had a bad case of the “atomic jitters” and would almost certainly panic in the aftermath of nuclear war. If the fact of war did not do it, then certainly the sight of charred survivors, “hideous and ambulatory,” would send those who remained over the edge.84 79. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 80. Quarantelli, “The Nature and Conditions of Panic,” 270, 272. 81. Mintz, “Nonadaptive Group Behavior.” 82. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1985]). 83. Duane P. Schultz, “Theories of Panic Behavior: A Review,” Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 66, no. 1 (1965): 31–40. 84. Philip Wylie, “Panic, Psychology, and the Bomb,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 10, no. 2 (1954): 37–40, 63.

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Val Peterson, Eisenhower’s first FCDA administrator, was concerned that mass panic might “produce a chain reaction more deeply destructive than any explosive known . . . Mass panic—not the A bomb—may be the easiest way to win a battle, the cheapest way to win a war.”85 Peterson, in a widely circulated 1952 article in Collier’s, described a scenario in which bombs decimated Manhattan: “Those who did succeed in fleeing the island would pour into adjacent areas to become a hungry pillaging mob—disrupting disaster relief, overwhelming local police and spreading panic in a widening arc.”86 Matching the certainty that the nation would panic, however, was the confidence that panic could be overcome. Those who sought to manage panic seized on the perspective that planning for chaos could maintain order. But while much of the work of the FDCA focused on preventing the panics they believed would attend a seemingly inevitable nuclear holocaust,87 the specter of biowarfare, argued some emergency planners, would be more terrifying to the public than any other. Participants at a meeting called by the Secretary of Defense on April 7, 1949, explained why the prospect of biological warfare, often referred to simply as BW, was so scary: it was the covert nature of the ordi nance—a “clandestine weapon par excellence”—that made it particularly panic-provoking. Attackers could deny having used BW. Just as easily they could pretend to have used such weapons, inspiring widespread chaos. And of course, they could accuse the United States of having used biological warfare “with relative impunity.” These features made BW “an exceedingly strong weapon of political manipulation.” Only chemical weapons had a similar capacity to cause “fear and anxiety without necessary foundation in fact.” But perhaps most critically, the committee concluded, “people are afraid of disease in peace and war, whereas they have to fear conventional weapons only in time of war. Therefore BW is a weapon which has the potentiality of eradicating psychologically the difference between peace and war.”88 Dr. Alexander Langmuir would emerge as the most influential of the federal officials concerned with biowarfare. Before coming to the CDC, Langmuir consulted with the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board and served on the Commission on Respiratory Diseases at Fort Bragg. As a faculty member in epidemiology at 85. Val Peterson, “Panic: The Ultimate Weapon?” Colliers Weekly, August 21, 1953, 99–109. 86. Ibid., 101. 87. Schultz, “Theories of Panic Behavior,” 31. 88. Minutes of the First Meeting of the Sub-Committee on the Public Relations Aspects of Biological Warfare of the Secretary of Defense’s Ad Hoc Committee on Biological Warfare, Held at 4:30 P.M. April 7, 1949, Room 5159, New State Department Building, Washington, DC, 3–4. RB 59 General Records of the Department of State, Office of the Secretary, Special Assist. to Sec. of State for Atomic Energy & Outer Space, General Records Relating to Atomic Energy matters, 1948–1963; Box 60, ARC ID 2517138, A1 Entry 3008-A; Folder: 9B Secretary of Defense’s Ad Hoc Committee on Biological Warfare, 1949, Minutes of Subcommittee Meeting. Declassified NND 50551.

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Johns Hopkins University, he became involved in biological warfare through the Department of Defense’s Committee on Biological Warfare, first as a member and later as the committee’s chair.89 When Langmuir arrived at the CDC in 1949 as chief epidemiologist, he recognized that the seemingly remote threat of biowarfare was dwarfed by the day-to-day concerns of “natural” epidemics. Yet he saw an unparalleled opportunity for funding and expansion of the functions of the CDC. By the spring of 1951, Langmuir later recalled in handwritten notes on yellow lined paper, the Korean War “was six months old and had been going badly.” The Chinese were mounting “a massive propaganda campaign claiming with no justification what so ever that the USA had used biological warfare as indeed the Japanese had 15 years earlier.” The “emotional tension”90—indeed, “emotional hysteria”91—about biological warfare “was unbelievable and worse the higher one reached into the establishment.”92 In an effort to capitalize off these mounting anxieties, Langmuir noted that he had “submitted a detailed plan and a budget and published a plain unvarnished statement of the potentialities of BW and sneaked it through military intelligence.”93 The CDC’s famed Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) was created using military funds. Langmuir proceeded to make the case both in the public health literature and in the popular media that pathogens could be aerosolized over cities, that water or food could be contaminated, and that strategic buildings could be sabotaged in order “to incapacitate key individuals and industries or create hysteria and undermine public morale.”94 In a television episode entitled “What You Should Know about Biological Warfare” that aired on April 3, 1951, as part of the Johns Hopkins Science Review, Langmuir vividly demonstrated the ease with which a rogue actor might successfully aerosolize a pathogen with dry ice using a simple household blender, as well as the simplicity of contaminating public drinking water with a simple pipette filled with dye.95 But if Langmuir presented himself as a scientist bent on showing mechanically how the enemy could attack and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands, he again 89. Elizabeth Fee and Theodore M. Brown, “Preemptive Biopreparedness: Can We Learn Anything from History?” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 91, no. 5 (2001): 721–26. 90. Handwritten talk c. 1978, Alexander D. Langmuir Papers, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Box no. 1, Folder “JHV Honorary Degree 1978.” 91. Handwritten lecture notes, March 12, 1971, Alexander D. Langmuir Papers, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Box no. 5, Folder “Lecture Notes, Miscellaneous History CDC.” 92. Handwritten talk c. 1978, Alexander D. Langmuir Papers, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Box no.1, Folder “JHV Honorary Degree 1978.” 93. Ibid. 94. Alexander D. Langmuir, “The Potentialities of Biological Warfare Against Man—An Epidemiological Appraisal,” Public Health Reports, vol. 66, no. 13 (1951): 387–99 (388). 95. “What You Should Know about Biological Warfare,” Johns Hopkins Science Review, WAAM, Baltimore, MD, April 3, 1951.

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reinforced the broader federal message that it was imperative to address the “psychological problem” stemming from BW. As Langmuir explained, his goal was to “emphasize understanding of the known rather than fear of the unknown.”96 He blurred the line between deliberate events and natural events, stressing that we were already well prepared for either: “Actually, nature has directed biological warfare against man for thousands of years, but health workers have devised and applied constantly improving preventive methods.”97 Thus, like countless other civil defense films, Langmuir’s Johns Hopkins Science Review episode sought to drum up fear—to launch the panic drama—while simultaneously resolving the problem of panic in one stroke. At the height of nuclear anxiety, Langmuir himself was likely terrified, much like the scientists who helped launch the atomic age. Many, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, were scared to death of the weapons they had built and felt that widespread fear was not only appropriate, but absolutely essential if populations were going to be convinced that nuclear war must be avoided at all costs.98 If, on the one hand, mass panic was certain to be the consequence of the annihilation that would accompany nuclear war, ironically, the chief problem for officials involved in the Cold War panic drama was, as Langmuir described it, the “the level of ‘disbelief.’”99 The worst that US emergency planners could imagine was brought into public view in a series of national rehearsals called Operation Alert. The exercise required everyone in 16 cities across the United States and Canada to take cover for 15 minutes as part of a simulated nuclear attack. Participation was compulsory and refusal carried fines of up to $500 and one year in jail.100 Only if people were prepared to move calmly into shelters could panic be prevented. Behind the scenes, Operation Alert involved elaborate scenarios where bombs fell on many cities across the nation. City officials involved in the drill would receive a sealed envelope telling them how many of their citizens were dead and injured, how much infrastructure was destroyed, and what percentage of their land had been rendered uninhabitable. For example, in 1958, Operation Alert envisioned an attack that annihilated one-third of the US population, with a tenth of the survivors expected to develop radiation sickness and die within two-and-a-half months. Decimated cities battled “raging fires” that left only a third of the nation’s housing stock intact; medical facilities and manpower were seriously 96. Ibid. 97. Executive Office of the President, Federal Civil Defense United States, Civil Defense: Health Services and Special Weapons Defense (GPO, December 1950): 25. 98. Boyer, Bomb’s Early Light, 72. 99. Memorandum from Langmuir to Robert Smith, January 31, 1961. Alexander D. Langmuir Papers, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Box 2, Folder “1951 BW.” Langmuir would lament the public apathy over the possibility of biowarfare till the end of his days. 100. Dee Garrison, “‘Our Skirts Gave Them Courage’: The Civil Defense Protest Movement in New York City, 1955–1961,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Post-War America, 1945–1960, ed. Joanne Meyerowitz (Phildalphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994), 205–7.

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compromised. Fuel shortages compromised the ability to transport food, and “industrial production prospects look gloomy.”101 If it is surprising that despite the growing anxiety over biological weapons, the scenario did not involve biological attacks, it is stunning that in neither the scenarios presented to state and municipal officials nor in the write-ups produced by the participating locales was word of mass panic even breathed. The absence of BW is perhaps most easily explained. Even though BW inspired more dread, it remained mere specter. A nuclear event was far more likely. Nonetheless, the challenge of dealing with actual chaos and misinformation was not integrated into the Operation Alert rehearsals themselves. It may have represented the growing influence of empirical and theoretical evidence regarding the improbability of panic. Or it may have reflected a growing sense of the futility of preparation. In 1957, the self-defense director in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, one of 162 cities hit hard by nuclear bombs, simply reported to headquarters: “I am dead. So is everybody else. Goodbye.”102 Perhaps this was a wry joke, or maybe it was assumed that the population was so well trained that they complied in military fashion, having embraced Eisenhower’s insistence that “vigilance and preparedness under all circumstances all of the time is essential to the civil defense of our country.”103 But there were broader social, cultural, and political shifts that made panic less salient. There was mounting skepticism, for example, that the prospect of the bomb, biological warfare, or even panic would “scare us all into being good.”104 A powerful social movement that sought to bring Operation Alert to an end would gain steam and ultimately undermine such public preparedness exercises early in the administration of John F. Kennedy.105 But perhaps above all the “politicization of terror” was increasingly viewed as political ploy.106 Even Langmuir, who had worked the system to his own ends, later admitted that a pattern took hold in the Cold War that would continue to shape the politics of public health thereafter: “each emergency led to increased budgets, increased recruiting, & absorbed career officials.”107 Social activists, students, 101. D+14 Situation Summary for Phase II, Operation Alert 1958 (Executive Office of the President, Office of Defense and Civilian Mobilization). Marked Secret and Declassified NND 50531. RG 40, Records of the Department of Commerce, Entry P-6, Box no. 1, Folder: Documents Implementing Pan D-Minus (Copy No. 4) (Draft–11/1/55). 102. News roundups for Government Employees, RG 64, Records of the National Archive and Records Administration, Records Relating to Operation Alert, 1950–1957, Code Case 057–129, Parts 7b Alerts to Parts 7d Alerts (2), Box no. 1, Entry P-4. 103. Dwight D. Eisenhower, letter to the Heads of All Departments and Agencies, May 16, 1955. RG 64 Records of the National Archives and Records Administration, Records Relating to Operation Alert, 1950–1957, Code Case 055–129a, Part 7a to Part 7b (2 of 2); Box no. 2, Entry P-4; Folder: OSS-129, Part 7b (1 of 2). 104. Columnist Eduard C. Lindeman, quoted in Boyer, Bomb’s Early Light, 72. 105. Garrison, “‘Our Skirts Gave Them Courage.’” 106. Boyer, Bomb’s Early Light, 66. 107. Handwritten notes, Box no. 5, Folder “Lecture Notes. Miscellaneous EIS History CDC.”

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and scholars demonstrated a new willingness to challenge and critique authority. As the United States became embroiled in Vietnam, a new social science focus on social movement theory (which viewed collectivities as interested actors rather than as nameless faces in the crowd or a panicking mob)108 eclipsed concern over mass panic, which had emphasized “containment” (both in terms of the containment of communist expansion and the containment of American dread about nuclear annihilation). Likewise, containment strategy for panic made increasingly little sense as the other prong of US foreign policy—which had aimed since before the First World War to “expand an American imperium” grounded in free enterprise, democratic capitalism, and the empire-making power of science and technology—became ascendant.109 But while the Cold War panic drama fizzled and the geographically boundless “Market Empire” of the United States extended its reach,110 preparedness exercises did not come to an end even if they no longer involved either the public or garnered much publicity.111 Following the partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1972, which became public only in 1978, the newly organized Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which merged federal disaster-related authority under one roof, focused its efforts on homegrown radiological incidents.112 The full-blown panic drama would be taken up by public health in the 1990s.113 The US government had grown increasingly concerned, not about accidents, but about the threat of chemical and biological terrorism following a series of alarming events.114 In 1995, the Japanese terrorist organization Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system, killing 13 and seriously injuring more than 50.115 The 108. See Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, eds. Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 109. See Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Sheila Jasanoff, “Biotechnology and Empire: The Global Power of Seeds and Science,” Osiris, vol. 21, no. 1 (2006): 273–92; Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006). 110. de Grazia, Irresistible Empire. 111. Erickson and Barratt, “Prudence or Panic?” 2. 112. Ibid. 113. The context was one in which the field was experiencing funding cutbacks that affected the infrastructure for basic public health activities. President Reagan ushered in a new era of personal responsibility, as opposed to state obligation, when it came to public health. By the 1990s, after a decade of cutbacks and the resurgence of TB and the AIDS epidemic, there was genuine alarm over the state of the public health infrastructure. Further, Americans were quivering with panic over “emerging infections” like Ebola, the so-called flesh-eating virus, among many other infectious terrors. Tomes, “Making of a Germ Panic,” 193, 196. 114. Erickson and Barratt, “Prudence or Panic?” 3. 115. Paul Keim, Kimothy L. Smith, Christine Keys, Hiroshi Takahashi, Takeshi Kurata, and Arnold Kaufmann, “Molecular Investigation of the Aum Shinrikyo Anthrax Release in Kameido, Japan,” Journal of Clinical Microbiology, vol. 39, no. 12 (2001): 4566–67.

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group reportedly had plans to release chemicals in New York and Washington DC, as well. In 1998, a number of health clinics in Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee received letters and telephone calls claiming that anthrax had been released into building ventilation systems. All were determined to be hoaxes,116 but the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City sealed the perception that a new age of terrorism was dawning and that such tactics were taking root in American soil. The Oklahoma City attack also arrived at a moment when the breakup of the USSR seemed to have potentially opened up a cache of poorly secured biological weapons that might be obtained by groups hostile to the United States. These anxieties sparked an interest in planning for scenarios of large-scale unconventional attacks.117 While the threat of intercontinental ballistic missiles seemed to have receded, civil defense planners found it easy to imagine the destructive capacity of a dirty bomb or anthrax attack and the uncontrolled panic that might ensue. “Terrorism is now a growth industry. The possibility of a chemical or bioterrorism attack is increasingly defined as ‘not if but when,’” observed one 1999 newspaper report.118 Preparations for the possibility of unconventional attacks on the United States began in 1996 when Congress passed the Defense Against Weapons of Mass Destruction Act following the subway nerve gas killings in Japan.119 Notably, there was recognition that it was not just the public that needed to be protected from panic.120 First responders needed to be insulated as well. The Act established a framework for domestic terrorism defense against nuclear, chemical, and biological attack and created a preparedness program, run by the Pentagon, designed to teach officials in 120 cities how to respond to biological or chemical attack and to create special vaccination and decontamination teams.121 Two years later, not long before the incoming Secretary of the Navy, Richard Danzig, in a reprisal of sorts of Val Peterson’s Collier’s 116. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Bioterrorism Alleging Use of Anthrax and Interim Guidelines for Management—United States, 1998,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, vol. 48, no. 4 (1999): 69–74. 117. J. Barbera, A. Macintyre, L. Gostin, et al., “Large-Scale Quarantine Following Biological Terrorism in the United States: Scientific Examination, Logistic and Legal Limits, and Possible Consequences,” Journal of American Medical Association, vol. 286, no. 21 (2001): 2711–17. See also Representative Spratt introducing a preparedness bill in the House of Representatives. http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/congress/1996/h9606271.htm (accessed June 1, 2014). 118. Steve Goldstein, “Clouded by a Fear of Bioterrorism, Experts Say a Chemical Attack in the U.S. Is a Matter of ‘Not If But When.’ After a Series of Hoaxes, Some Ask: How Real is the Threat?” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 14, 1999. Available at: http://articles.philly.com/1999–11-14/news/25495432_1_ wmd-weapons-chemical (accessed June 1, 2014). 119. Thomas V. Inglesby, Rita Grossman, and Tara O’Toole, “A Plague on Your City: Observations from TOPOFF,” Clinical Infectious Diseases, vol. 32, no. 3 (2001): 436–45. 120. Erickson and Barratt, “Prudence or Panic?” 3. 121. Joshua Green, “Weapons of Mass Confusion: There’s Anthrax in the Subway. Who You Gonna Call?” Washington Monthly, January 5, 2001. Available at: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0105.green.html (accessed June 1, 2014).

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article, declared panic to be the next “superweapon” in the Op-Ed section of the New York Times,122 Republican Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire inserted a provision into a 1998 spending bill calling for “practice operations” for a terror attack.123 And it was hardly just the federal government that placed a new emphasis on preparedness. Practically every public health school in the country created disaster preparedness centers and programs. This emphasis on public health preparedness seemed designed to counteract the panic that is associated with terrorist attacks (real, imagined, and anticipated), though terrorism was hardly a sole focus. September 11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks became an occasion for both genuine alarm and deep skepticism about the potential abuses of panic.124 An America that now saw itself as vulnerable and on a war footing responded with a range of aggressive surveillance and preparedness measures.125 Critics stopped short of using the word “panic” to describe the Bush administration’s plan to inoculate millions for smallpox, but many health experts felt it was “premature” to distribute the vaccine so widely, as one pox researcher told Science in 2002. A committee of the prestigious Institute of Medicine that was asked to evaluate the smallpox campaign originally titled its report “Betrayal of Trust.” An ethicist who served on the committee explained that the original title was meant to “indicate the extent to which members believed the smallpox threat had been exaggerated for political ends.”126 While the report itself hardly amounted to a political accusation, it conveyed the clear message that the vaccination program had been concocted in haste, without appropriate forethought or safeguards.127 Indeed, the smallpox campaign was but a piece of what many on the left saw as a broader effort to enact emergency public health and national security legislation in a moment of national panic. “Constructive public health legislation, which must be federal, cannot be carefully drafted under panic conditions,” wrote health law scholar George Annas in 2002. “When it is,” he concluded, “it will predictably rely on broad, arbitrary state authority exercised without public accountability.”128 122. Richard Danzig, “The Next Superweapon: Panic,” New York Times, November 15, 1998, 15. 123. Patrick Connole, “U.S. Conducts Mock Biological and Chemical Attacks,” Reuters, May 24, 2000; Erickson and Barratt, “Prudence or Panic?” 4. 124. John A. Jernigan, David S. Stephens, David A. Ashford, et al., “Bioterrorism-Related Inhalation Anthrax: The First Ten Cases Reported in the United States,” Emerging Infectious Diseases, vol. 7, no. 6 (2001): 933–44. 125. Amy L. Fairchild, Ronald Bayer, and James Colgrove, with Daniel Wolfe, Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 126. Ronald Bayer, personal communication, December 6, 2012. Those higher up at the Institute of Medicine, however, changed it to something far more bureaucratic: The Smallpox Vaccination Program: Public Health in an Age of Terrorism (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2005). 127. Denise Grady, “Officials Press Ahead with Smallpox Shots,” New York Times, January 18, 2003, A10. 128. George J. Annas, “Bioterrorism, Public Health, and Human Rights,” Health Affairs, vol. 21, no. 6 (2002): 94–97 (94).

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Conclusion: Judging Panic Invoking the specter of panic is an extremely effective means of riveting public attention at a moment of risk and uncertainty, securing resources, and establishing or challenging policies aimed at either control or amelioration of the diseases or other threats we associate with social disorder. Panic stirs attention because it implies conflict, confusion, controversy, and either error or triumph over terrifying circumstances. Panic also represents an additional element that can be threaded through each state of Turner’s social drama, making the panic drama a distinct variety of narrative that informs the social response to situations charged with fear. Over time, we begin to expect that there are things that can be done, despite unavoidable uncertainties, to avert disease and prevent panic. They generally fall into two broad classes: measures that respond to an outbreak in progress (quarantines, mask ordinances, hoarding of medications or food, flight) and those that anticipate or attempt to manage disease and panic in advance (convincing the public that the threat of disease, terrorist attack, and subsequent disorder and panic represent a clear and present danger, mandating participation in sheltering drills, creating teams of first responders, vaccinating in advance to head off a bioterrorism threat). Reactive measures, although often criticized for coming too late or having overlooked or played down a patent threat, have been judged to carry a more solid warrant and have proved less susceptible to criticism. Efforts that have sought to head off emerging threats, especially those that have been mounted on the basis of scarce, ambiguous, or inflated evidence (the swine flu episode, the smallpox inoculation campaign), have threatened the public’s trust in the prudence and foresight of officials charged with spending public money to protect the public’s health. Importantly, a broad historical pattern to panic prevention activities can be perceived: the war on terror has mirrored the panic drama so carefully laid out during the Cold War era; the still unfolding drama involving the computer scientist and former CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) employee Edward Snowden has revealed how panic provides a unique opportunity for the covert expansion of governmental powers. The prospect of panic creates a need to provide a warrant for action that goes beyond a simple calculation of the risks and benefits of action or inaction at moments of profound uncertainty in terms of health and safety. In the past, when questions regarding mass vaccination have been raised, it was not enough to ask whether it was wiser to wait and risk an unknown but potentially large number of deaths from an epidemic or take preventive measures that would guarantee a certain but smaller number of fatalities. Knowing that panic represents a critique in the midst of intervention as well as a final judgment, those engaged in the panic drama have also been forced to weigh an additional set of questions.

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Will intervention stem disease and ameliorate panic, or will it induce fear and panic? Is a threat exaggerated, leaving citizens susceptible to disease-inducing panics? Who is responsible for calming hysteria, public servants or individuals themselves? Do the risks of sowing fear and panic to motivate people to act outweigh the risks of paralyzing citizens with fear? Can using fear and panic to achieve public health ends backfire by generating disruptive behavior? Panic will remain a term that is used haphazardly. There is no formula for determining when fear rises to the level of panic, no reliable or objective definition, and history only underscores panic’s multiple meanings and uses. Yet it is always a wedge or lever that, when employed, triggers a need for swift action. When panic is in the air so is the feeling that something ought to be done, and fast. The only moment that we can hope to pin it down is as a retrospective judgment or critique of the way things turned out, which implies that things might have gone differently. Ongoing sociological efforts to describe and account for what happens in certain circumstances of mass fear or disaster have largely concluded that the “panic” of our nightmares, or of Hollywood’s imagining, mostly does not occur. But the fact that most people still believe in the possibility of panic does not simply represent a failing of these scholars to publicize their work, for collective belief in panic is not simply a misreading or even ignorance of empirical data. Our persistence in worrying about, trying to anticipate, and ultimately seeking to avert panic is a result of a script we have rehearsed again and again when faced with a threat of a sufficient order of magnitude. While with each panic we also alter the drama, along with institutions and authority, the script coheres with the past. The most central lesson that we should take from this high altitude look at panic over the course of two centuries is that if we hope to change the script, we have to follow the drama all the way to the end and judge the uses and abuses of panic.

8 Mediating Panic: The Iconography of “New” Infectious Threats, 1936–2009 Nicholas B. King

This chapter explores the role that visual culture has played in producing infectious disease “panics” during the past 80 years, from concerns over cholera and yellow fever in the 1930s and 1940s, through the influenza H1N1 pandemic in 2009. A key concern in this collection is how “modern” technologies have been deployed historically to make infectious diseases visible with a view to their effective prevention, management, or eradication. As other contributors have suggested, “panic” may be understood not as the antithesis of modern strategies of disease prevention and crisis containment, but rather as one of their consequences. For example, Robert Peckham notes in his discussion of telegraphy in the 1890s (Chapter 6) that by the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the plotting of infectious disease threats was understood to be a key public health tool linked to the emergence of a new subfield, “disease geography.”1 From a somewhat different perspective, Amy Fairchild and David Merritt Johns (Chapter 7) underscore the role of representations in their account of what they term—borrowing from the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner—“panic dramas,” from yellow fever to bioterrorism. The emphasis in both these discussions is on how visualizations of disease threats across a range of media served to define epidemics as discrete and hence “knowable,” predictable, and preventable events. However, as both chapters intimate, in giving a new visibility to the agents of disease, these technologies often produced the panic they purported to control. In this chapter, I argue that Western, predominantly American, visual depictions of infectious disease threats during the past century have drawn on a common visual and discursive repertoire that emphasizes visibility and novelty. To emphasize the persistence of common elements amidst pervasive claims of newness, I adopt a reverse chronological approach. The first section moves backwards in time from 2009 to the 1990s to explore underlying continuities in the ways that emerging infectious diseases have been imagined as a “new” phenomenon that is linked to deepening and accelerating globalizing processes. Amidst this discourse of “newness,” however, 1. On the history and contemporary applications of epidemic mapping, see Tom Koch, Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

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common visual motifs are discernible in accounts of infectious diseases—a repetition of particular characters, images, and narratives that together form an “outbreak narrative.”2 In the second section, my focus shifts backward 50 years to two public health documentaries, The Work of the Public Health Service (1936) and The Eternal Fight (1948), produced by the US Public Health Service (USPHS) and the World Health Organization (WHO), respectively. Juxtaposing these promotional films with the materials presented in the first section, in the third section I identify an “iconography of new infectious threats”—five clusters of images that accompany narratives of ostensibly “new” disease threats throughout the period under review. In the final sections, I suggest that this iconography plays a critical role in making otherwise invisible diseases visible, connecting these threats to narratives about globalization and social change, and providing the visual raw materials for the creation of “germ panics.”3 I argue that this iconography is powerful and persistent in part because it draws heavily upon the narrative tropes and visual repertoire of consumer culture and its attendant preoccupations with novelty. I conclude with some reflections on the relationship between this iconography and Western, particularly American, ambivalence toward modernity and the apparent dissolution of imperial order in the face of globalization. This chapter thus emphasizes the continuities and discontinuities in how infectious threats have been visualized, tracking the tension between persistent motifs and novel responses in order to show how the past and the present are intertwined. While past ways of seeing continue to shape how we apprehend and experience infectious diseases today, changing technologies of visualization have also generated new forms of panic that are inseparable from new ways of seeing the world.

Back to the Future: Snapshots of “New” Disease Emergence H1N1, 2009 In April 2009, researchers first described the H1N1 influenza virus, a novel reassortment of bird, swine, and human influenza viruses.4 By that time, dozens of cases and several deaths had been reported in Mexico and the United States, prompting governments worldwide to adopt urgent containment measures. Under the headline “World Moves to Contain Flu Spread,” the BBC News website showed pictures of Mexico 2. Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 3. Nancy Tomes, “The Making of a Germ Panic, Then and Now,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 90, no. 2 (2000): 191–98. 4. See Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, H1N1 Flu. http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/cdcresponse. htm (accessed June 1, 2014).

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City residents wearing surgical masks, and a map of the world with North America highlighted in red to indicate confirmed cases of influenza.5 The Korea Times website’s story, “Airlines Take Preventive Measures Against the Flu,” featured a picture of Korean Air staff members clad in protective body suits and gas masks spraying insecticide inside an airplane.6 The graphic map and the forensic image of the suited body became pervasive images in 2009, signifying two axes of infection: horizontally across geographic space and vertically into atmospheric space. As outbreaks increased throughout the spring, fears of a global pandemic grew. Newsweek’s May 25th cover featured a photo of a pig’s nose peeking out of a dark cage. The accompanying article by journalist Laurie Garrett, “Fear & the Flu,” declared a “new age of pandemics” in its subtitle. On June 11, with over 50,000 reported cases worldwide, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Margaret Chan issued a phase 6 pandemic alert. Websites and newspapers reproduced WHO maps depicting the global spread of influenza, with all of North America, Australia, and China colored a deep crimson to denote more than 500 cumulative cases.7 Governments instituted travel restrictions, enforced quarantines and school closures, and stockpiled antivirals and vaccines. In August 2010, with more than a million confirmed cases and approximately 14,000 confirmed dead, Chan declared the pandemic over. In the time since, researchers have debated the effectiveness of various public health responses. Recent research using network analysis techniques has suggested that travel restrictions were widely ineffective, while school closings and quarantines may have somewhat limited the spread.8 Researchers also agree that the H1N1 pandemic heralded a new era of infectious disease. In the “Globalization” section of its web-based primer, “What You Need to Know About Infectious Disease,” the US National Academy of Sciences notes: Today’s world is a global village, with growing concentrations of people in huge cities, mass migrations forced by social or economic pressures, and accelerating commerce and travel . . . In this rapidly shifting and interconnected world, infectious agents continually find new niches. The 2009 “swine flu” pandemic starkly illustrated the impact of globalization and air travel on the movement of infectious diseases.9 5. “World Moves to Contain Flu Spread,” BBC News, April 27, 2009: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8019882. stm (accessed June 1, 2014). 6. “Airlines Take Preventive Measures Against Flu,” Korea Times, May 7, 2009: http://www.koreatimes. co.kr/www/news/nation/2013/07/119_44522.html (accessed June 1, 2014). 7. World Health Organization, “Disease Outbreak News” (status as of June 26, 2009): http://www.who. int/csr/don/Map_20090626_0600.png (accessed June 1, 2014). 8. P. Bajardi, C. Poletto, J. J. Ramasco, M. Tizzoni, V. Colizza, and A. Vespignani, “Human Mobility Networks, Travel Restrictions, and the Global Spread of 2009 H1N1 Pandemic,” PLoS One, vol. 6, no. 1 (2011): e16591. 9. National Academy of Sciences, “Infectious Disease: Global Challenges”: http://needtoknow.nas.edu/id/ challenges/globalization/ (accessed June 1, 2014).

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The appearance of new variants of viruses, along with the visual imagery of mask-clad travelers and the disinfection of planes, appeared to herald a “new,” peculiarly twentyfirst-century epidemic, borne on the wings of global transportation networks. The images and descriptions of the 2009 pandemic emphasized the novelty of the threat. Yet, in so doing, commentators drew upon a discourse of “new” emerging diseases that had developed from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Indeed, when Garrett proclaimed a “new age of pandemics” in Newsweek, she essentially reiterated the central argument articulated in her 1994 bestseller The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, which, in the wake of HIV/AIDS, had raised the alarm about human vulnerability to “new” infections. In the book, the emphasis is on the need for novel ways of seeing that were able to overcome “shortsighted political action/inaction” to counter the “new” threat posed by emerging infections. The motif of “seeing” as a form of empowerment recurred. The challenge, Garrett asserts, is to develop “a view that sees humanity’s relationship to the microbes” not as linear, but as dynamic and nonlinear. The biomathematician and ecologist Dick Levins is quoted with approval: “We must embrace complexity, seek ways to describe and comprehend an ever-changing ecology we cannot see, but, nonetheless, by which we are constantly affected.” The challenge, in other words, is to make visible that which is invisible but traceable only through its destructive impact.10

SARS, 2002 In late November 2002, Canada’s Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN), an internet-based surveillance system that monitors global media in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish, identified an outbreak of influenza in Guangdong province, China.11 Three months later, a flight from China to Singapore was diverted to Hanoi to offload an American suffering pneumonia-like symptoms. Over the next few months, he and several medical staff died, and cases of what came to be called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) emerged in Hong Kong, Canada, and the United States. By April 2003, the cause of SARS had been identified as a novel coronavirus. As cases mounted through April and May, fears of a pandemic grew. Time magazine’s May 5th cover featured a young woman clad in a surgical mask and asked “How Scared Should You Be?” Inside, a two-page spread displayed the “global reach” of SARS on a map illustrating cases in North America, China, and Southeast Asia. Newsweek’s May 5th cover, also featuring a mask-clad young woman, promised to tell 10. Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (New York: Penguin, 1995), 11. 11. Public Health Agency of Canada, “SARS in Canada: Anatomy of an Outbreak,” Chapter 2: http://www. phac–aspc.gc.ca/publicat/sars–sras/naylor/2–eng.php (accessed June 1, 2014).

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you “what you need to know” about a “new age of epidemics.” As governments scrambled to contain its spread, a May 4th USA Today article about US and Asian airlines’ containment efforts showed a photograph of health officials spraying insecticide in the cabin of a Thai Airways plane.12 The SARS epidemic eventually resulted in 8,000 cases and 774 deaths worldwide. In the time since, it has served as a useful case study for predictive mathematical modeling of the spread of infectious disease in social networks.13 Researchers also agreed that the SARS epidemic heralded a new era of infectious disease. As one viewpoint posted on the website of the International Development Research Center, a public corporation created by the Canadian Parliament, noted: SARS has brought home how completely we rely on the uninterrupted rhythm of our interdependent society . . . Germs are blissfully indifferent to geopolitical and social boundaries. We ignore at our peril the medical and public health consequences of globalization, climate change, and the reality that desperate people do desperate things . . . [SARS] spread rapidly thanks to modern transport systems that are so vital to the global economy.14

Anthrax, 2001 In September and October 2001, five letters containing weaponized anthrax spores were mailed to American media organizations and members of congress. Newsweek’s October 8th cover, which featured two eyes peering from behind a gas mask, queried “How Scared Should You Be?”—the same language that would be used two years later for Time’s cover story on SARS. Time’s cover, featuring a disembodied gas mask, asked “How Real is the Threat?” and promised to “separate reality from rumor.” For many, the anthrax attack was the harbinger of a new world in which naturally occurring and intentionally spread infectious disease presented a grave threat to international security. Only a few weeks before the attack, the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs published a roundtable entitled “Forum: Bioalert,” with contributions from representatives of the WHO, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC), and the World Bank. In his lead article, the executive director of the WHO’s Communicable Disease Cluster warned about “jet-set disease threats”: 12. Chris Woodyard and Barbara De Lollis, “Asian Airlines Handle SARS Concerns Differently,” USA TODAY, May 4, 2003: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/biztravel/2003–05-04-disinfect_x.htm (accessed June 1, 2014). 13. Vittoria Colizza, Alain Barrat, Marc Barthélemy and Alessandro Vespignani, “Predictability and Epidemic Pathways in Global Outbreaks of Infectious Diseases: The SARS Case Study,” BMC Medicine, vol. 5, no. 34 (2007): 34. 14. Christina Zarowsky, “SARS, AIDS, and Public Health,” June 20, 2003: http://www.idrc.ca/EN/Themes/ Health/Pages/ArticleDetails.aspx?PublicationID=927 (accessed June 1, 2014).

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Nicholas B. King Now more than ever, no country is an island. No country can fortify itself against an invasion of infectious disease either from its neighbors or from the remotest corners of the globe . . . we must accept that infectious diseases are not under control and that a massive effort, as well as constant vigilance, will be needed to secure greater safety for the world’s populations.15

West Nile Virus, 1999 Two years before the anthrax scare, outbreaks of encephalitis in the United States sounded a similar herald. Like SARS and H1N1 after it, the appearance of the West Nile virus illustrated the ease with which insects could hitch a ride on a plane or ship, transforming mosquitoes from summer pests into vectors of deadly disease. The September 27th issue of The New Yorker featured a cover duplicating the image of its inaugural issue, with two key differences: unofficial mascot Eustace Tilley sported a mosquito net attached to his top hat, and he peered through his monocle at a mosquito rather than a butterfly. In a 2001 article, the director of the CDC’s Division of Vector-Borne Infectious Disease noted that the West Nile virus epidemic “illustrate[s] that the United States is at increased risk as the global economy and modern transportation continually shrink the world to a global village. Although the economic impact of globalization can be great, the public health impact can be devastating.”16 Several years later, the workshop report from an Institute of Medicine forum on “The Impact of Globalization on Infectious Disease Emergence and Control” commented: Just as modern modes of transportation allow more people and products to travel around the world at a faster pace, they also open the airways to the transcontinental movement of infectious disease vectors. That mosquitoes can cross the ocean by riding in airplane wheel wells is a commonly cited example of this phenomenon and is one of several hypotheses proposed to explain the introduction of West Nile virus into New York City in 1999.17

Emerging Diseases, 1992–1998 The visual and narrative motifs accompanying the four episodes outlined above, which range from bioterrorist attacks with a death toll under ten (Anthrax) to highly localized outbreaks among small populations (West Nile Virus) to global pandemics 15. David L. Heymann, “The Fall and Rise of Infectious Diseases,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, vol. 11, no. 2 (2001): 7–14. 16. Duane J. Gubler, “Silent Threat: Infectious Disease and U.S. Biosecurity,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, vol. 11, no. 2 (2001): 15–24. 17. Stacey Knobler, Adel Mahmoud, Stanley Lemon, and Leslie Pray, ed., The Impact of Globalization on Infectious Disease Emergence and Control: Exploring the Consequences and Opportunities, Workshop Summary—Forum on Microbial Threats (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2006).

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that impacted thousands (SARS and H1N1), all drew on a prehistory of coverage of threats of “emerging diseases” in popular and scientific media. Whereas each of these episodes was heralded as “new” at the time, during the preceding decade journalists such as Garrett and Richard Preston, along with a group of virologists and infectious disease researchers, aggressively promoted a sense that “new” infectious diseases were a general threat to human health and security.18 The year before the West Nile Virus outbreak, the specter of a new strain of pandemic influenza emerging from Southeast Asia garnered widespread attention in American media and public health. Against a backdrop of fluorescent green pathogens, Time’s February 23rd cover featured a supersaturated picture of a figure clad in mask, goggles, and biohazard suit to illustrate the story of “The Flu Hunters . . . scientific detectives who are trying to stop a lethal virus before it spreads around the world.” Yet influenza was not the only pathogen to garner a Time magazine cover story in 1998. Later that year, its August 3rd cover story warned that the “Killer Germ” (E. coli) was pouring from urban American taps. The eerie green pathogen that provided the backdrop for the flu was now understood to seep directly into homes. If the idea of “killer germs” seemed familiar to Americans, it might have been because three years before that, they had witnessed extensive coverage of the most famous pathogenic superstar, Ebola. The May 1995 Ebola outbreak in Kikwit, Zaire (Democratic Republic of Congo), captivated American audiences for several weeks running. Newsweek’s May 22 cover story on the “Killer Virus” depicted a biohazard symbol and a pair of gloved hands holding a vial of the invisible pathogen, mislabeled “E. bola.” The accompanying story, “Outbreak of Fear,” featured a map depicting a “world of viruses,” and asked: “We want to know whether Ebola is headed our way. Could it reach critical mass in a Third World capital, then engulf the globe?”19 In 1995, this question expressed a widespread anxiety. Time’s September 12, 1994, cover featured magnified microbes behind its cover story “Revenge of the Killer Microbes.” Indeed, the mid-1990s seemed to be an era in which deadly pathogens emerged from laboratories and jungles alike; The Economist’s May 20, 1995, cover featured a glowing green skull peering out from a petri dish, underneath the headline “Disease Fights Back.” This narrative was no media creation. Time’s cover story was belated coverage of a 1992 Institute of Medicine report on “emerging infections.” This and other reports argued that recent global social and technologic changes posed novel threats to health, and encouraged the emergence of new diseases:

18. On the emergence of the concept of “emerging diseases,” see Nicholas B. King, “Security, Disease, Commerce: Ideologies of Post-Colonial Global Health,” Social Studies of Science, vol. 32, no. 5–6 (2002): 763–89; and “The Scale Politics of Emerging Diseases,” Osiris, vol. 19 (2004): 62–76. 19. Geoffrey Cowley, “Outbreak of Fear,” Newsweek, vol. 125, no. 21, May 22, 1995.

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Nicholas B. King Since the end of the Cold War, the world economy has become increasingly interconnected and globalized; increased competition, trade, and communication have brought benefits to people in virtually every country and have created a remarkable degree of mutual interdependence . . . The movement of 2 million people each day across national borders and the growth of international commerce are inevitably associated with transfers of health risks, some obvious examples being infectious diseases, contaminated foodstuffs, terrorism, and legal or banned toxic substances.20

This report and others presented a cartography of emerging diseases, in which new pathogens appear in developing nations and quickly become global threats. This concept mobilized an implicit critique of post-imperial “globalization” and the disequilibrating forces it set in motion through mutual interdependence, situating disease threats in a “third world,” postcolonial space of poverty, substandard health care, and failing states.

Disease as “Modern” From this brief review, it should be clear that coverage of “new” infectious threats during the 1990s and early 2000s featured several narrative and visual tropes evoking the unique dangers of globalization and the emergence of a deeply networked society. Each episode provided cues that recapitulated previous episodes and framed subsequent responses and reporting. While it may appear that these tropes are a reaction to peculiarly late twentieth-century phenomena, they may in fact be traced back to earlier eras, when important transformations in visual technology, public health institutions, and the burden of disease influenced the development of a repertoire of narrative and visual imagery that would persist for decades to come. This section briefly describes the appearance of these tropes in two important public health films from the 1930s and 1940s. The 1927 release of The Jazz Singer heralded the beginning of the sound era in film, ushering in what has come to be called the Golden Age of Hollywood, lasting through the end of the Second World War. Capitalizing on advances in sound, color, and animation technology, Hollywood studios increased production of popular films, and film emerged as a dominant means of mass communication. This emergence accelerated during the Second World War, when film was used as a means of inspiring patriotism, disseminating propaganda, and shaping public opinion in the United States and abroad. This acceleration culminated in what one film historian has called a “transition from a rational, print-based culture to an impressionistic motion picture world” in which moving images replaced still ones in the public imagination.21 20. Joshua Lederberg, Robert E. Shope, and Stanley C. Oaks, Emerging Infections: Microbial Threats to Health in the United States. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1992. 21. Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York:

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The importance of film as a means of mass communication was clear to new American and international public health institutions responsible for monitoring, combating, and disseminating information about infectious disease. Disease control activities in the United States were consolidated under the auspices of the USPHS. In 1942, US Surgeon General Thomas Parran created the Malaria Control in War Areas (MCWA) division of the Public Health Service to control the disease in army training areas in the Southern United States. During the Second World War, the MCWA expanded its programs, and, in 1946, its leaders convinced Parran to make it a permanent agency, the Communicable Disease Center—forerunner of the CDC.22 Two years later, the newly formed United Nations (UN) established the WHO, with the mission of monitoring, classifying, and combating key infectious diseases in the service of “the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health.” Ironically, just as industrialized nations in Western Europe and North America were developing institutions and technologies for tracking and representing infectious disease in novel ways, actual experience of these diseases was disappearing. Infectious disease mortality rates in the United States declined from 797 deaths per 100,000 in 1900 to 283 in 1937, and to 75 in 1952.23 However, while the industrialized West enjoyed the benefits of this “epidemiologic transition,” rates of infectious disease remained high in the developing world.24 While tuberculosis, diphtheria, poliomyelitis, and dysentery continued to kill a significant proportion of the population in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, these diseases were rapidly fading from memory in Western Europe and North America. In 1936, the USPHS released The Work of the Public Health Service, a 40-minute educational film intended to be shown in theaters and educational facilities, which gives an overview of the service’s history, organization, and activities. It was produced by Bray Studios, an independent production company that pioneered the use of celluloid sheets in cartoons and animations. The first and longest section of the film, entitled “Prevention of the Introduction of Diseases from Abroad,” gives us a snapshot of the image that the USPHS wished to project about the state of the world and the state of the art in disease control. It also gives us insight into the state of the art in terms of visual iconography and mass communications. In 1936, film was at the cutting edge of communications technologies,

Columbia University Press, 1993), 6. 22. Elizabeth W. Etheridge, Sentinel for Health: A History of the Centers for Disease Control (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 23. Gregory L. Armstrong, Laura A. Conn, and Robert W. Pinner, “Trends in Infectious Disease Mortality in the United States During the 20th Century,” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 281, no. 1 (1999): 61–66. 24. Abdel R. Omran, “The Epidemiologic Transition,” in International Encyclopedia of Population, vol. 1, ed. John A. Ross (New York: Free Press, 1982), 172–83.

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and, like most other government agencies, the USPHS made many of their films by contracting out the projects to commercial producers. The first section of “Prevention of the Introduction of Diseases from Abroad,” begins with a montage of footage of “modern” transportation: large ships, trains, and commercial propeller planes. The narrator gravely warns: The danger of introduction of diseases from abroad has paralleled in growth the remarkable development of transportation on the sea, on the land, and in the air. The transportation of disease has been as much facilitated by improved mechanical methods as has the transportation of persons or property.

The imagery shifts to a close-up shot of a rotating mosquito impaled on a pin, followed by a map of South America, as the narrator intones: Although yellow fever has been banished from our shores since 1905, it still exists in South America and Africa, and recent developments in air travel again make it a menace to the United States. To combat this menace, the YF mosquito must be eliminated from ships and airplanes, and infected persons must be detected and isolated. Although the mosquitos which spread yellow fever usually fly but a relatively short distance, they have been carried by airplanes for thousands of miles. It’s only by the exercise of the utmost care and constant watchfulness that this dangerous, ever-threatening disease is kept outside our borders.

As the background shifts to film of well-dressed passengers disembarking from a seaplane, the narrator describers the inspection of passengers and crew for symptoms of disease at US ports of entry. Over film of men vacuuming and then spraying the interior of a plane with an atomizer, he describes the disinfection of airplanes in order to combat the importation of yellow fever. Later, the film reiterates an earlier point, displaying a map of the Pacific Rim, with an air route from China to San Francisco via Manila, Guam, Midway, and Honolulu. The narrator cautions us that “the opening of air routes to the Orient has created serious problems in preventing the introduction of diseases, particularly cholera and smallpox, into Hawaii and the United States.” In 1948, the United Nations’ Film Board released an educational film entitled The Eternal Fight. At this time, the UN was extremely interested in the field of mass communications, and both the department of public information and United Nations’ Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) were investing heavily in print, radio, and film. Having just witnessed the effective use of mass communication by fascist propagandists during the Second World War, these organizations saw film in particular as a way of educating the public and fostering internationalism and democracy worldwide.25 A contemporary catalog of UN-produced films 25. UNESCO, “UNESCO’s Program of Mass Communication: I,” Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 4 (1946–1947): 518–39.

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listed, among others, Battle for Bread and Green Gold (on food problems and the work of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization), Crossroads of Life (on juvenile delinquency); Defense of the Peace (a description of UN structure); Fate of a Child (on underdevelopment in Latin America and the establishment of an Economic Commission for Latin America); and For All the World’s Children (on the United Nations’ Children’s Fund).26 In a 1946 program statement on their mass communication program, UNESCO noted: During the last half century, we have seen a progressive breakdown, almost everywhere, of the cultural fixations of the past. New social attitudes and ways of life are beginning to emerge. But these are not yet defined, and so our age is one of flux and transition. The media of mass communication have an important role to play in broadening the impact of the basic forces making for change . . . [they] have helped to destroy . . . [a] sense of stability, and have projected through the world in its place a stimulating but alarming picture of change and diversity. At the same time, by making people conscious of the magnitude and global scope of many of the forces and problems they have to deal with, they have given the individual a feeling of helplessness and isolation.27

Well aware of the need to produce films that were both entertaining and informative, the United Nations often contracted with commercial filmmakers. The Eternal Fight was produced under the auspices of the UN’s Department of Public Information, in conjunction with Madeleine Carroll Films. Carroll was a British actress who appeared in films from the late 1920s through the late 1940s, most notably Alfred Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, and later worked for UNESCO. The film’s director, Russian-born Victor Vicas, worked in France and Germany and directed the Jayne Mansfield vehicle, The Wayward Bus. The Eternal Fight presents a narrative of international health that starts with the middle ages and culminates in the establishment of the WHO. Like The Work of the Public Health Service, it gives us a snapshot of the image that the United Nations wished to project about the state of the world and the state of the art in disease control. After a review of the horrific treatment of patients in the pre-germ theory era, illustrated by woodcuts of plague victims, the film surveys the contemporary landscape of infectious disease control. The narrator intones a triumphant narrative of medical progress: Despite the raging panic of ignorance, the lurking danger of contagion, scientists of many nations went to work. Painfully they labored to nurse the flickering light of research into a broad searchlight of knowledge, using every means of communication to share their findings with each other. 26. Adolf Nichtenhauser Medical Motion Picture Collection, National Library of Medicine, Box 23, folder “United Nations films.” 27. UNESCO, “UNESCO’s Program of Mass Communication: I,” 519–20.

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In a live-action recreation, the seventeenth-century scientist Anton von Leeuwenhoek is depicted in a darkened room, preparing a slide and holding it up to a candle, as the triumphalist narration continues: It was the Dutchman, Leeuwenhoek, whose research helped provide scientists everywhere with the new and powerful vision of the microscope. Now at last the hidden enemy could be examined under the probing searchlight of science.

Over jerky images of microscopic organisms swimming, the narrator notes that “the hunt was on for contagious disease and their causes, wherever they existed.” The camera pans over to a globe, then a map of France, and finally to an actor portraying Louis Pasteur, sitting in front of a window casting light on his laboratory bench in an otherwise darkened room, as “medical science marched forward bringing light where once there had been darkness, hope where once there had been despair.” After a similar description of Koch’s discoveries, a map of the world with lines connecting multiple continents illustrates scientific communication, as “the old prejudices were smashed, and the free exchange of information forged modern weapons to fight the ancient diseases of mankind.” The film then abruptly switches from a celebratory narrative of scientific progress to a more somber evocation of global threats. Over a montage of stock footage of industrialization and urbanization, the narrator proclaims that “in the course of the nineteenth century, the world underwent a striking change, gave birth to the industrial revolution, transformed man’s way of life.” Then over an animation of a train bearing a large skull representing cholera passing from one city, across an empty landscape, and into another city, the narrator warns: New means of transportation brought the world tight and close together, making it one tremendous and congested city. From a disease-infected zone the traveller now became, unwittingly, a carrier of deadly germs. Wherever he went, the germs stayed, and spread.

Later, as a visual montage of air travel footage and world maps moves across the screen, the narrator again warns: Today there are no distances. Today the aeroplane links continents, as trains linked cities. Today, the people of the world are one people, joined by wings over the globe . . . Modern transport poses new dangers of complete, universal contagion.

The Iconography of New Infectious Threats The above descriptions cannot do justice to the remarkable familiarity of these two films in terms of visual and narrative content. Their evocation of the threat of infectious diseases spreading through global transportation networks is so familiar that

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if one colorized them, substituted footage of modern jet airliners, and replaced animations of the cholera bacillus with electron micrographs of the SARS coronavirus, these films could find a comfortable home in twenty first-century media. These disparate materials illustrate the persistence of what I call the iconography of new infectious threats: a set of narrative conventions and images that frame responses to infectious disease that are, or are thought to be, novel. Across a span of 75 years, from the tail end of the Great Depression to the post–Cold War era, similar arguments recur: we live in exceptional times marked by massive social and technological changes that produce novel threats—new diseases, new vectors, new weapons. It is tempting to dismiss contemporary claims to novelty and historical exceptionalism as mistakes, products of a culture that continually forgets its own history. But I want to inquire a little deeper into this phenomenon. I am not interested in decrying the historical errors on the part of contemporary observers, but rather in trying to understand the repetition of strikingly similar historical perspectives across 75 years of change. The repetition of perspectives may be understood as the result of two interrelated phenomena: first, the persistence of an ambivalent relationship to the technological and social changes of modernity; second, the peculiar role that visual technologies play not only in representing disease, but also in representing disease as modern. A recurrent dialectic of the visible and the invisible permeates the iconography of new infectious threats, particularly as represented in the two films discussed in this chapter. First, it underwrites the historical narratives embedded in these films. The Eternal Fight tells a familiar story of progress from primitive belief to modern scientific understanding. This teleological narrative is expressed in profoundly visual terms: humans were “blinded by ignorance, filled with terror,” and thus they “lashed out against the Black Plague with witchcraft.” Prejudice, intolerance, and cruelty resulted from an inability to see disease for what it really was. In contrast to the blindness that characterizes the premodern era, modern scientists “painfully . . . labored to nurse the flickering light of research into a broad searchlight of knowledge.” Leeuwenhoek holds a slide up to a candle. His invention of the microscope introduces a “new and powerful vision . . . now at last the hidden enemy could be examined under the probing searchlight of science.” Similarly, Pasteur sits in front of a window casting light on his laboratory bench in an otherwise darkened room. His discoveries of the microbial causes of disease inaugurate a new era in which “medical science marched forward bringing light where once there had been darkness.” Visibility also plays a key role in the depiction of medical technology—in this case, the ability to literally see the causes of disease. Leeuwenhoek and Pasteur did not just identify microorganisms as the cause of disease, they also capitalized on the ability to make them visible to the naked eye. In this respect, the films identify visual

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technology as the hallmark of modern medical science, suggesting that what makes modern medicine so powerful is its power to see things that have never before been seen. Film, in the most obvious sense, is a medium that conveys moving visual images. It is no coincidence that these narratives of modern science feature scientists seeing germs, and it is no coincidence that each shot of the scientist is paired with a shot of bacilli in motion. Cinematic representations of bacteria are not just the basis of scientific advances; they also are interesting to watch on screen. Moreover, they justify the use of cinema as a means of conveying information. While nineteenth-century scientists may have discovered how to see disease, twentieth-century cinema allows us—the audience—to also see disease, in a way that written words, oral descriptions, and still pictures cannot. So, in a sense, this is a story not only about the advent of modern medical technologies but also modern representational technologies. The modern is what can be seen; it is also the act of seeing and the technology of sight. This point is further illustrated by the use of different visual techniques and forms of media to represent the past. So, for example, while both films represent past events, they cannot use film because no film of these events exists. The past—in this case the great epidemics of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries—is literally invisible to the modern cinematic eye. So the directors must resort to rather heavy-handed techniques of depiction, including woodcuts, newspapers headlines, and a shot of “Webster on Pestilence,” in order to lend authenticity to their representations of the past. There is a tension here between cinema’s attempts to make good history and history’s resistance to making good film.

Five Image Clusters of Disease The iconography of new infectious threats encompasses five images: the agent, the vector, the map, the network, and the barrier. Drawing upon the “classic disease triad” of agent, host, and environment,28 this iconography provides a simple, familiar means to render infectious disease visible, and to convey a sense of novelty and imminent threat. The advent of motion pictures gave scientists a means of rendering otherwise inaccessible physical spaces and processes legible to the human eye, including disease agents: the bacteria and viruses that are the proximate cause of infectious disease. In 1903, British embryologist Robert E. Kelly assembled 2,000 images of stained sections from the head and neck of a chicken embryo into a film, allowing viewers to “travel

28. On the “classic disease triad,” see Mark L. Wilson, “Ecology and Infectious Disease,” in Ecosystem Change and Public Health: A Global Perspective, ed. Joan L. Aron and Jonathan A. Patz (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 283–324.

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through” it in a previously impossible manner.29 In particular, the ability to envision microorganisms, spaces, and spatial relationships inside the body was one of the most profound innovations of the medium.30 Visual depictions of disease agents play a dual role, providing a visible evocation of an invisible threat, and celebrating the modern scientific power that allows this visualization to occur. Animations and pictures of pathogens—often rendered in a manner that highlights the scientific production of images, as if through the microscope’s lens or in situ in a petri dish—render an otherwise imperceptible risk perceptible to the viewer in a way that symptoms or suffering patients do not. In the post-germ theory era, animations of agents provide evidence of disease and of modern medical science’s ability to identify, manipulate, and destroy it. It also confers a reality effect: these germs are real, they are there, we can see them, they move. And if the germs are real, then we must conclude that the disease is real, the bioweapon is real, and the threat is real. Vectors are mechanisms by which microorganisms are introduced from an animal reservoir into a human population, or transmitted from human to human. While the iconography of the agent is relatively constant—microorganisms generally all look the same—that of the vector is surprisingly variable. It might be an animal: the mosquito that transmits yellow fever or the pig that transmits H1N1. It might be human: the air traveler who unwittingly carries germs. It might signify the primitive or the modern, innocence or culpability; it is often (but not always) marked by race, class, and/or gender.31 In each case, the vector personifies the otherwise invisible pathogen, giving it recognizable form and agency, and imparting to it mobility. It transforms the intangible threat identified by science into an image recognizable to the naked eye and to lay audiences: we cannot see microorganisms unaided, but we can see mosquitos, flies, pigs, immigrants, and travelers. More recently, media coverage32 and scientific investigation33 of so-called “superspreaders” has evoked a hierarchy of vectors among health care workers and the general public. 29. Adolf Nichtenhauser Medical Motion Picture Collection, National Library of Medicine, box I, vol. I, 77–78. 30. Hannah Landecker, “The Life of Movement: From Microcinematography to Live Cell Imaging,” Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 11, no. 3 (2012): 378–99; and “Microcinematography and the History of Science and Film,” Isis, vol. 97, no. 1 (2006): 121–32. 31. Kirsten Ostherr, “Contagion and the Boundaries of the Visible: The Cinema of World Health,” Camera Obscura, vol. 17, no. 2 (2002): 1–39; and Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 32. A. P. Galvani and R. M. May, “Epidemiology: Dimensions of Superspreading,” Nature, vol. 438, no. 7066 (2005): 293–95. 33. L. Temime, L. Opatowski, Y. Pannet, C. Brun-Buisson, P. Y. Boëlle, and D. Guillemot, “Peripatetic Health-Care Workers as Potential Superspreaders,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 106, no. 43 (October 27, 2009): 18420–25.

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Maps perform much work in the iconography of new infectious threats. As Denis Woods has argued, maps do not impartially represent a stable geographic reality, but rather are political instruments that construct the world according to particular interests.34 Maps also play a crucial role in what geographers Erik Swyngedouw and Neil Smith call the “politics of scale,” the process by which different actors mobilize geographic scale as a resource to explain events, support arguments, and enlist allies.35 Whereas images of agents and vectors help visualize and personify disease, maps establish proximity and connectedness, by visually juxtaposing geographic locations thought to be so radically different that there can be no traffic between them. When animated and coupled with imagery of vectors, they convey motion between places, as in the discussion of the spread of cholera in The Eternal Fight and yellow fever in The Work of the Public Health Service. Maps also spatially locate agents, populations, and vectors, inviting viewers to place themselves on the map and see the vast world of three dimensions as a two-dimensional space of self-evident, direct connections. The use of maps to visually establish connections also allows researchers and media alike to engage a politics of scale, lending local disease outbreaks in faraway places an immediate a global significance. Closely allied with the map is the iconography of the network. Networks can be abstracted flows of communication and information exchange, or the material infrastructure of transportation, trade, and commerce. Networks work together with maps to establish connectedness; at the same time, they signify modernity and technological progress. However, whereas maps represent actual geography, signifying proximity between different locations and social groups, networks are generally abstractions, and signify a flattening or erasure of difference, and the promise of universal communication. Maps show us how big the world is; networks show us how small it is becoming, and invite us to envision ourselves within a system of interconnections. With the advent of powerful mathematical modeling and social network analysis, it has also become possible to envision and analyze networks that were heretofore invisible,36 and to identify “sentinel” nodes in the network that allow us to predict epidemics before they become legible in a strict statistical sense.37 Networks are both the conduits of infection and the potential mechanism of prophylaxis: even as transportation networks accelerate the transmission of new 34. See Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York and London: Guildford Press, 1992). 35. Neil Smith, “Geography, Difference, and the Politics of Scale,” in Postmodernism and the Social Sciences, ed. Joe Doherty, Elspeth Graham, and Mo Malek (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); Erik Swyngedouw, “Neither Global nor Local: Glocalisation and the Politics of Scale,” in Spaces of Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local, ed. Kevin R. Cox (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), 137–66. See also, King, “The Scale Politics of Emerging Diseases.” 36. L. M. Glass and R. J. Glass, “Social Contact Networks for the Spread of Pandemic Influenza in Children and Teenagers,” BMC Public Health, vol. 8 (2008): 61. 37. N. A. Christakis and J. H. Fowler, “Social Network Sensors for Early Detection of Contagious Outbreaks,” PLoS One, vol. 5, no. 9 (2010): e12948.

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infectious diseases, the advent of better surveillance and communications infrastructure promises to increase our ability to quickly detect and intervene against epidemics.38 Networks are also both the content of visual communication, and the means of communication itself. In this respect, when visual media use the iconography of the network, they also depict the apparatus of film itself. While the previous four elements depict elements of threat, the barrier represents a technological fix that intervenes in the transmission of agent from vector to human. Barriers may be physical, as with cloth surgical masks, cloth or rubberized gas masks, or portable isolation units. They may be political, as with quarantine regulations at national borders. Or they may be technological, as with pesticides, insecticides, or pharmaceuticals. While the barrier may represent prophylaxis, it is usually mobilized as a sign of vulnerability rather than safety, a visual representation of human anxiety about our place in a world of agents, vectors, and networks, and about the frailty of geographic and corporeal borders.

Mediated Panics and Modern Ambivalences Panics do not just happen, as though arising organically in the face of novel threats. They must be made. Since the mid-twentieth century, residents of wealthy nations in the industrialized West have had little direct exposure to infectious diseases in the early stages of an outbreak or epidemic. Pathogens are invisible to the naked eye, and must be observed microscopically and represented through photographs or animation; vectors often show no visible signs of disease, and even the symptoms are often invisible to all but trained specialists; outbreaks are often geographically and socially remote, striking the least visible members of society, the poor or socially marginalized; and the diffuse and long-developing threat that these diseases pose is all but invisible to policymakers and the public. Panic, rarely portrayed as a characteristic of the already sick, requires some means by which the healthy can have a visceral experience of an invisible, diffuse, abstract disease outbreak.39 I have argued in this chapter that the iconography of new infectious threats has performed this critical role in creating and mediating panics. However, it is worth asking why this particular repertoire of images persists and continues to persuade. On a superficial level, it is no surprise that this iconography prominently features agents, vectors, and maps, as these reflect the material underpinnings of infectious disease. This material semiotics of disease thus reproduces the well-known 38. Nicholas B. King, “Dangerous Fragments,” Grey Room, no. 7 (2002): 72–81; and “Networks, Disease, and the Utopian Impulse,” in Networked Disease: Emerging Infections in the Global City, ed. S. Harris Ali and Roger Keil (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 201–13. 39. Charles Briggs, “Pressing Plagues: On the Mediated Communicability of Virtual Epidemics,” in Plagues and Epidemics: Infected Spaces Past and Present, ed. D. Ann Herring and Alan C. Swedlund (Oxford: Berg; 2010), 39–59.

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epidemiologic triad of agent, host, and environment. However, it does so in culturally specific ways. The iconography of new infectious threats that I have identified beginning in the 1930s resonates with and borrows heavily from both the cultural logic and the visual lexicon of marketing and, more broadly, consumer culture. Historian of advertising and consumer culture Stuart Ewen has argued that an emphasis on the continual manufacture of novelty also originated in the “consumer engineering” of the 1930s. Following the collapse of consumer markets during the Great Depression, producers and advertisers turned to “style obsolescence” as a means of stimulating a continual expansion of markets for their products. Convincing the consumer that novelty was in itself a desirable characteristic—a “purchased value” as Roland Barthes calls it— further ensured the insatiability of consumer appetites: “In the commercial world of style, the fundamental assumption underlying the ‘shaping of everyday life’ is that life must visibly change, every day . . . What will appear next is not always predictable. That something new will appear is entirely predictable.”40 Novelty also stands in as a marker for a wide array of culturally resonant phenomena: buying something new means participation in scientific and cultural progress; it means being modern and fashionable; and most of all, it means expanding the range of one’s own freedom of consumer choice, the activity that had come to replace the franchise as the consummate expression of American freedom. As historian Michael Smith observes, by mid-century commodification had fused with technological progress to produce “an inexhaustible conveyor belt of ever newer and more advanced products . . . consistent with the need for more and bigger markets, and its promise of consumer involvement provided a substitute for participatory decisionmaking.”41This newness is in some respects a key element of American exceptionalism and the foundational myth of self-invention.42 In a consumer culture, the “new” is always “better” (more modern, more creative, more productive) than the “old.” The pervasive emphasis on the novelty of disease agents, networks, and vectors, thus echoes in form and substance these obsessions with novelty and modernity. These are not simply germs, but “new” germs; not just vectors, but “new” vectors; not just bugs, but “new,” improved, superbugs. As the visual language of public health participates in the marketplace of signs, it too depicts particular diseases as stylish, modern, and new. Indeed, we can even see signs of competition, in the form of the

40. Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 41. M. L. Smith, “Recourse of Empire: Landscapes of Progress in Technological America,” in Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, ed. L. Marx and M. R. Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1994). 42. See, Philip Abbott, Exceptional America: Newness and National Identity (New York: Peter Lang, 1999).

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“disease-of-the-week” phenomenon, as different infections ascend and recede from the public eye.43 However, the iconography of new infectious threats and its accompanying narrative tropes not only celebrate the novel and the modern, but also articulate a profound ambivalence toward modernity. The imagery is simultaneously critical and celebratory of modernity, particularly those aspects of globalizing modernity that compress time and space.44 Even as it agitates, creating a sense of immanent threat or present crisis, it also comforts, reassuring us that we are modern and technologically sophisticated. The iconography of new infectious threats rarely uses images of primitive squalor, preferring instead signs of modern technology; not the suffering poor, but the affluent traveler. In early twentieth-century films, and in early twenty-firstcentury visual media, infectious disease does not signify the failure of social welfare, but rather the unintended consequence of technological triumph. From this point of view, we have always been modern—and our modernity presents us with new risks, but also new opportunities.45 This ambivalent narrative is itself hardly new. In his magisterial The Country and the City (1973), Raymond Williams noted its presence in pastoral narratives across several centuries: We hear again and again this brisk, impatient and as it is said realistic response: to the productive efficiency, the newly liberated forces, of the capitalist breakthrough; a simultaneous damnation and idealisation of capitalism, in its specific forms of urban and industrial development; as unreflecting celebration of mastery—power, yield, production, man’s mastery of nature—as if the exploitation of natural resources could be separated from the exploitation of men. What they say is damn this, praise this.46

Whereas Williams discussed a comparison of the modernizing present with an idealized pastoral past, the iconography of new infectious threats compares the globalizing, networked present to an imagined past in which humans occupied disconnected, secure geographic and cultural niches: not an expansive bucolic pasture, but a multitude of self-contained islands. These self-contained islands also reflect an imagined imperial order in which “modern” colonial centers are spatially, culturally, and epidemiologically separate from “primitive” colonized peripheries. On one level, the iconography of new infectious threats clearly reflects Western anxieties about the threatened dissolution of imperial order in the face of globalization. However, as I have suggested elsewhere, 43. Malcolm Gladwell, “The Plague Year,” New Republic (July 1995): 38–46; Susan D. Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death (New York: Routledge, 1999). 44. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 45. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992). 46. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 37.

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this time period witnessed a reconfiguration rather than the dissolution of imperial power. 47 The decline in the sovereignty of nation-states—both as colonial agents exerting control over distant territories, and as stable entities able to police their borders and maintain their territorial integrity against extraterritorial political or economic incursion—has not resulted in the decline of sovereignty in general. Instead, the imperialism of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries is gradually giving way to a new form of global sovereignty in which national and supranational organizations are “united under a single logic of rule.”48 The iconography of new infectious threats articulates the transition from nineteenth-century imperialism to twenty-first-century empire.

Conclusion: Visibility and Panic The iconography of new infectious threats’ simultaneous cautionary and celebratory narrative, identifying modern networks as both conduits of infection and the infrastructure of public health prevention, embodies one of the enduring paradoxes of visibility. Contrary to the narrative presented in The Eternal Fight, we are not on a one-way trip from darkness to light, but rather on a cyclical journey in which blindness gives way to sight, but sight also begets greater awareness of the remaining blind spots. The more sophisticated our surveillance technologies become, the more inadequate they seem to be. We are able to discern changes in patterns of disease—the emergence of new pathogens, epidemics, evolving health disparities—quicker and with greater subtlety. But we also become more and more aware of the changes that escape our attention, and we raise our expectations about the speed and accuracy with which we will be able to identify them in the future. Similarly, evolving communications infrastructure allows quicker transmission of messages about new health threats. This results in more effective health communication, to be sure; but also an insatiable thirst for new threats to feed into the machinery of the visible, and increasing anxiety regarding the threats we do as yet see. This is the paradox of sight: the more we see, the blinder we feel ourselves to be. Images capture moments, which they make momentous. When confronted with an iconic image that seems somehow to capture something new and frightening, something terrifying and unutterably modern, we might stop a moment to reflect on how this sense of interwoven risk, novelty, and historical exceptionalism is communicated to us through pictures and video—and how these depictions may play a role in framing and fostering panic.

47. King, “Security, Disease, Commerce.” 48. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), xii.

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Acknowledgements The author would like to thank David Serlin and the National Library of Medicine for providing access to the films described in this chapter, Jonah Campbell for research assistance, and Robert Peckham for helpful editorial suggestions.

Epilogue Panic’s Past and Global Futures Alison Bashford

In late August 2013 an alleged chemical weapons attack took place in the Ghouta area of Syria. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reported that three hospitals it supports in the region received around 3,600 patients that morning. MSF’s director of operations considered that the “symptoms, the massive influx of patients in a short period of time, the origin of the patients, and the contamination of medical and first aid workers, strongly indicate mass exposure to a neurotoxic agent.”1 This episode in the Syrian civil war resulted in tragic death and created panic of many orders, in many places. It all escalated instantly. Locally, hospitals were overwhelmed with injured civilians. Thousands of Syrians fled to Jordan or Lebanon, to join the thousands of refugees already there. The Syrian government itself was described as “panicked” by the attacks because it had lost control of its own forces, of its own ammunition as it were. Panic spread in the region and in the media. In Israel, civilians raced to distribution points for gas masks and other supplies. One reason was possible chemical attacks from Syria; another related to the chances of an American military response. Even the prospect that the United States would not respond elicited anxiety. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged Israelis to remain calm, but the panic itself was heightened, arguably produced by the media’s own reports: “Civilians panicked by Syria threat,” reported The Times of Israel, the “scramble for cover” thus intensifying.2 And elsewhere: “Fear of West attacking Syria sends panic waves across Middle East.”3 The Middle East might well be concerned about an attack from the West. Meanwhile, however, the West itself seemed rather more concerned about the prospect of a financial crisis that would accompany any US military response. Real-time 1. “Syria Symptoms ‘Point to Neurotoxic Agent,’” Aljazeera, August 25, 2013. Available at: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/08/201382417141280856.html (accessed September 17, 2014). 2. “Gas Mask Centers Boost Hours as Israelis Line up for Protection,” Times of Israel, August 29, 2013. Available at: http://www.timesofisrael.com/gas-mask-centers-boost-hours-as-israelis-line-upfor-protection/ (accessed September 17, 2014). 3. “Fear of West Attacking Syria Sends Panic Waves Across Middle East,” Firstpost, August 29, 2013. Available at: http://www.firstpost.com/world/fear-of-west-attacking-syria-sends-panic-waves-acrossmiddle-east-1068443.html (accessed September 17, 2014).

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Internet communication warned investors to prepare for market panic, warnings that almost ensured it coming to pass.4 The quintessential site of virtual panic with real effects, the global financial market wavered. In the terrible Syrian events, globalized and communicated in an instant, bodily suffering became virtual apprehension: the same event entailed fear of death, fear of war, and fear of financial loss, almost simultaneously. This was about communication as much as it was about chemical weapons. All of the chapters in Empires of Panic deal with communication, the touch of words, so close etymologically, to contagion. Communication and its means—its media—are always required for panic to become a phenomenon beyond the individual and beyond the local. This “touch” is how panic spreads, how it is communicated or “made common.” A history of panic and disease, then, turns out to be a history of communication and technology. Panic is therefore also about relative time, dependent in part on the temporality of different media. Like contagion, panic is not always catastrophic, instant, or fast. Some chapters in this book observe panic working in slow time—chronic infections. John Carroll’s “Slow Burn in China” is to the point, a constant low-level concern about fires and Canton; embers to which oxygen might be added at any point. Public panic sometimes works like this, when it is more rumor than conflagration, more a chronic anxiety than an acute action. Yet anxiety and fear are different. And Carroll’s chapter shows a distinction between a diffused and indeterminate colonial “anxiety,” and “fear” which is ascribable to a particular cause.5 Sometimes anxiety is given a causality that might, in fact, be fictive. James Beattie’s chapter looks at responses to longstanding and diffused anxieties about climate and place. This work suggests the extent to which panic itself was sometimes constructed as the product of a pathogenic “Oriental” environment. As a contagious emanation belonging to a particular place, panic became, in part, an environmental concern. Solutions for the misplaced British in India—send them to climate-appropriate Australasia, or rework the climate in India in the form of Australasian eucalypts—were hardly panicked responses, but they do invite reflection on just where the distinction between panic and chronic cultural anxiety lies. Underneath the latter there is, perhaps, a residual memory of panic that might be triggered at any point. It may not be an emergency, but it might become one at any moment. As Amy Fairchild and David Merritt Johns suggest in their chapter, the nineteenth century set the stage for future dramas, building memories of panic moments, and of who benefitted and who bore the cost.

4. “Prepare for Market Panic: Jim Rogers (3:07),” Reuters, August 28, 2013. Available at: http://www. reuters.com/video/2013/08/28/prepare-for-market-panic-jim-rogers?videoId=260178527&videoCha nnel=5 (accessed September 17, 2014). 5. See Ranajit Guha, “Not at Home in Empire,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 3 (1997): 482–93.

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Disease, news of it, and panic about it, do not necessarily work in lockstep, in the same temporality. Cholera in a neighborhood might consume quickly, like a fire in Canton. But in the past communication about this was likely both slow and clumsy. This was especially the case on an imperial scale, notwithstanding the bureaucracies devoted to scribing and dispatching intelligence.6 Most of the nineteenth century functioned on maritime, so to speak: ships brought news to the colonial Antipodes of a cholera epidemic in London that might already be over. The same ship might simultaneously bring people with disease. As the nineteenth century proceeded, steamships might bring more prompt communication, but ironically they were more, not less, likely also to bring disease. Shorter journeys increased the risk of unwittingly carrying incubating passengers or crew. In this sense isolation, slowness, and global distance could have their health benefits. As Robert Peckham here shows, at the end of the century technology overtook this heavy, unresponsive maritime communication. Cables and then telegraph wired the world and were deployed almost immediately to communicate epidemiological intelligence. The speed was astonishing to contemporaries. Peckham elegantly describes the great modern acceleration of communication toward real time, the technological globalization represented by telegraphy. It was certainly fast. But the limits of telegraphy were perhaps less those of time, and more of its linear mode. Enabling communication from sender to receiver, telegraphy multiplied only slowly. It had to transfer and transform into a different medium to have a mass effect. Panic requires a multiplier to really spread: word-of-mouth rumor, print media, radio, or as Nicholas King suggests in his chapter, film. If panic about disease has been about communication all along, paradigm shifts in communication mean paradigm shifts in panic and its effects. Internet time is real time,7 and the slowness of the old communication regime is only apparent because of the new digital temporal regime. The gap between telegraphy and real time is now apparent as very sizeable indeed. News with panic potential is instantly multiplied the world over. Indeed, all the standard scholarly insights into how the Internet has created a postmodern world apply tenfold to the nexus of panic and disease. The digital world has revolutionized the links between communication, panic, and disease in every possible way. The Internet can simply be used to compound the effectiveness of health communication.8 It has offered new mechanisms for global 6. The logistics of information in a maritime world are nicely described in Cindy McCreery and Kirsten McKenzie, “The Australian Colonies in a Maritime World,” in The Cambridge History of Australia: Volume 1. Indigenous and Colonial Australia, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 560–84. 7. Heejin Lee and Jonathan Liebenau, “Time and the Internet at the Turn of the Millennium,” Time & Society, vol. 9, no. 1 (2000): 43–56. 8. Sylvia Wen-ying Chou et al., “Social Media Use in the United States: Implications for Health Communication,” Journal of Medical Internet Research, vol. 11, no. 4 (2009): e48.

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disease surveillance.9 Authorities now search for patterns of words whereas once they searched for bodily symptoms. Alerts can be communicated in either contained ways, as old-fashioned private correspondence—“intelligence”—or in ways that are public beyond the imagining even of twentieth-century moderns; certainly beyond the wildest dreams of the telegraphers. Intelligence can escape containment lines easily, just as it always did: the “sabotage” of telegraph codes endures as hacking. But the devastating implications are of a different scale altogether. Perhaps the most important element of the new regime of communication is the potential for authorities to be irrelevant to the entire process. The presence of disease, or suspected disease, can be communicated instantly and by anybody, bypassing all experts, and with little heed for verification or authorization. Social media is a kind of new prose; an open-ended, multidirectional, un-centered medium, simultaneously highly individualized and mass-beyond-comprehension. The new digital world arguably heralds a shift away from the dominance of images (that King observes in his study of the “new” iconography of epidemics) and a return to the dominance of words—text and texting. The digital world is in very real senses, a new world for panic, disease, communication, and containment. As the world now knows, after the Arab Spring, it is not the computer at all but the smartphone that is the hardware-of-the-moment, and its effects are very real. Panic, riot, and revolution have a long history; add social media, and media contagion is the result. To a very considerable extent, the politics of a digital world have flattened distinctions between the most powerful and least powerful, between East and West, North and South, if not between the richest and poorest. As a contagion, social media is both a weapon and an opportunity. As David Arnold explains, efforts to manage, suspend, or neutralize panic can be utterly confounded. Controlling measures are just as likely to unwittingly create panic. This is perhaps just as true—perhaps more so—in the digital world. Interventions intended to solve a crisis—the “over-hasty action of the state” as Arnold puts it— might easily become accelerants to compound catastrophe. Anti-plague measures in 1896–97 India were themselves incitements toward panic and disorder. His chapter suggests that panic is always unpredictable, perhaps beyond management, a risk almost too difficult to calculate and predict. In the context of India, bubonic plague created major public turmoil while influenza did not, even as mortality and morbidity were on comparable scales. There are lessons, then, in the history of panic and disease about how authorities might contain both, and in how the history of panic

9. See Lorna Weir and Eric Mykhalovskiy, “The Geopolitics of Global Public Health Surveillance in the Twenty-First Century,” in Medicine at the Border: Disease, Globalization and Security, 1850 to the Present, ed. Alison Bashford (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 560–84; Lorna Weir and Eric Mykhalovskiy, Global Public Health Vigilance: Creating a World on Alert (New York: Routledge, 2010).

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turns into the history of risk management, but might well exceed all management, as the 2014 Ebola outbreaks show. The spatial turn in the history of science is appropriately drawn into these chapters and fused with the geographical sensibility that has long marked the history and historiography of disease management.10 Panic always has a geography—it spreads over place—just as epidemics of infectious disease do. When that place changes from one polity to another, epidemic panics turn into international relations. This has long been so, as João Rangel de Almeida shows here in his analysis of the 1851 International Sanitary Convention. Historians have tended to dismiss this elaborate meeting between East and West as a failure—nothing was ratified—but Rangel de Almeida shows the extensive groundwork laid, for better or worse, and built upon by the next generation of international sanitary conventions. An early exercise in epidemiological geopolitics, the Sanitary Convention established a health border of sorts, between the East and the West, between the public health–conscious Europeans and the negligent Ottomans. As far as public health was concerned, Ottoman rule was deemed to be rogue, part of a suite of “weak states” that threatened the health of the West.11 Syria was part of the Ottoman Empire in 1851 and thus part of the International Sanitary Conference conversations. Indeed, it was close to core business because Damascus was a major entrepôt for Mecca, and because the annual regional movement of the Hajj was a major issue for the sanitary-minded Europeans. More than 160 years later, Syria, disease, and panic have returned to public prominence. This is again about the East and the West, not least because discussion of chemical weapons has raised the question of un/civilized warfare.12 Almost unavoidably, this is now framed as the “clash of civilizations” between an Islamic and a non-Islamic (but implicitly Christian) world.13 Chemical weapons were deemed uncivilized—formally—by the League of Nations’ Geneva Protocol in 1925. But the history of chemical warfare and the panic about it began as an intra-European event, not one between the West and the Ottomans, or indeed any other part of the “East.” It was German deployment of toxic substances on the Belgian fields of war in 1915 that sparked initial outrage, as well as panic. Men were gassed invisibly, surreptitiously, and thus the unwritten rules of (gentlemanly) warfare were broken. This was the threat to civilization, not least 10. Diarmid A. Finnegan, “The Spatial Turn: Geographical Approaches in the History of Science,” Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 41, no. 2 (2008): 369–88. 11. See Patrick Zylberman, “Civilizing the State: Borders, Weak States and International Health in Modern Europe,” in Medicine at the Border, 21–40. 12. Chris Godburn, “O’Donnell: ‘War Is the Breakdown of Civilization,’” MSNBC, September 10, 2013. Available at: http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/09/10/odonnell-war-is-the-breakdown-of-civilization/ (accessed September 17, 2014). 13. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

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because all sides in that war deployed poison gas. By the Cold War, it was less use of chemical agents, than threatened use that incited panic, as the United States and the USSR stockpiled and diversified their arsenals. Chemical and biological warfare is perhaps the site at which panic and disease come together most intensely. In the Syrian case, chemical weapons appear to have been used by the government itself. More often, in the West, the threat is perceived to be extra-governmental, inhabiting the unpredictable and opaque zones of terrorist organizations. What is the best prophylactic? Information? Education? At least in one instance, vaccination was thought to be a start, a public health intervention that doubles as anti-bioterror: “vaccinate a city against panic.”14 Indeed, this particular preventative intervention triplicates its effect: immunization against disease, immunization against terror, and immunization against panic itself. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the dynamics of panic, disease, and fear have shifted from an imperial axis of East-West to a neo-imperial axis of the global North and South on the one hand, and to a US-centered “clash of civilizations” on the other. Fear—latent panic—was the powerful armory of the Cold War and became so again in the so-called “war against terror.”15 This is post-imperial at one level, but at another is a straightforward extension of older imperial logics. Panic is raw, especially when attached to disease and death. It can also therefore be expediently directed and redirected, panicked people exploited in the process. There is thus an ethics to panic and to attempts at its control. Notwithstanding the extraordinary digital revolution in media and communication, the “making common” of ideas and information that characterizes the twenty-first century, panic about disease remains enmeshed in the dynamics of global power.

14. Thomas A. Class and Monica Schoch-Spana, “Bioterrorism and the People: How to Vaccinate a City against Panic,” Clinical Infectious Diseases, vol. 34, no. 2 (2002): 217–23. 15. Curtis D. Malloy, “A History of Biological and Chemical Warfare and Terrorism,” Journal of Public Health Management and Practice, vol. 6, no. 4 (2000): 30–38; Jonathan B. Tucker, War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006).

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Index

Abeel, David 46 A-bomb 8 aborigines (Australian) 28. See also indigenous people Adelaide Hills 107 affect 6. See also emotions Afghanistan 96, 156 Africa 24, 26, 27, 30, 31, 33, 34; panic over African men’s assaults on white women 15, 24, 26, 29–31 (see also rape) agoraphobia 14 AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) 23, 111, 131, 175, 184 Al Qaeda 21, 156. See also terrorism analogies 14, 16, 20; pathological 11, 14 Analytic Services Inc. 155 Andrews Air Force Base (Virginia) 155 Annas, George 177 anthrax 155, 176, 177, 185, 186 anticolonial 127 anti-panic 8, 133 Antipodes 17, 105, 205 anxiety 1, 4, 5, 15–21, 30, 37, 48, 55, 57, 85, 86, 133, 135, 164, 170–76, 187, 197–200, 203; about fire 36, 37 (see also fire); about India’s climate and people 87–92, 94, 98, 101,102, 105, 109; about sexual assault 30; about the Oriental crowd 48; and colonial empire 1, 36, 37, 204; and panic 21, 15, 36, 55, 62, 91; and telegraph 18 (see also telegraph); chronic 204; confusion with fear 1, 36, 55, 204; “epistemic anxiety” 12; fictive causality of 204; of modern “personhood” 7; over national

anxiety (continued) sovereignty 74; social 20 (see also “moral panic”) Arab Spring 206 archives 1, 12 Arlington (Virginia) 155 Armed Forces Epidemiological Board (US) 171 Arnold, David 12, 14, 17, 18, 23, 36, 206 arson 38, 40, 41 Arthur Road Hospital (Bombay) 117, 122 Asia 4, 55, 61, 136, 144, 184, 187, 189; immensity and diversity of 1 Athenaeum Club 30 atomic war 170, 173 Auckland 95, 96, 97, 99, 101 Auckland Weekly News (newspaper) 95 Auckland Weekly Register (newspaper) 95 “aura” 120. See also Benjamin, Walter Australasia 17, 88, 90, 93, 98, 99, 101, 105, 109, 204 Australia 17, 28, 87–110, 183 Austria 65, 66, 71–73, 75, 76, 79, 81, 123 avian flu. See influenza Ayurveda 120 bacteria 33, 34, 194 bacteriology 123, 136, 162 Bagehot, Walter 10, 11, 14 ballistic missiles 176 Bankoff, Greg 38 Barrett, Ronald 155 Bashford, Alison 14, 20, 169 Batavia (Jakarta) 50, 55 Bayly, C. A. 21

230 Index Belgium 79 Benjamin, Walter 120. See also “aura” Bentley, Charles 121 biological warfare (BW). See biowarfare biopolitics 162 biosurveillance 57, 84 bioterrorism 19, 175; Tokyo subway sarin gas attack (1995) 175. See also terrorism biowarfare 19, 159, 171, 172, 203. See also chemical warfare Black Death 113, 120. See also plague Blake, John D. 166 Blue Mountains (Australia) 107 Bluff (New Zealand) 99 Blum, Alan 7, 15 Boldrewood, Rolf 108 Bombay (Mumbai) 33, 94, 113–26 bombs 173, 174 Brandis, Dietrich 104 Bridgman, Elijah 50, 52, 53 Briggs, Charles L. 153 Britain 1, 28, 55, 65–67, 69, 72, 75, 77, 79, 90–95, 135, 138, 143, 144 British Empire 3, 4, 15, 33, 34, 88, 109, 131, 140, 146, 147. See also Britain British Medical Journal (BMJ) 138, 139, 144 British Raj 88, 93, 109. See also India Browne, Thomas Alexander. See Boldrewood, Rolf bubonic plague. See plague Buckingham Palace 131 Buddhism 42 Bush, George W. (President) 9, 177 cables. See telegraphic cables Cairo 81 Cairo (Illinois) 160 Calcutta Englishmen, The (newspaper) 91 Calcutta (Kolkata) 33, 91, 92, 94, 113, 114, 117 Canterbury (New Zealand) 87, 99, 100, 106 Canton (Guangzhou) 2, 4, 8, 16, 35–55, 57, 150, 151, 204, 205 Canton Press (newspaper) 35, 37, 45, 51, 53, 54 Canton Register (newspaper) 36, 39, 40, 42–44, 47–49, 51–53

Canton System 35, 38, 48, 49, 54; factories 35–55 Cantril, Hadley 157 Cape Colony 23, 25 Cape Town 33 Carey, James W. 152 cartography 15, 188 Cashmere (Kashmir) 106 Cassidy, James E. 166 Caucasus 32 causality 1, 204 census: of 1891 (Hong Kong) 1; of 1921 (India) 124. See also Census Bureau (US) Census Bureau (US) 162 Center for Strategic and International Studies 155 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 169, 170–72, 185, 186, 189 Central Telegraph Department (London) 131 Ceylon (Sri Lanka) 97, 145 Chan, Margaret 183 chapatis 2 character 47, 49, 50, 122, 131, 140, 161 chemical warfare 176, 203, 207, 208. See also biowarfare Chernobyl disaster (1986) 20 Chess, Caron 5 China 1, 3, 16, 33, 35–55, 108, 111, 137, 139, 144–46, 150, 183, 184, 190, 204 China Mail (newspaper) 145, 149 Chinatown 158 Choksy, N. H. 122 cholera 4, 13, 14, 17, 19, 57–86, 101, 111, 114, 117, 123, 138, 143, 181, 190, 192, 193, 196, 205 Choudhury, Deep Kanta Lahiri 137 Christchurch (New Zealand) 100, 106, 109 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 155, 178 circulation 2, 32, 33, 63, 66, 67, 84, 116, 117, 128, 132 Clarke, Lee 5, 12 “clash of civilizations” 207 classificatory logic 1 Cleghorn, Hugh 104

Index 231 climate 17, 81, 101, 185; in India (see India); pathological nature of 17, 87, 88, 92–95, 98, 99, 106, 107, 109, 204 Cohen, Stanley 13, 30, 158. See also “moral panic” Cohn, Bernard S. 3 Cohong (Gonghang) 35, 54 Cold War, 7–9, 156, 159, 170, 173–75, 178, 188, 193, 208 “collective mind” 158. See also Le Bon, Gustave Collier’s (newspaper) 171, 176 colonial: insecurity 1; quasi 1, 16 Colonial Magazine and East India Review (newspaper) 28 Colonial Office 147, 149, 150, 151, 152 colonies 27, 34, 55, 64, 93, 94, 97–101, 109, 144, 146, 152 Colorado 166 Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, The (book) 184 Commission on Respiratory Diseases 171 Committee on Biological Warfare (US Department of Defense) 172 commodities 9, 33, 126 communication 3, 23, 28, 33, 73, 136, 139, 163, 192, 196, 205; and contagion 14, 204; as “scar tissue” 152; communicability 14; digital 5, 208; health 200, 205; history of 69, 152–54, 204; in relation to panic 3, 6, 7, 13, 15, 205; in relation to rumor 18; long-distance 132, 142; mass 188–91; (mis)communication in producing panic 3; network 24, 143, 153; telegraphic 3, 131–54 (see also telegraph) conflagration 16, 35–55, 204. See also fire Confucianism 42 Conner, Patrick 44 contagion 3, 14, 23, 135, 191, 192, 204; panic as (see panic); social 142; social media as 206; theory 156 (see also “affect contagion”) Contagion (movie) 155 counterinsurgency 1 Country and the City, The (book) 199. See also Williams, Raymond

crisis 9, 17, 18, 32, 37, 112, 124, 126, 127, 131, 138, 142, 153, 158, 165, 169, 199, 206; and telegraphic communication 144, 146, 149; as “blind spot” 12; cholera 17, 58; containment 181; definitions of 11; financial 10, 20, 167, 203; in relation to panic 11, 12, 15, 17, 20, 133; medical model of 13, 14; nuclear 7, 8; SARS 37 (see also SARS) crowd 6, 14, 36, 45, 47, 48, 128, 163, 175; and imitation (see also Le Bon, Gustave) 6, 14, 156; irrationality of 6, 12 Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, The (book) 156. See also Le Bon, Gustave Damascus 81, 207 Damien (Father) of Molokai 111 Danzig, Richard 176 Darjeeling 109 Das, Veena 2, 3, 14, 18 daubed-trees episode in India (1894) 2, 3 Davis, John 40, 42, 44, 50, 51 Deakin, Alfred 109 Deep South 160 Defense Against Weapons of Mass Destruction Act (1996) 176 deity: disease as 125 Denison, Sir William Thomas 103 Dennett, Tyler 37 Des Voeux, George William 145, 147 de Winton, Sir Francis 133 Diamond Jubilee (1897) 131 digital 5, 205, 206; revolution 208 diplomacy 17, 26, 60, 86 disease 18, 21, 33, 81, 87, 90, 96, 111, 112, 120, 122, 129, 171, 178, 183, 189, 190, 192, 193, 198; as metaphor 13–15; contagious 34, 162; cultural construction of 18; emerging 19, 21, 186–88; epidemic 66, 68, 78, 79, 83, 84; infectious 4, 19, 117, 131, 170, 181, 182, 186–89, 192, 197; invisible 182; mobility of 34; visualizations of 181 (see also visualization) dissection 116 Downing, Charles Toogood 37, 39, 40, 42, 47, 49, 51

232 Index “dramaturgic form” 131, 141. See also Rosenberg, Charles E. Dunedin (New Zealand) 99 Durban 26 D’Urban, Sir Benjamin 25, 26 Dutch East Indies 1 earthquake 52, 58 East India Company (EIC) 38–41, 43–46, 51, 53, 94, 99 Ebola 20, 175, 187, 207 ecological exchange 88, 105,109 Economist, The (newspaper) 187 Egypt 79–84, 138 Eisenhower, Dwight D. (President) 171, 174 emergency 12, 113, 146, 155, 171, 173, 174, 177, 204 emigrants 28, 29 emotions 5–7, 14, 156; histories of 5 (see also affect) empire 1, 3, 4, 6–10, 13, 18, 20, 23, 27, 32–36, 50, 70, 90, 101, 132, 135, 137, 145, 146, 161, 169, 175, 200; and “network interruptions’ 33; anxieties in 36 (see also anxiety); boundary crossings and 27, 32; British (see British Empire); continuities and discontinuities of 8; edge of 135; essence of 23; historiography of 36; “informal” 37; lost in 1, 36; “reterritorializing power” of 18; twenty-first-century 200; varieties of 8–9; vulnerability of 137; webs of 34; Western 9; Qing (see Qing) enclave 38, 55, 102; as ring-fenced space of certainty 1 environment 17, 52, 93, 98, 101–3, 107, 194, 198; Oriental 17, 204 Epidemic Diseases Act (India) 113 Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) 172 epidemics 10, 18, 19, 36, 37, 66, 69, 70, 85, 95, 112, 127, 131, 133, 143, 153, 162, 172, 194–97, 200, 206, 207; and panic 4, 57, 58, 111, 161, 167; construction of 19, 161; influenza 36, 111, 128 (see also influenza); of cholera 68, 83, 114, 143 (see also cholera); of plague 127, 143 (see also plague); of smallpox 114 (see

epidemics (continued) also smallpox); opportunities furnished by 17, 58. See also disease “epidemics of signification” 111, 137. See also Treichler, Paula A. epidemiology 158, 171; and geopolitics 207; of plague 113 Eternal Fight, The (film) 182, 193, 190–200 Etherington, Norman 26, 30, 31 Eurasia 120 “factories.” See Canton System Fall River Evening Herald (newspaper) 166 famine 10, 114, 116, 126, 127 fear 1, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21, 26, 36, 37, 58, 60, 65, 75, 85, 111, 113, 115, 120, 163, 173, 203, 204; and anxiety 171, 204; and panic 21, 23, 55, 83, 85, 86, 139, 158, 179, 183, 208; nuclear 7, 8, 170; of epidemic 168, 184, 187; of tropical climate on health 90, 99, 102, 105, 107; “primitive” 4–6, 135 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 155 Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) 8, 170 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) 175 “Festival of the British Empire” (1897) 131 fevers 95–97, 102, 106 financial crash 5; of 1929 20; of 2007/8 20 fire 34; and fire prevention 38, 49; as metaphor 2, 16, 37, 166, 168, 173; in Canton 16, 35–55, 57, 204, 205; of Chicago (1871) 43; of Edinburgh (1824) 43; of Lisbon (1755) 52; of London (1666) 43, 52 (see also London) First World War 164, 175, 207 “folk devils.” See “moral panic” folk memories 113 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 155 Ford, Gerald (President) 169 Fort Bragg (North Carolina) 171 Fox, Paul 108 framing 69, 157, 200 France 32, 64–66, 68, 69, 71, 73, 75–79, 81, 83, 85, 123, 191, 192 Fraser’s Magazine (newspaper) 3

Index 233 Frierson, Cathy 38 frontier 15, 23, 25, 26, 29, 34, 138, 161, 162 Frontier Times, The (newspaper) 28 frustration 37, 38, 43, 45, 150 Galen 14 Galveston (Texas) 160 Gandhi, Mahatma 125–27 Garrett, Laurie 183, 184, 187 gas masks 183, 185, 197, 203 Geneva Protocol (1925) 207 geography 196, 207; “disease geography” 181 Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 185 Germany 123, 125, 191 Gilliland, Jason 52 Gilman, Sander 161 global markets 69, 137 Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) 184 Godlonton, Robert 25, 28, 29 governance 3, 9, 17, 62, 70, 73; colonial 115; imperial 9, 133, 136, international 17, 66, 68, 79, 84 Government Civil Hospital (Hong Kong) 2, 150 Grahamstown Journal (newspaper) 25, 26 Great Depression, The 156; after 1873 10, 11; 1930s 167, 198 Greece 66, 79 Gregg, Judd 177 grievances 54, 55 Guam 190 Guha, Ranajit 1, 24, 36, 91 Gulf Coast 155 H1N1 (see swine flu pandemic of 2009); and 1918 pandemic 119–22, 169 hacking 206 hakims 118 Haffkine, Waldemar 117 Hajj. See Mecca Hamburg, Margaret 155 Harvey, David 8, 9 Havelock (New Zealand) 100 Hawke’s Bay 100 Hazen, Margaret 39

Hazen, Robert 39 Headrick, Daniel 24, 152 helplessness 38, 43, 45, 119, 121, 191 Hillemann, Ulrike 37 hill stations 4, 17, 88, 94, 101–9 Hindess, Barry 55 Hindu (newspaper), The 127 Hiroshima 170 Hitchcock, Alfred 191 HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). See AIDS Hollywood 155, 179, 188 Holmes, Sherlock 112 holocaust 21; nuclear 170, 171 homeland security 9 Hong Kong 1, 2, 4, 16, 18, 33, 40, 50, 52, 111–13, 123, 135, 136, 144–53, 184 Hongkong Daily Press (newspaper) 146, 152 Hongkong Telegraph (newspaper) 136 Hong merchants 36, 41, 43, 46, 50–52, 55 Honigsbaum, Mark 140, 143, 144 Honolulu 190 hospitals 97, 116, 118, 137, 138, 141, 159, 203; temporary 122, 124 house inspections 2, 117; in Bombay 115, 117 humanitarian 25; endeavors in the Cape 25, 26 Humphries, Margaret 160 Hunter, William C. 39, 51 Hunter, William Wilson 6 hurricane 155 hysteria 14, 15, 168, 172, 179 iconography 19, 136, 181, 182, 189, 192–200, 206 immigrants 34, 61, 100, 121, 160, 162, 195 immunization 169, 208 imperialism 9, 37, 91, 109, 148, 153, 200; US 8, 9; British 23, 37 (see also British Empire) India 2–4, 12, 13, 18, 21, 33, 36, 48, 58, 84, 111–29, 136, 137, 145, 204; climate 17, 87, 88, 90–93, 96, 98, 101, 102, 105, 109, 204; government of 112, 113, 120, 121, 123, 126, 128 Indian Forester (newspaper) 102

234 Index Indian Medical Gazette (IMG) 124 Indian Medical Service 123 Indian Research Fund Association 123 Indiana 176 indigenous people 13, 17, 24, 25, 27, 34, 87, 96. See also aborigines infection 4, 14, 16, 37, 61, 62, 113, 131, 132, 135, 138, 139, 141, 143, 183, 196, 199; chronic 204; emerging 184, 187; map 133; metaphoric 15 influenza 111, 181–84, 187, 206; avian 111; in India 12, 17, 18, 36, 111, 112, 116, 119–29; late twentieth-century pandemics of 4, 12, 18, 19, 111, 124, 135–44, 153, 159, 162, 166. See also epidemics Inglis, Andrea 107 inoculation 117, 121, 124, 178. See also vaccination insecurity 1, 16, 24 Institute of Medicine (US) 177, 186, 187 intelligence 2, 21, 132, 138, 140, 147, 148, 172, 205, 206 International Sanitary Conference (1851) 17, 58, 66, 67, 83, 85, 207 Internet 5, 204–6 “investigative modalities” 3. See also Cohn, Bernard S. Iraq 8, 156 Israel 203 Jackson (Mississippi) 160 Jacksonville (Florida) 160 Jallianwala Bagh massacre (1919) 126 Japan 2, 176 Jasanoff, Sheila 9 Jazz Singer, The (film) 188 Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies 155 Johns Hopkins Science Review (film) 172, 173 Johns Hopkins University 172 Jordan 20 judicium 14 kala-azar 123 Kansas 155

Kant, Immanuel 52 Karwi. See Kirwee Kaukiainen, Yrjö 152 Kelly, Robert E. 194 Kennedy, John F. (President) 174 Kentucky 176 Killingray, David 116 Kimberley (diamond mines) 30 Kingdom of Sardinia 66, 69, 73, 79, 85 Kingdom of the Two Sicilies 66 Kipling, Rudyard 148 Kirwee (New Zealand) 100 Kitasato, Shibasaburō 149 knowledge 1, 11–13, 15, 58, 66, 67, 84, 139, 152, 191, 193; oppositional 8; uncertain 3, 12 Koch, Tom 136, 192 Korean Air 183 Korea Times (newspaper) 183 Koselleck, Reinhart 11, 14 Krell, Alan 43, 45 Kuwait 156 Kwok A-Sing 147 laboratory 28, 33, 61, 137, 163, 192, 193; science 18, 131 Lancet 137, 139, 141, 169 Langmuir, Alexander D. 171, 174 Latour, Bruno 32, 33 League of Nations 207 Lebanon 203 Le Bon, Gustave 6, 14, 156 Lederberg, Joshua 16 leprosy 111 Lester, Alan 4, 15 Lisbon 60, 149 Lloyd’s List (newspaper) 152 Loch, Henry 108 Lombard Street. See global markets London 28–30, 37, 45, 60, 65, 123, 131, 140, 141; the Fire of (1666) 43, 52 London Missionary Society 45 London Stock Exchange 142 Lower East Side (New York) 162 Lowson, James 2, 150 Lübken, Uwe 38 Lugard, Sir Frederick 149

Index 235 Mackinder, Sir Halford 10 Madras 103, 104, 125, 126 Maitland, Sir Peregrine 29 malaria 90, 95, 111, 123 Malaria Control in War Areas (MCWA) 189 Malone, R. H. 123 Manila 55, 136, 190 mapping. See maps maps: and iconography of new infectious threats 196, 197; and visualization of disease 136; networks and 196; shaping responses to epidemics 19; WHO and 183; world maps 192 markets 10, 57, 63, 69, 137, 198 masks 165, 183–85, 187, 197, 203 Massey, Doreen 27 McDougall, William 5, 6 Mecca 207 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) 203 Medhurst, Walter Henry 50 mediatization 143 medical geography 93, 96, 102 Mediterranean 61–66, 72, 73, 83, 84 Memphis (Tennessee) 160 metaphor 15, 16, 37, 62, 158 Mexico 168, 182 Mexico City 182–83 miasma 95, 102, 103, 105 Middle East 86, 113, 156, 203 migrant laborers 30, 31 migration 17, 18, 87–110, 112, 170, 183 militarism 8 Milne, William 50 mob 6, 17, 157, 160, 171, 175 Model State Emergency Health Powers Act (MSEHPA) 21 modernity 6, 38, 193, 196, 198, 199; ambivalence toward 19, 182, 199; “warping” effects of 15 (see also Vidler, Anthony) Molesky, Mark 52 “moral panic” 13, 15, 29, 34, 115, 158. See also Cohen, Stanley morbidity 95, 140, 163, 206 Morrison, Robert 35, 41, 44–46, 50 Morse, Hosea 39 mosquitoes 90, 162, 186, 190, 195 Muter, Elizabeth 101

“Mutiny.” See Uprising of 1857 Nagasaki 170 Nairobi 33 Nanee Tal (hill station) 106 Nanking (Nanjing), Treaty of 35 Napier (New Zealand) 100 Natal 23–31 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) 183 National Guard (US) 155 National Security Agency (NSA) 179 Nelson (New Zealand) 99 Netanyahu, Benjamin 203 network 4, 8, 18, 32, 34, 143, 196–98; and globalization 10, 11, 21, 153, 184, 192; as descriptive and analytic device 28, 32; iconography of 196, 197; interruption of 32, 33; invisible 196; migrant labor 30; more-than-human 24, 32, 33, 61; social 185, 196; telegraphic 132, 137, 140; transnational 9, 11, 31 neuralgia 11, 14 neurasthenia 14 New Hampshire 177 New Orleans (Louisiana) 13, 162 newspapers 26, 28, 30, 34, 57, 62, 93, 96, 99, 116, 132, 135, 136, 140, 142, 148, 183, 194 Newsweek (newspaper) 183, 185, 185, 187 New York 21, 39, 41, 48, 168, 176, 186 New York City Department of Health 16, 168 New York Times Magazine. See New York Times New York Times (newspaper) 8, 168, 169, 177 New Yorker, The (newspaper) 186 New Zealand 4, 17, 87–110 New Zealand Waste Lands Act (1858) 99 Nickles, David Paull 147 Non-Cooperation Movement 127 North Island (New Zealand) 97, 99 nuclear 7, 8, 20, 156, 170, 173–76; Fukushima Daiichi disaster (2011) 20 Nunn, Sam 155 Nye, Gideon 37 Oklahoma 155, 176 Ootacamund (Utakamand) 104

236 Index Operation Alert 173, 174 Operation Dark Winter 155, 156 Opium. See pre–Opium War Oppenheimer, Robert J. 173 opportunity: biowarfare as 172; fire as 52; International Sanitary Conference as 57, 66; panic as 178 (see also panic); plague as 115; “social drama” and 158; social media as 206; Uprising of 1857 as 93 Oriental 6, 17, 48, 60, 79, 204 Ostherr, Kirsten 13 Ottoman Empire 57–86, 207 Pall Mall Gazette (newspaper) 141, 142 pandemic 155 panic: as chronic anxiety 204; as communication 204; as device 12; as fear of lives at risk 23; as hysteria 15; as modern 6–7, 14, 15, 135; as neuralgia 11, 14; as “primitive” 5–6; as the diffusion and amplification of small-scale events 33; association with the Greek god Pan 6; collective 4, 5, 12, 157, 197; colonial 4, 8, 15, 2, 37; compounded nature of 12, 13, 17, 153; contagious properties of 2, 10–11, 17, 204; controlled 16; emplacement of 4; history of 157–58; “information panics” 88, 91 (see also Bayly, C. A.); market 10, 204; mass phenomenon versus individual event 167; memory of 204; monger 169; “myth of ” 157; native 24; non-panic 16; of 1873 10; postcolonial 8, 15, 37; prehistory of 15; public health 169; scales of 16; virtual 204 “panic dramas” 19, 159, 162, 163, 167–69, 173, 175, 178, 181 Panic in the Streets (movie) 13 Park, Robert E. 163 pathogenicity. See pathogens pathogens 19, 172, 187, 188, 195, 200 Payton, Edward 100 Peckham, Robert 18, 23, 37, 157, 181, 205 Pender, Sir John 143, 45 Pennsylvania 175 Pentagon 155, 176 Peterson, Val 171, 176

Pfeiffer, Richard 139 Philadelphia Inquirer (newspaper) 165 Phillips, Howard 116 Pietermaritzburg (KwaZulu-Natal) 26, 27 placards 1–3 plague 2, 4, 13, 17, 36, 62, 81, 82, 111–29, 136, 137, 143, 148–53, 155, 159, 191, 193; bubonic 12, 16, 18, 33, 111, 112, 127, 135, 144, 151, 163, 206; pneumonic 13 Plague Commission 123 Plague Research Committee (Bombay) 123 plants 90, 105, 106, 108, 109 pneumonic plague. See plague policymakers 4, 5, 157, 197 polio 167 polygamy 24, 30 Poona 117 Portugal 52, 66, 69, 71 Post Office Department (Washington DC) 160 Prendergast, Robert Keating 96, 97 pre–Opium War 4, 16, 37, 48, 55, 57 preparedness 137, 155, 174–77 press 30, 45, 57, 116, 123, 128, 140, 141, 144, 146, 149. See also newspapers Preston, Richard 187 Progressive Era 162 prophylactics 63, 117, 123, 208 Prussia 79 psychopathologies 6, 14 public health 4, 16, 61, 66, 79, 81, 83, 85, 114, 118, 129, 133, 163, 167, 175, 179, 187, 207; action 170; and consequences of globalization 185; authorities 122; education 162; emergency 177; epidemiologically based 18; event 136; experts 113, 115, 122, 142; films 182, 188; governance 68, 84; impact 186; institution-building 161, 162; institutions 188, 189; international regulation of 65; interventions 13, 17, 58, 68, 164, 208; legislation 177; literature 172; measures 102, 164; officials 127, 142, 155; Ottoman 58; politics of 174; preparedness 177; prevention 200;

Index 237 public health (continued) responses 18, 183; school 177; threat to 119, 164; tool 142, 181 Punjab 87, 117, 118, 120, 123 Qing 35, 144 Quarantelli, Enrico 4 quarantine 4, 13, 17, 57–86, 141, 160, 162, 178, 183, 197 Queen Adelaide Province 25, 29 quinine 24 race 20, 30, 90, 91, 195; interracial sex 15; racial purity 91 radiological incidents 175 Rai, Rajesh 105 railways 9, 18, 33, 114, 132, 138–42, 145, 152; station 115, 121 Rand, W. C. 117 Ranikhet (Uttarakhand) 104 rape 15, 24, 26, 29, 30, 31; and panic 24, 29, 30, 31; scare of 30, 31 Reagan, Ronald (President) 169 Reed, Walter 162 Reid, Gilbert 146 Reuters, Julius 140, 146, 148 Reuters (news agency) 140, 146, 148, 149 revolution 105, 109, 206; imaginative 153; in communication 152 (see also digital); industrial 192 Rhodes, Cecil 30 riot 6, 18, 121, 206; food 127; political 161 Ripon, Lord (George Robinson) 150, 151 risk 23, 38, 39, 42, 55, 58, 67, 82, 85, 111, 117, 169, 178, 179, 186, 188, 195, 199, 205, 206; management 207; “risk society” 20; telegraph as amplifier of 142 Robinson, Sir William 2, 150–52 Roitman, Janet 11 Roman Empire 14, 77 Rose, Sir Hugh 91 Rosenberg, Charles E. 131, 135, 153 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 52 Rowlatt Bills (1919) 125 Royal Army Medical Corps 114 Rudé, George 12, 128

rumors 18; as panic 204; as transformation of language 14; conceived to spread 14. See also Das, Veena Russia 32, 38, 66, 69–71, 79, 123, 156. See also USSR sabotage 137, 172, 206 Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) 136, 145 Salisbury, Lord 141 “sampling device” 135. See also Rosenberg, Charles E. San Francisco 163, 190 sanatoria 92, 94, 95, 101, 109 Sand, Jordan 38 sarin. See bioterrorism SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) 37, 111, 158, 184–87, 193 Science (newspaper) 177 Second World War 6, 16, 161, 188–90 securitization 8 Sedgwick, William 162 “sentinel” 137, 138, 196 September 11, 2001 (9/11 terror attacks) 8, 21, 155 Shepstone, Theophilus 31 Shinrikyo, Aum 175. See also bioterrorism shocks 17, 57 Shreveport (Louisiana) 159 signs 3, 88 Simla 101, 106, 108 Sinclair, Andrew 99 Singapore 145, 184 Sioux Falls (South Dakota) 174 slave 25, 34, 67, 80 smallpox 16, 19, 114, 117, 155, 156, 162, 168, 169, 177, 178, 190 Smart, Alan 52 smartphone 206 Smith, Neil 196 Snowden, Edward 178 social actors 158 “social distancing” 164 “social drama” 19, 158, 178 social media 206 soldiers 87, 91, 92, 94, 96, 99, 109, 121 South African War 33 South Australian Register (newspaper) 107

238 Index South Island (New Zealand) 100, 106 space; “panic space” 7; social space 7 Spain 65, 66, 69, 75, 77, 85 Spanish Flu 164, 167, 168. See also influenza “spatial turn” 23, 27, 207 steamships 24, 132, 141, 145, 152, 205 stigmatization 158 Stirling, Sir James 98 Stockenström, Andries 26, 29 Stoler, Ann Laura 12 Story of New Zealand, The (book) 96–97 St. Paul’s Cathedral 131 St. Petersburg 140 subcontinent. See India Suez 94 swine flu; 2009 pandemic 19, 20, 181–83, 186, 187, 195; outbreak of 1976 169 Swyngedouw, Erik 196 syphilis 111 Syria 80, 83, 207, 208; conflict in 203, 204, 207, 208 Taoism 42 Tarde, Gabriel 6 Tasmania 94–96, 100 technologies 4, 7, 9, 18, 24; digital communication 5; of visualization 136 telegraph: telegrams 145, 147–53, 159, 160; telegraphic cables 18, 24, 69, 136, 138, 140, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 205; telegraphic speech 18; wires 144. See also technologies Telegraphic Messages Copyright Ordinance (1894) 148 telegraphy. See telegraph Tennessee 176 terror 28, 40, 50, 57, 58, 111, 116, 135, 160, 193, 208; nuclear 8; politicization of 174; space of 26. See also terrorism and bioterrorism terrorism 21, 155, 175, 176, 177, 188; Oklahoma City bombing (1995). See also bioterrorism Third Plague Pandemic 135, 144 Thirty-Nine Steps, The (movie) 191 Thompson, E. P. 12, 128

Thomson, Arthur Saunders 96, 97 Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania) 175 Time (newspaper) 187 Times of Israel, The (newspaper) 203 Times, The [London] (newspaper) 28, 29, 140, 144, 146, 148, 149 Tinseltown. See Hollywood Tomorrow (novel) 170 topography 4, 93 tornado 155 trade 29, 32, 62, 65, 69, 80, 83, 170, 188; in Canton (see Canton System); in Hong Kong 136, 144, 145; Mediterranean trade route 84; slave trade 25 transcolonial 3, 90 Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing) 35 tree-planting 102–6 Treichler, Paula A. 133 troops 17, 57, 87–110, 119, 156 tropical climate 17, 87, 90 tropical medicine 161 Truman Doctrine 16 tuberculosis 111, 123, 127, 189 Turkey 79, 81, 84, 123. See also Ottoman Empire Turner, Victor 19, 158, 159, 160, 178, 181. See also “social drama” typhoid 97, 106 Unani 120 Unani-tibb. See Unani uncertainty 1, 3, 12, 20, 24, 60, 75, 140, 178 UNESCO (United Nation’s Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) 190 Ungar, Sheldon 20 United States (USA) 6, 8, 9, 16, 161, 164, 172, 173, 175, 183, 185, 189, 190, 203, 208 Uprising of 1857 (India) 14, 17, 21, 87–91, 97, 100, 109 114 urbanization 6, 192 US Public Health Service (USPHS) 182, 189, 190 USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) 156, 176, 208 Uttar Pradesh 100

Index 239 vaccination 117, 168, 176, 177; as antibioterror 208; mass 168, 169, 178 (see also swine flu) vaidyas 118 Van Dyke, Paul 41, 51 vectors 19, 186, 193, 195–98 Venice 63, 113 Vesey, George (Captain) 2 Vicksburg (Mississippi) 160 Vidler, Anthony 6 Vienna Stock Exchange 10 Vietnam (war) 175 Virginia 155 virus 123, 131, 139, 158, 169, 182, 182, 187, 193, 194 visuality 13, 19, 28, 136, 181–82, 184, 186, 189, 192, 193, 194–200, 197, 200 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 52

Weir, T. S. 115 Welles, Orson 157 Wellington 97, 99, 191 Wellington Independent, The (newspaper) 97 West Nile virus 186, 187 Whampoa (Huangpu) 38, 43 White, Luise 24 White, Norman F. 124, 125 Williams, Raymond 199 Willingdon, Lord (Freeman-Thomas) 126 Wilson, Sir John Cracroft 106 World Trade Center 155 World War Z (movie) 155 Wragge, Clement 107, 108 Wren, Sir Christopher 52 Wylie, Philip 170

Wagner, Kim A. 36, 91 Wald, Priscilla 16 War of the Worlds, The (novel) 157 War on Terror 9, 159, 170, 178. See also Bush, George W. “warping.” See modernity Weather Channel 155 Weinstein, Israel 16, 168

yellow fever 9, 19, 65, 85, 155, 159–62, 181, 190, 195, 196 Yellow Jack. See yellow fever Young India (newspaper) 126, 127

Xhosa 25, 26, 28, 29

zombie 155 Zoological Gardens (London) 37