How's the Empire? An Essay Review

Abstract

N his novel Tancred (), Benjamin Disraeli observed that: “the East is a career.” According to the three books under review, the East would give many Britons not only their career, but also their literature and sense of embodiment. Each of these books examines different aspects of the impact of empire on British culture and institutions; each describes the imperial production of Britain and Britishness during the nineteenth century. But they have little to say about India and other parts of the empire. Reading these books led me to reflect again on notions of center and periphery in the history of medicine and science. If a sort of imperial imagination was at the heart of Britishness in the nineteenth century, then how could medicine and science in the empire, even at its most distant outposts, have been “peripheral” to Britain? And if these distant engagements were so crucial to national identity, then to what extent can the history of colonial medicine be reinterpreted as a story of the fabrication of race, of whiteness—both at “home” and abroad?