Imperial Rejuvenations: Youth, Empire, and the Problem of Accelerated Aging in “Tropical” Colonies, ca. 1800–1914

Abstract

Abstract In recent years scholars have argued that “rejuvenation” took distinctively modern forms as a specific set of surgical procedures intended to realize sexual potency and libidinal enhancement, as well as anti-aging medicine and cosmetic body projects. However, this article underlines the earlier, imperial dimensions of rejuvenation as a set of modern, state-sponsored practices taking shape outside Europe. An important turning point in the modern history of rejuvenation was a shift around 1830 in thinking about “the tropics,” as scientists who identified heat as accelerating the process of aging rejected the possibility of acclimatization in hot zones. Because racial vitality supposedly diminished more quickly in the tropics, the older ideal of the grizzled, mature colonial soldier fell into decline, and rethinking the globe in racial-climatological terms made youth an essential corequisite of empire. Military commanders confronted the need to rejuvenate armies by recruiting soldiers at younger ages. Together with medical experts, they responded to fears of racial-climatological impotence by developing a range of strategies—from troop rotation to the development of hill stations—which scaled up rejuvenation to the level of entire population groups. Focusing on strategies elaborated in Asia to address this problem, this article shows how ideas about youth, time, geography, and modernity gave rise to spaces and networks designed to slow or reverse the aging process, or in other words to achieve “imperial rejuvenation” well before rejuvenation became a buzzword in late nineteenth-century Europe.