Abstract
SummaryThis article is looking at colonial governance with regard to leprosy, comparing two settings of the Dutch colonial empire: Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. Whereas segregation became formal policy in Suriname, leprosy sufferers were hardly ever segregated in the Dutch East Indies. We argue that the perceived needs to maintain a healthy labour force and to prevent contamination of white populations were the driving forces behind the difference in response to the disease. Wherever close contact between European planters and a non-European labour force existed together with conditions of forced servitude (either slavery or indentured labour), the Dutch response was to link leprosy to racial inferiority in order to legitimise compulsory segregation. This mainly happened in Suriname. We would like to suggest that forced labour, leprosy and compulsory segregation were connected through the ‘colonial gaze’, legitimising compulsory segregation of leprosy sufferers who had become useless to the plantation economy.
Highlights
We would like to suggest that forced labour, leprosy and compulsory segregation were connected through the ‘colonial gaze’, legitimising compulsory segregation of leprosy sufferers who had become useless to the plantation economy
By comparing leprosy policies in two very different colonies belonging to the same colonial empire, we have tried to show how responses to leprosy were driven by the specific local interests of plantation owners, company officials and colonial governments
The existence of forced servitude by non-Europeans under the direct rule of Europeans turned out to be an important variable in the development of compulsory segregation policies
Summary
In 1667, the English ceded Suriname to the Dutch. The colony was brought under the control of a private company, the Society of Suriname, comprised of the Dutch West Indies Company (WIC), the city of Amsterdam and Cornelis van Aerssen van Sommelsdijck, a private investor who later became governor of Suriname. As one of the few physicians working in the colony of Suriname, and one who conducted medical examinations of newly arrived slaves, Schilling supplied the scientific ‘evidence’ and underpinnings of the repressive policy of isolation and segregation based on an humoral understanding of disease. He claimed that leprosy was caused by a ‘special substance’, ‘a certain poison’ that was brought by slaves from Africa to the Americas and that could become virulent when climate or inadequate diet had weakened a person’s constitution. Doctors in early nineteenth-century Suriname routinely embraced Schilling’s sexualised and racialised discourse on leprosy They complained about the supposed fatalism of Africans, slaves and leprosy sufferers and expressed fear for a ‘return’ of the disease to Europe. When effective medication became available in the 1950s was compulsory segregation abandoned in Suriname
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