Romanticism and Colonial Disease (review)

Abstract

In this extraordinarily important, exhaustively documented book, Alan Bewell for the first time tracks the emergence in Britain between 1780 and 1848 of an understanding of the fundamental conjunction of colonial expansion with epidemic disease, both in the colonies themselves and, more anxiety-provoking, at home in England. As Britain sent its sailors, soldiers, colonial administrators, settlers, and missionaries in ever-larger numbers to farther-flung regions of the globe, they disseminated European diseases for which the natives of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific Islands had no immunities. At the same time, they contracted diseases for which Europeans had no immunities, establishing "biomedical contact zones" (p. 3), or what Le Roy Ladurie has called a "common market of bacilli" (p. 4).