The constitution of empire: place and bodily health in the eighteenth-century Atlantic

Abstract

For eighteenth-century British Atlantic colonists, bodily health depended in large part on the surrounding environment. Aware that the West Indies and the Georgia and Carolina lowcountry had climates very different from Britain's, voyagers who traveled to the tropical and semitropical climates of the Americas believed that their bodies would need to adapt to the new environment. While much of the existing scholarship emphasizes the unhealthy nature of the eighteenth-century Caribbean, this article examines the importance of health as crucial to the formation of the British Atlantic world. Rather than seeing these hot climates as uniformly unhealthy for British bodies, planters and other colonists held a much more nuanced view of the land, taking into account both microclimates and individual differences among people's bodies and constitutions. Settlers and government officials considered the local environment and evaluated particular places for their effects on people's health as they determined the locations and layouts of towns, cities, and residences. Charleston, Carolina's capital city, moved a few miles from its original location in accordance with the Lords Proprietors' demands that settlers find a healthier spot, and the location of Jamaica's seat of government was the subject of heated debate during the 1750s. Health proved to be a crucial variable in the establishment of towns, and it also determined where individual people chose to settle – some found their bodies did not suit the Caribbean climate, while others determined their health was better in the heat than it had ever been in England. It was far from unusual for people to travel around the empire for health reasons, and considerations of health helped to direct the movement and settlement of people around the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world.