Fevers and Famines: 'Natural' Disasters and Victorian Imperial Culture

像大多数其他主要研究项目一样，“发烧和饥荒：自然灾害和维多利亚帝国文化”有一系列广泛的问题，它试图通过调查一系列更具体和“当地”的问题来回答这些问题。一方面，我的目标是通过观察我所认为的这些假设的形成时刻——维多利亚时代的19世纪，为我们目前关于“自然”或“环境”灾难的假设建立一个文化史前史。另一方面，通过仔细阅读和分析大量的文学、行政、法律和医学文献，这些文献大多是由直接或间接参与大英帝国在南亚的日常生活的男男女女用英语撰写的，从而充实了这段文化史前史。我的观点是双重的；首先，从这些文本中出现的关于“自然”灾害、帝国和“文明”的辩论形成了我们当代环境灾难观念的核心，以及我们采取的避免它们或将其影响降到最低的做法；其次，维多利亚时代的帝国文学为这场辩论的形成和传播提供了一个重要的场所。诸如流行病、饥荒和洪水等灾难性事件在维多利亚时代关于帝国与文明的辩论中占据了至关重要的地位。这些事件的物理和物质表现表现在数百万大英帝国臣民的死亡，市场和贸易周期的波动和变化，人口和社会关系的急剧变化，以及医学、技术、卫生和治理方面的创新和实验。特别是在印度次大陆，这些事件的循环似乎与大英帝国在那里的权力增长保持着完美的同步。这引发了关于“自然”灾害与帝国之间关系的令人不安的问题，这些问题反过来又渗透到维多利亚时代的公共话语和关于治理、种族、阶级、性别、自然/环境和文化的辩论中。这样的讨论和辩论形成了所谓的维多利亚时代的“灾难意识形态”。然而，像所有的意识形态一样，维多利亚时代的“灾难意识形态”也包含着根深蒂固的矛盾。一方面，疾病和饥荒被视为大英帝国扩张的理由，因为有人认为，只有帝国的技术和政治工具才能减轻这些灾难对世界“落后”地区的影响。另一方面，人们一直怀疑瘟疫，霍乱和饥荒不是“自然”发生的，而是帝国经济，社会，政治和文化机制造成的。在帝国文化领域，特别是在维多利亚时代印度的四位主要英国作家——艾米丽·伊登、拉迪亚德·吉卜林、菲利普·梅多斯·泰勒和芙罗拉·安妮·斯蒂尔的作品中，决定性地形成了“自然”灾难观念中的这一关键矛盾。他们在小说中使用饥荒、疾病和流行病来确认和质疑维多利亚帝国的“灾难意识形态”，反过来又对帝国的“文明”属性的规范理解产生干扰。我将它们与行政、法律和“热带”医学著作结合起来阅读，以显示维多利亚时代文学和非文学文化之间的思想交流是多么密集。正是在这种思想、辩论、讨论和文化形式的交流中，维多利亚时代对“自然”灾害的认识形成了，这种认识我们今天仍然存在。

Like most other major research projects, 'Fevers and Famines: 'Natural' disasters and Victorian Imperial Cultures' has a set of broad issues which it tries to answer by investigating a set of more specific and 'local' questions. On the one hand, I aim to establish a cultural pre-history of our current assumptions about 'natural' or 'environmental' catastrophes by looking at what I argue is the formative moment of these assumptions - the Victorian nineteenth century. On the other hand, this cultural pre-history is fleshed out by closely reading and analyzing a number of literary, administrative, legal and medical texts mostly written in English by men and women who were directly or indirectly involved with the everyday life of British empire in south Asia. My contention is two-fold; first, that the debates about 'natural' disasters, empire and 'civilization' that emerge from these texts form the core of our contemporary ideas of environmental catastrophe and the practices that we undertake to avert them or minimize their impacts; second, that Victorian imperial literature formed a crucial site for the formation and dissemination of this debate. Cataclysmic events such as epidemics, famines and floods, occupied a crucial position in the Victorian debates about empire and civilization. The physical and material manifestations of these events were expressed in the deaths of millions of British imperial subjects, the fluctuation and alterations of markets and trade cycles, radical changes of demographics and social relations, and innovations and experiments in medicine, technology, hygiene and governance. The Indian subcontinent in particular, saw the entrenchment of cycles of these events that seemed to keep perfect pace with the growth of British imperial power there. This triggered disturbing questions about the relationship between 'natural' disasters and empire which in turn infiltrated Victorian public discourses and debates about governance, race, class, gender, nature/environment, and culture. Such discussions and debates came to form what might be called the Victorian 'disaster ideology'. Yet, like all ideologies, Victorian 'disaster ideology' contained within it deep-seated contradictions. On the one hand diseases and famines were seen as the rationale of British imperial expansion, since it was argued that it was only the technological and political tools of the empire that could mitigate the effects of these disasters in the 'backward' regions of the world. On the other hand, there was a nagging suspicion that plague, cholera and famines were not 'natural' at all,but produced by the very economic, social, political and cultural mechanisms of empire. This crucial contradiction in the idea of 'natural' disaster was decisively formed in the imperial cultural field, especially in the works of four major British writers of Victorian India - Emily Eden, Rudyard Kipling, Philip Meadows Taylor and Flora Annie Steel. They used famines, diseases and epidemics in their fiction to at once confirm and interrogate the Victorian imperial 'disaster ideology', and in turn to generate disturbances about normative understandings of the 'civilizational' attributes of empire. I read them in conjunction with administrative, legal and 'tropical' medical writings to show how intensive the traffic of ideas was between Victorian literary and non-literary cultures. It is in this traffic of ideas, debates, discussions and cultural forms that the Victorian sense of 'natural' disasters was formed, a sense that we still live with today.