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

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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.