Colonising Disability: race, impairment and otherness in the British Empire, c. 1800-1914

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Whilst it is impossible to calculate the exact numbers of disabled people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, taken as a proportion of the overall population, there were many more disabled people in Britain in the past than there are today. Illnesses causing deafness and/or blindness (such as scarlet fever; mumps; chicken pox; influenza; measles; meningitis; and rubella) were prolific and there were high rates of industrial and agricultural accidents which were physically disabling. Furthermore, what today might be considered a moderate or 'correctable' hearing or sight loss, had profound implications as sensory-enhancing technology was of poor quality and often prohibitively expensive. As literary critics have demonstrated, disabled people populate British culture. Yet disability has been ignored by the vast majority of historians. My first research question addresses this by asking how was disability represented, treated and experienced in the British Empire? My second research question is wider: how did disability (so present in the period's literature, institutions, and legal discussions) frame understandings of the body more generally? Disability does not only affect those who are labelled disabled but forms part of a wider social system (that disability theorists have recently discussed as 'ableism') that is widely formative. Disability was a way of thinking about bodily difference, which fed into ways of viewing other bodily differences such as the differences of race. There are good reasons to suggest that thinking about attitudes towards disability alongside the attitudes towards race will be particularly useful. 'Race' and 'disability' are both ways of thinking about perceived bodily 'otherness'. In the nineteenth century, pseudo-scientific racism sought to define and categorize people by measuring and codifying bodily diversity. Images of 'suffering' colonial others were used to justify their colonialisation. Eugenics saw 'impairment' and degeneracy in both race and disability. Scientists argued over whether Down's Syndrome ('Mongolianism') was a race or an impairment. My pilot study on deafness has suggested that these discourses interacted with those of 'benevolence' which, in constructing colonial 'others' and disabled people as a '(healthy) white man's burden', created long-standing relationships of dependence. I now want to test this hypothesis and investigate whether the same is true of disability more generally.In order to make my study feasible in the period of the AHRC fellowship I have limited the scope of my study in terms of period and geography. The timeframe, 1800-1914, was a period where the configuration of both race and disability changed dramatically. It was also a period which saw massive British expansion overseas, and Empire shaped every aspect of British life. The study stops short of the First World War which, in generating large numbers of newly disabled men, changed the way in which disability was understood. In asking whether the major reconfiguration of the understanding of disability in this period was shaped by empire, imperial relationships or other power-structures, I need to take a wide geographical scope. On the other hand, too broad a study would be unfeasible. With this in mind my study is confined to the 'white' British Empire, to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and to Britain itself as places which shared numerous connections and believed themselves to hold a common culture. I will thus explore the specific conjunctions of race and disability that were formulated in such places.In summary, major questions that this research will address include the following:- How did disability and race intersect in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?- How were the lives of disabled people informed by the wider colonial context?- What part did disabled people and colonised others play in the way some bodies were seen as more 'normal' than others?