Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies
© 2014
Vice in the Barracks
Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780-1868
Authors: Wald, E.
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- About this book
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Shortlisted for the 2014 Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize and the 2014 Templer Award for the Best First Book by a New Author.
Sex and alcohol preoccupied European officers across India throughout the nineteenth century, with high rates of venereal disease and alcohol-related problems holding serious implications for the economic and military performance of the East India Company. These concerns revolved around the European soldiery in India – the costly, but often unruly, 'thin white line' of colonial rule. This book examines the colonial state's approach to these vice-driven health risks. In doing so it throws new light on the emergence of social and imperial mindsets and on the empire, fuelled by fear of the lower orders, sexual deviation, disease and mutiny. An exploration of these mindsets reveals a lesser-explored fact of rule – the fractured nature of the Company state. Further, it shows how the measures employed by the state to deal with these vice-driven health problems had wide-ranging consequences not simply for the army itself but for India and the empire more broadly. By refocusing our attention on to the military core of the colonial state, Wald demonstrates the ways in which army decision-making stretched beyond the cantonment boundary to help define the state's engagement with and understanding of Indian society.
- About the authors
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Erica Wald is Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research interests include modern South Asia, with a particular focus on social, medical and military history.
- Reviews
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Shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society's Gladstone Prize 2014.
Shortlisted for the 2014 Templer Award for the best first book by a new author.
- Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Introduction
Pages 1-15
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The East India Company, the Army and Indian Society
Pages 16-47
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Regulating the Body: Experiments in Venereal Disease Control, 1797–1831
Pages 48-83
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Medicine and Disease in the ‘Age of Reform’
Pages 84-117
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The Body of the Soldier and Space of the Cantonment
Pages 118-156
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
Bibliographic Information
- Bibliographic Information
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- Book Title
- Vice in the Barracks
- Book Subtitle
- Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780-1868
- Authors
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- E. Wald
- Series Title
- Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies
- Copyright
- 2014
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan UK
- Copyright Holder
- Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
- eBook ISBN
- 978-1-137-27099-3
- DOI
- 10.1057/9781137270993
- Hardcover ISBN
- 978-1-137-27098-6
- Softcover ISBN
- 978-1-349-44451-9
- Series ISSN
- 2635-1633
- Edition Number
- 1
- Number of Pages
- XII, 273
- Topics
