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About this book
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.
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.
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Keywords
Table of contents (7 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
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.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Vice in the Barracks
Book Subtitle: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780-1868
Authors: Erica Wald
Series Title: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137270993
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Palgrave History Collection, History (R0)
Copyright Information: Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2014
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-27098-6Published: 26 March 2014
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-44451-9Published: 01 January 2014
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-27099-3Published: 26 March 2014
Series ISSN: 2635-1633
Series E-ISSN: 2635-1641
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 273
Topics: Imperialism and Colonialism, History of Britain and Ireland, Social History, History of Science, International Relations, History of South Asia