![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The expansion of British imperial warfare during the middle of the eighteenth century provided motivation and opportunity for observations on British and native forces. The nature of military medicine, with its use of regimental returns and empirical observations about mortality rates of large groups of anonymous individuals, encouraged generalizations about differences between native and European bodies. As foreign, colonial environments accentuated European deaths due to disease during war-time, and as early modern medicine advised the use of acclimatized, native labour, the physical experience of eighteenth-century colonial warfare encouraged the recruitment of native forces as menial labourers under the direction of professional British soldiers. Although not inherently racial, such practices buttressed emerging social and cultural prejudices. In contrast to the traditional focus on intellectual writings on race and science during the modern period of nineteenth-century imperialism, Charters's article examines the experience of common men—rank-and-file soldiers—during the early modern period, demonstrating the relationship between developing empirical and scientific observations and burgeoning racial theories.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the organizers and participants of the ‘War and the Body’ conference (11 June 2010), Guy Chet, Mark Harrison, Gavin Schaffer and the two anonymous readers for their helpful insights and comments.
Notes
1John Polus Lecaan, Advice to the Gentlemen in the Army of Her Majesty's Forces in Spain and Portugal (London: Printed for P. Varenne 1708), 4. For details of Lecaan's career, see María Antonia Martí i Escayol, ‘Catalunya dins la xarxa científica de la illustració. John Polus Lecaan: medicina i botánica a Barcelona durant la Guerra de Successió’, Manuscrits, vol. 19, 2001, 175–94.
2On race and empire, see Jane Samson, Race and Empire (Harlow and New York: Pearson/Longman 2005). On scientific racism of the nineteenth century, see Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (London: Macmillan 1982). Racial thinking has long been identified as a crucial component of modernity; see, for example, Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1996), particularly 41–3; and Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. from the French by David Macey (London: Allen Lane 2003). For race and modernity situated in a colonial context, see, for example, Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press 1995); and Irene Silverblatt, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press 2004).
3See, for example, Nicholas Hudson, ‘From “nation” to “race”: the origin of racial classification in eighteenth-century thought’, Eighteenth Century Studies, vol. 29, no. 3, 1996, 247–64; Bronwen Douglas, ‘Climate to crania: science and the racialization of human difference’, in Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard (eds), Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940 (Canberra: ANU E Press 2008), 33–96 (34–5); Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lee Lott, ‘Introduction’, in Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lee Lott (eds), The Idea of Race (Indianapolis: Hackett 2000), vii–xviii; and Hannah Franziska Augstein, ‘Introduction’, in Hannah Franziska Augstein (ed.), Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850 (Bristol: Thoemmes Press 1996), ix–xxxiii (ix–xi).
4Michael Banton, The Idea of Race (London: Tavistock Publications 1977), 6.
5Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo and Maureen Quilligan (eds), Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2007); Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Benjamin Isaac and Joseph Ziegler (eds), The Origins of Racism in the West (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2009).
6Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge 2003), 12.
7On the transition to modern forms of identity, physical and otherwise, see Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-century England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press 2004); and Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2000).
8Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, ‘Demons, stars, and the imagination: the early modern body in the tropics’, in Eliav-Feldon, Isaac and Ziegler (eds), The Origins of Racism in the West, 313–25 (320); see also Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O'Hara (eds), Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press 2009).
9Martha L. Finch, ‘“Civilized” bodies and the “savage” environment of early New Plymouth’, in Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter (eds), A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2001), 43–60 (46); see also Trudy Eden, ‘Food, assimilation, and the malleability of the human body in early Virginia’, in Lindmann and Tarter (eds), A Centre of Wonders, 29–42.
10See, for example, Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert and Susan Wiseman (eds), At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1999), particularly Margaret Healy, ‘Bodily regimen and fear of the beast’, 51–73; Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2005); Julia L. Hairston and Walter Stephens (eds), The Body in Early Modern Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2010); Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. from the German by Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1978–82); and Ulinka Rublack, ‘Fluxes: the early modern body and the emotions’, trans. from the German by Pamela Selwyn, History Workshop Journal, no. 53, 2002, 1–16.
11Georges Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages, trans. from the French by Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988); Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press 2009).
12John Mitchell, ‘An essay upon the causes of the different colours of people in different climates’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 43, no. 474, 1744, 102–50 (102, 146).
13John Mitchell, ‘An essay upon the causes of the different colours of people in different climates’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 43, no. 474, 1744, 130–1, 146.
14‘A letter from Dr John Lining, at Charles-Town in South Carolina, to James Jurin’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 43, 1744, 318–30 (319). Lining's practice followed the model of the seventeenth-century physiologist Sanctorius, who recorded everything he ate and drank, as well as what he excreted, in order to establish that the most important form of excretion was insensible perspiration.
15Lecaan, Advice to the Gentlemen in the Army of Her Majesty's Forces in Spain and Portugal, 19–20.
16Lecaan, Advice to the Gentlemen in the Army of Her Majesty's Forces in Spain and Portugal, 33, 35.
17On the relationship between racial ideas and medicine, see, for example, Waltraud Ernst and Bernard Harris (eds), Race, Science and Medicine, 1700–1960 (London: Routledge 1999), esp. Norris Saakwa-Mante, ‘Western medicine and racial constitutions: surgeon John Atkin's theory of polygenism and sleepy distemper in the 1730s’, 29–57; Mark Harrison, ‘“The tender frame of man”: disease, climate and racial difference in India and the West Indies, 1760–1860’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 70, no. 1, 1996, 68–93; Gary Puckrein, ‘Climate, health and black labor in the English Americas’, Journal of American Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 1979, 179–93; and Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ‘Fear of hot climates in the Anglo-American colonial experience’, William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 41, no. 2, 1984, 213–40.
18Stephen Conway, ‘The mobilization of manpower for Britain's mid-eighteenth-century wars’, Historical Research, vol. 77, no. 197, 2004, 377–404 (378–88).
20‘Extract of . . . Don Antonio de Ulloa's F.R.S. account of his voyage to South America’, trans. from the Spanish by W. Watson, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 49, 1749, 134–9 (138).
19For a recent overview of the role of disease in West Indian warfare, see J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010). For specific details of the Cartagena campaign, see Richard Harding, Amphibious Warfare in the Eighteenth Century: The British Expedition to the West Indies, 1740–1742 (London: Royal Historical Society 1991); and Duncan Crewe, Yellow Jack and the Worm: British Naval Administration in the West Indies, 1739–1748 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 1993). The public was aware of the campaign and its outcome; see Kathleen Wilson, ‘Empire, trade and popular politics in mid-Hanoverian Britain: the case of Admiral Vernon’, Past & Present, no. 121, 1988, 74–109.
21James Lind, An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates (London: Printed for T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt 1768), 8.
22James Lind, An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates (London: Printed for T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt 1768), 2.
23Review of John Clark, Observations on the Diseases in Long Voyages to Hot Climates (London: D. Wilson and G. Nicol 1773), in Medical and Philosophical Commentaries. By a Society of Physicians in Edinburgh, vol. 2 (London: Printed for J. Murray; W. Creech and W. Drummond, Edinburgh; and T. Ewing, Dublin 1774), 9–19 (9).
24George Cleghorn, Observations on the Epidemical Diseases in Minorca (London: D. Wilson 1751), iv, x.
25George Cleghorn, Observations on the Epidemical Diseases in Minorca (London: D. Wilson 1751), v.
26Lind, An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates, 70.
27On the transformation of eighteenth-century western medicine, see, for example, Guenter B. Risse, Hospital Life in Enlightenment Scotland: Care and Teaching at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (eds), William Hunter and the Eighteenth-century Medical World (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press 1985); and Roger French and Andrew Wear (eds), British Medicine in an Age of Reform (London: Routledge 1991). On the contributions of naval and military medicine more particularly, see H. J. Cook, ‘Practical medicine and the British armed forces after the “Glorious Revolution”’, Medical History, vol. 34, no. 1, 1990, 1–26; Ulrich Tröhler, ‘To Improve the Evidence of Medicine’: The 18th Century British Origins of a Critical Approach (Edinburgh: Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 2000); and particularly Mark Harrison, Medicine in an Age of Commerce and Empire: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies 1660–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010).
28Lloyd G. Stevenson, ‘A note on the relation of military service to licensing in the history of British surgery’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 27, 1953, 420–7; George Clark, A History of the Royal College of Physicians of London, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press for the Royal College of Physicians 1966), 553–69; J. R. Butterton, ‘The education, naval service, and early career of William Smellie’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 60, no. 1, 1986, 1–18; Erica Charters, Disease, War, and the Imperial State: Victory and the Welfare of British Armed Forces during the Seven Years War, 1756–63 (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming), ch. 5.
29James Rymer, An Essay on Medical Education, with Advice to Young Gentlemen of the Faculty, Who Go into the Royal Navy as Surgeons’ Mates (London: Printed for R. Snagg and T. Evans 1776), 50.
30On Pringle, see J. S. G. Blair, ‘Pringle, Sir John, first baronet (1707–1782)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2004), XLV, 398–400. On Morgan, see Whitfield J. Bell, John Morgan, Continental Doctor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1965).
31‘Extract of a letter from Mr. John Hosley’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 54, 1764, 329–32.
32Letter from Richard Huck to John Pringle, 5 December 1760: Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, Pringle Manuscripts, vol. II, f. 205.
35James Wolfe, General Wolfe's Instructions to Young Officers (London: Printed for J. Millan 1768), v.
33Alan J. Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline: Officership and Administration in the British Army, 1714–63 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1985), ch. 3, ‘The machinery of regimental finance and its reform, 1714–66’, 53–87.
34Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline, 47n91; and see, for example, New Manual Exercise as Performed by His Majesty's Dragoons, Foot-Guards, Foot, Artillery, Marines, and by the Militia (London: Printed for J. Millan 1758), ii; or A List of the General and Field-Officers, as They Rank in the Army (London: Printed for J. Millan 1758), title page.
36 The Parliamentary Register; or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Lords, vol. 10 (London: Printed for J. Almon 1778), 137.
37William Stork, An Account of East-Florida (London: Printed for G. Woodfall, R. Dymot, J. Almon, Richardson and Urquhart 1766), 41, 42.
38Gilbert Blane, Observations on the Diseases Incident to Seamen (London: Joseph Cooper 1785), 21, 20. For the relationship between returns and racial theories in a later period, see Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989).
39Lind, An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates, 121.
40Returns of 17 July 1762: National Archives, Kew, CO 117/1, f. 94; and Suffolk Record Office, Ipswich, Albemarle Papers, HA 67:969/E8.
41Returns of 4 October 1762: Suffolk Record Office, Ipswich, HA 67:969/E17.
42Letter from Dr Butt to John Pringle, March 1769: Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, Pringle Manuscripts, vol. II, f. 249.
43Letter from Dr Munro to John Pringle, 2 July 1757: Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, Pringle Manuscripts, vol. 4, ff. 198, 200.
44Letter from Temple to John Pringle, July 1763: Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, Pringle Manuscripts, vol. 7, f. 169.
45Donald B. Cooper and Kenneth F. Kiple, ‘Yellow fever’, in Kenneth F. Kiple (ed.), The Cambridge Historical Dictionary of Disease (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2003), 365–9. On differential immunity, see J. R. McNeill, ‘Epidemics, environment and empire: yellow fever and geopolitics in the American tropics, 1650–1825’, Environment and History, vol. 5, no. 2, 1999, 179–80; McNeill, Mosquito Empires, 40–6; and Trevor Burnard, ‘“The Countrie Continues Sicklie”: white mortality in Jamaica, 1655–1780’, Social History of Medicine, vol. 12, no. 1, 1999, 45–72.
46Lind, An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Europeans in Hot Climates, 134.
47John Hunter, Observations on the Diseases of the Army in Jamaica (London: Printed for G. Nicol 1788), 24 (on the ‘seasoning’ of Negroes) and 29, 138 (advice on their labour); for a summary of Hunter's Observations, see Medical Commentaries for the Year M,DCC,LXXXVIII, vol. 13 (Edinburgh: Printed for T. Elliot and T. Kay, and for C. Elliot 1789), 104–43 (107).
48Orders of Major General Jeffery Amherst, 7 January 1762: National Archives of Canada, Ottawa, Frederick Mackenzie Collection MG23-K34, Order Books, vol. 2, f. 19.
49Thomas Mante, The History of the Late War in North America, and the Islands of the West-Indies (London: Printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell 1772), Book X, 409.
50James Millar, ‘Memoirs of an Invalid’, 1762: Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, U1350/Z9a, f. 47.
51See, for example, returns from the 1750s and 1760s: Asian and African Studies Reading Room, British Library, London, Mss Eur/Orme India XIII, ff. 94–120; and Orders, Rules, and Regulations, to Be Observed respecting the Troops on the Coast of Choromandel (Vepery: Printed at the East India Company's Press 1766), 29.
52Channa Wickremesekera, ‘Best Black Troops in the World’: British Perceptions and the Making of the Sepoy, 1746–1805 (New Delhi: Manohar 2002), 183, and see chs 3–5 for more detail on sepoy recruitment and use; G. J. Bryant, ‘Indigenous mercenaries in the service of European imperialists: the case of the sepoys in the early British Indian army, 1750–1800’, War in History, vol. 7, no. 1, 2000, 2–28.
53Letter from Dr Munro to John Pringle, 2 July 1757: Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, Pringle Manuscripts, vol. 4, f. 200.
54George Durant, 17 February 1759, quoted in Alan J. Guy (ed.), ‘George Durant's journal of the expedition to Martinique and Guadeloupe, October 1758–May 1759’, in Alan J. Guy, R. N. W. Thomas and Gerard J. DeGroot (eds), Military Miscellany 1: Manuscripts from the Seven Years War, the First and Second Sikh Wars and the First World War (Stroud: Sutton 1997), 18–57 (43).
55Letter from Surgeon Huck to John Pringle, 1 January 1755: Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, Pringle Manuscripts, vol. 3, f. 12. See also Erica Charters, ‘Disease, wilderness warfare, and imperial relations: the battle for Quebec, 1759–1760’, War in History, vol. 16, no. 1, 2009, 1–24.