Infective Economies: Empire, Panic and the Business of Disease

Abstract

The Third Plague Pandemic in Asia during the 1890s, and the institutional stresses it produced, exposed inherent vulnerabilities within the global networks that sustained the British Empire. While commercial and informational routes meshed disparate imperial dominions, they also functioned as pathways for disease and conduits of panic, undermining imperial commerce and threatening social order. Focusing in particular on the 1894 outbreak of bubonic plague in Hong Kong, the paper suggests that an analysis of a ‘local’ epidemic episode and its wider reverberations provides a new perspective on the often heated debates during the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about the meaning and scope of empire in relation to new communication networks. The paper shows how expanding global networks were construed alternatively as sustaining and jeopardising imperial power. The bubonic plague in Hong Kong—a hub of ‘free trade’ in East Asia—and the panicked reactions elicited by the disease's diffusion westwards revealed the economic priorities that informed colonial public health concerns as well as the challenges posed to laissez-faire economic policy and ‘free trade’ by the expanding influence of capital in the ‘New Imperialism’. In so doing, the paper suggests that contemporary preoccupations with ‘globalisation’, ‘biosecurity’ and ‘emerging diseases’ have antecedents that lie beyond the Second World War and the interwar period in a late-nineteenth-century imperial biopolitics.

Acknowledgements

The research for this paper was supported through the University of Hong Kong's Seed Funding Programme for Basic Research and presented at the international conference ‘Hong Kong in the Global Setting’ held at HKU on 10 January 2011. I have benefited greatly from conversations with Christopher Munn and John Carroll, and I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

Turn-of-the-century western commentators located the origins of the plague in Yunnan but ascribed its diffusion after 1850 to a variety of factors, including trade and military activities. See Simpson, A Treatise on Plague, 48–75. For a comprehensive account of the plague in China from the late eighteenth century and, in particular, its interregional spread between 1860 and 1894, see Benedict, Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-Century China, 49–71. Benedict argues that ‘the critical factor allowing for the spread of plague was not the identity of the actual agents (merchants, soldiers, bandits, or refugees) who effected its transmission but significant changes in patterns of transport and travel over the course of the mid-nineteenth century’, 50–1.

Determining accurate mortality figures is problematic given the pandemic's equivocal chronology and the lack of firm data. For an estimated death toll, see Echenberg, Plague Ports, 5, 51. The World Health Organization (WHO) acknowledges the difficulty in determining numbers but estimates that nearly 13 million died in India; see WHO, Plague Manual, 13.

Sir William Robinson was away in Japan attending the celebrations to mark the anniversary of the emperor and empress of Japan; the administration was headed in his absence by George O'Brien until 30 April, and thereafter by Major-General Barker until Sir William's return on 15 May. The proclamation was made according to provisions in the 1887 Public Health Ordinance No. 24, which enabled the Sanitary Board to draft new bye-laws in the event that the colony was declared ‘affected by any formidable epidemic, endemic, or contagious disease’. ‘Government Notification No. 175’, Hongkong Government Gazette for 1894, 10 May 1894, 375–6.

‘The Plague in Hongkong’, Hongkong Telegraph, 17 May 1894, 1.

Dispatch from Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon, 17 May 1894, Great Britain, Colonial Office, General Correspondence: Hong Kong, Series 129, CO129/163, 43–73, the National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA).

‘The Plague in Hongkong’, The Times, 28 Aug. 1894, 6 (story filed on 19 July).

On the elasticity of terms such as ‘epidemic’, ‘infection’ and ‘disease’, see Harrison, Disease and the Modern World, 6–13.

Even as the plague served ‘to frame debates about society and social policy’; see Rosenberg, ‘Introduction: Framing Disease’, xxii. This paper is clearly indebted to Rosenberg's concept of ‘framing’ developed as a way of understanding the process by which disease identities are fashioned.

On the tenth International Sanitary Conference held in Venice in 1897 to coordinate responses to the plague (where Britain was criticised for its ineffective response to the epidemic in India), see Howard-Jones, Scientific Background of the International Sanitary Conferences, 78–80.

The description is of the bubonic plague but draws on earlier accounts of the ‘Asiatic cholera’; see, Anon, ‘The Plague in China’, 960.

O'Connor, Raw Material, 10.

On the 1851 conference and the broader history of efforts to stem global infections, see Stern and Markel, ‘International Efforts to Control Infectious Diseases’, 1475; see also Howard-Jones, Scientific Background of the International Sanitary Conferences, 12–16.

‘An imperial danger’ is the subtitle of Henry Press Wright's book Leprosy, published in 1889, which warned of the threat of leprosy infecting Britain from the colonies.

Leung, Leprosy in China, 133.

Ibid., 142. On imperial anxieties that centred on leprosy between 1867 and 1898, see Edmond, Leprosy and Empire, 61–109.

For the ways in which the Hong Kong plague was framed within a genealogy of former plague pandemics, see Anon, ‘The Plague at Hong Kong’, The Lancet 143, no. 3695 (1894), 1581–2.

The bacterium responsible for the bubonic plague was discovered in Hong Kong in 1894 by the Franco-Swiss Pasteurian Alexandre Yersin and the Japanese bacteriologist Shibasaburo Kitasato. On the impact of the 1894 epidemic on laboratory science, see Cunningham, ‘Transforming Plague’. However, on the different theories of the plague's transmission, which persisted after 1894, see Benedict, Bubonic Plague, 140–1, and, on the reception of ‘germ theory’ in Hong Kong, see Sutphen, ‘Not What, but Where’.

Anon, ‘The Plague in China’.

Eitel, Europe in China, 270.

Echenberg, Plague Ports.

Catanach, ‘Plague and the Tensions of Empire’.

Chandavarkar, ‘Plague Panic and Epidemic Politics in India’.

Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 200–39.

As Governor Sir William Robinson noted in a dispatch to the Marquess of Ripon, ‘something akin to panic has been created’ among the Chinese population. 23 May 1894, CO129/263, 188, TNA.

Sinn, Power and Charity, 159–83.

Echenberg, Plague Ports, xi.

Marshall, Principles of Economics, 19. On the influence of Spencer's biological ideas on Marshall, see Hodgson, who argues that acknowledging ‘the potential value of the biological analogy is not the same thing as the full incorporation of an evolutionary theory’. Hodgson, ‘Mecca of Alfred Marshall’. On the importance of evolutionary biology for neoclassical economics, see, generally, Hodgson, ‘Decomposition and Growth’; the emphasis in such literature, however, is on Darwinian and Spencerian evolutionary influences on economic theorising from the 1880s, not on the impact of biomedical models. See Burrow, Evolution and Society, on the influence of biology on Victorian social theory.

Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 86. On the relationship between economic crises, ‘fevers of speculation’ and ‘epidemics’ in the early to mid-nineteenth century, see Besomi, ‘Crises as a Disease of the Body Politick’, 83–95.

Hobson, Imperialism, v–vi.

Ibid., 389. Hobson was influenced by (and, reciprocally, influenced) the evolutionary economics of Thorstein Veblen; see Edgell and Townshend, ‘John Hobson, Thorstein Veblen’; see also Hodgson, ‘Decomposition and Growth’, charting the biological in economics of the 1880s and 1890s.

On metaphors as ‘literal descriptions’ and the many functions of metaphors ‘(illustrative, heuristic, constitutive, affective, persuasive, didactic, argumentative, etc.)’, see La Vergata, ‘Herbert Spencer’, 193.

See O'Connor, Raw Material, 1–2. On the entanglement of disease, people and ‘things’, and attempts to regulate their flows, see Anon, ‘The Conclusion of the Venice Sanitary Convention’, 1107.

Ibid., 3, 15.

Besomi, ‘Crises as a Disease of the Body Politick’, 91–5.

See O'Connor, Raw Material, 34–35.

Simpson, A Treatise on Plague, 418–19. There was much discussion about whether or not merchandise might be responsible for the spread of the disease. In his report ‘The Epidemic of Bubonic Plague in Hongkong, 1894’, Lowson stated: ‘Introduction by merchandise from an infected port though possible is very improbable indeed’. However, he then proceeds to assert that the baggage of Chinese ‘emigrants from an infected port … should be most carefully disinfected’, 202–203.

Anon, ‘The Plague in Hong Kong: Clinical and Pathological Characters’, 423–7.

See Bashford, ‘Global Biopolitics’.

Hills, Struggle for Control of Global Communications. As Carey has argued, until the mid-nineteenth century ‘communication’ designated both the flow of information and the movement of physical goods. He suggests that a defining feature of modernity is the break between information and transportation, Carey, Communication as Culture, 16.

Winseck and Pike contend that ‘the globalization of capitalism was actually a stronger influence on the organization and control of global communications than imperialism’. Winseck and Pike, Communication and Empire, xvi.

Bashford, ‘Global Biopolitics’, 82. On the continuities and discontinuities between colonial and postcolonial global health, security and commerce, see King, ‘Security, Disease, Commerce’, and, for a discussion of the recent conflation of financial crisis with pandemic, see Peckham, ‘Economies of Contagion’.

Eitel, Europe in China, v.

Curzon, ‘Notebooks Relating to Curzon's Travels Round the World’. He had been entertained in Hong Kong as a guest of the governor, Sir G. William Des Voeux. See Des Voeux's recollections of Curzon's visit in My Colonial Service, 197.

Thomson, Through China with a Camera, 28.

In 1870, Hong Kong was linked to London and New York. See Wright, Twentieth-Century Impressions of Hongkong, 34.

Baark, Lightning Wires, 55; on the development of submarine telegraphy and international telecommunications, see Headrick, The Invisible Weapon; Hugill, Global Communications since 1844. Although, surprisingly, as Carey has argued, ‘little attention has been paid to the role of telegraphy in generating the ground conditions for the urban imperialism of the mid-nineteenth century and the international imperialism later in the century’. Carey, Communication as Culture, 161. See, however, Lahiri-Choudhury, Telegraphic Imperialism; Winseck and Pike, Communication and Empire.

Legge, ‘The Colony of Hong Kong’, 177. The telephone reached Hong Kong in 1882. See Eitel, Europe in China, 566.

Keswick, ‘Hong Kong and its Trade Connections’, reported in The Times as ‘Hongkong and its Trade’, 15 Jan. 1890, 11.

Sanderson, The British Empire in the Nineteenth Century, 178.

Headrick, The Tools of Empire, 175–6.

Sir John Coode, ‘British Colonies as Fields for the Employment of the Civil Engineer—Past—Present—and Future’, Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers 99 (1890): 1–39, quoted in Home, Of Planting and Planning, 71.

Dispatch from Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon, 20 June 1894, British Parliamentary Papers, 415.

Coode, ‘British Colonies as Fields for Employment’, quoted in Home, Of Planting and Planning, 71.

Mackinder, ‘The Great Trade Routes: Lecture II’, 151–2.

Mackinder, ‘The Great Trade Routes: Lecture V’, 271.

Conant includes specific accounts of financial crises, such as those of 1890 and 1893; see History of Modern Banks of Issue, 662–7, 668–97. An earlier edition included a chapter on ‘Crises and Their Causes’. For a discussion on Conant's crisis theory in relation to the business cycle, see Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 62–68, and on corporate capitalism and imperialism, 78–85; see also,the discussion in Winseck and Pike, Communication and Empire, 9–10, 45–6.

Ireland, The Far Eastern Tropics, 269.

For example, in the dispatch sent by Sir William Robinson to the Colonial Office on 4 June 1894 the number of deaths is noted as 735. However, the dispatch was received on 12 July, weeks after telegraphic exchanges had informed the Colonial Office that the number of deaths stood at 2,298 and subsequently 2,363 (received 3 July and 7 July). See British Parliamentary Papers, 402–3.

On the creation of an imperial press system enabled by submarine cable telegraphy, as well as a discussion of the complex commercial interests and interdependencies created by telegraphy, see Potter, News and the British World.

Trentmann, Free Trade Nation, 172, 6–7.

See Hobson, Imperialism, 305, 324, 328. For a discussion on the interrelationship between Mackinder's view of empire and Hobson's theorising of empire, see Kearns, Geopolitics and Empire, 131–51.

Gallagher and Robinson, ‘Imperialism of Free Trade’, 6.

Tsang, Modern History of Hong Kong, 21, 25, 26; Osterhammel, ‘Britain and China, 1842–1914’.

Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 434.

Bickers and Henriot, New Frontiers, 3.

Colquhoun, China in Transformation, 15.

Tsang, Modern History of Hong Kong, 60; see, also, King, History of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and Eastern Banking.

Des Voeux. ‘Report on the Condition and Prospects of Hongkong’, 303–304. The gaze onto the refulgent city and harbour from the Peak is a trope that recurs in writing on Hong Kong. See, for example, the Rev. James Legge's description from a few years previously (1872): ‘I sometimes fancy Britannia standing on the Peak, and looking down with an emotion of pride on the great Babylon which her sons have built.’ Legge, ‘The Colony of Hong Kong’, 175.

Anon, Fifty Years of Progress.

Des Voeux, My Colonial Service, 305. Addressing the Legislative Council on 30 April 1891, Governor Des Voeux defended his assessment, although he acknowledged the fallout of speculation. Des Voeux, ‘Governor's Address’, 177–86.

In 1863 the silver dollar became the legal tender for Hong Kong and in 1866 the government began issuing a Hong Kong version of the silver dollar. The silver standard remained the basis of Hong Kong's monetary system until 1935, when, during a world silver crisis, the government announced that the Hong Kong dollar would be taken off the silver standard and linked to the pound.

Other factors included the company's speculation in silver. See, He, Russell and Company, 1818–1891, 233–9. See also the assessment of the 1891 crisis in Conant, History of Modern Banks of Issue, 662–7.

Davenport-Hines and Jones, ‘British Business in Asia since 1860’, 13.

Speech to the Legislative Council on 7 Dec. 1891, Hongkong Sessional Papers for 1892, 24 Jan. 1892, 1–6. See ‘The Finances of Hongkong’, The Times, 31 Dec. 1892, 13.

The Sanitary Board had been established in 1883 as a consequence of the Chadwick report of 1882 on the sanitary condition of Hong Kong. The recommendation was made largely on the advice of Dr James A. Lowson, acting superintendent of the Civil Hospital who had been dispatched to Canton to review the situation there. For a chronology of the Hong Kong plague, see Lowson's report, ‘Epidemic of Bubonic Plague in Hongkong’, 203–8.

The minutes of the meeting were printed in the newspaper along with the proclamation. ‘A Meeting of the Sanitary Board’, Hongkong Daily Press, 11 May 1894, 2.

Dispatch from Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon, 3 July 1894, CO129/263, 523–6, TNA.

‘The Plague’, Hongkong Daily Press, 28 Aug. 1894, 2. The paper also discusses the government's sanitary measure and the draft of the Taipingshan Resumption Ordinance, 3.

‘Trade in the Far East’, Financial Times, 23 Sept. 1895, 6.

Choa, Life and Times of Sir Kai Ho Kai, 278.

Severn states that ‘probably more than five-thousand persons died’ in 1894 and notes that in 1894 there was ‘no law to enforce the notification of death’. Severn ‘Outline of the History of the Plague in Hong Kong’, 33. Choa notes that there were 2,552 deaths. Choa, Life and Times of Sir Kai Ho Kai, 278. See, however, the telegraph from Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon, received 29 Aug. 1894, British Parliamentary Papers, 426.

‘The Plague in Hongkong’, The Times, 28 Aug. 1894, 6 (story filed on 19 July).

Norman, Peoples and Politics of the Far East, 17.

Letter from Sir William Robinson to Mr. Chamberlain, 10 July 1895, prefixed to the Blue Book for 1894, British Parliamentary Papers, 429.

Dispatch from Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon, 20 June 1894, British Parliamentary Papers, 411.

Ibid., 415.

Hongkong Telegraph, 10 July 1894, 2.

Halcombe, The Mystic Flowery Land, 209.

Des Voeux, ‘Report on the Condition and Prospects of Hongkong’, 303. On the importance of Chinese labour within the British Empire, see Des Voeux, ‘Chinese Labour in the Transvaal’.

‘The Plague in Hongkong’, The Times, 28 Aug. 1894, 6 (story filed on 19 July).

Meyer, Hong Kong as a Global Metropolis, 79.

In 1901, as a result of the plague epidemic, Simpson was asked to produce a report which led to the passing of a Public Health and Building Ordinance, enacted in 1903.

Simpson, A Treatise on Plague, 195.

Eitel, Europe in China, iv, emphasis in original. Eitel was also the author of a report on panic in the Chinese schools sent as an enclosure in the dispatch from Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon, 23 May 1894, CO129/263, 190–3, TNA.

Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 419, 421.

‘Quarantine Notice’, The Times, 6 June 1894, 10.

‘News in Brief’, The Times, 13 June 1894, 5.

See, the discussion of the notice in The Times in Peckham and Pomfret, ‘Introduction: Medicine, Hygiene, and the Re-Ordering of Empire’, 6.

‘Dr. Cantlie and the Plague’, Hongkong Telegraph, 10 July 1894, 2.

‘Dr. Cantlie on the Plague’, China Mail, 5 July 1894, 3. Cantlie was a founder of the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese and later of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine with Sir Patrick Manson. He argued that there was a clear connection between the physical deterioration of the British town-dwellers and imperial expansion. ‘The wastage of life’ in the slums of British cities, Cantlie contended, was not unrelated to ‘the loss of health and life attaching to the governing and commercial development of our Crown Colonies, of the great Empire in India, and of many countries lying within the tropics’. Accordingly, the human cost of empire, and its degenerative influence, outweighed the commercial benefits it yielded. Cantlie, Physical Efficiency, 19.

For a discussion of cholera as a dangerous, imported commodity, see O'Connor, Raw Material, 34.

Anon, ‘The Plague at Hong Kong’, British Medical Journal 2, no. 1752 (1894): 201.

Letter from Sir William Robinson to Mr. Chamerlain, prefixed to the Blue Book for 1894, 10 July 1895, British Parliamentary Papers, 434.

On fears that disease could be transmitted by ‘infected goods’, see O'Connor, Raw Material, 33–4.

Simpson, A Treatise on Plague, 66. The view that imperial networks and technologies of communication were the principal drivers of plague was frequently articulated by medical practitioners. See, for example, Anon, ‘The Pandemic of Plague’, 850.

Robinson, Bubonic Plague in Hong Kong, 4–5.

Sanderson, British Empire in the Nineteenth Century, 178.

Hao, Commercial Revolution in Nineteenth-Century China.

Eitel, Europe in China, 569–71.

Lynn, ‘British Policy, Trade, and Informal Empire’, 107; see also Lester, Imperial Networks, 160.

Sir Valentine Chirol noted in 1896 how commercial and political interests would have the ‘moral effect of compelling the capital of the Celestial Empire to throw open its gates to foreign trade’ thus freeing the declining empire from excessively regulated commerce and economic stagnation. Chirol, The Far Eastern Question, 155.

Dispatch from Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon, 20 June 1894, British Parliamentary Papers, 412.

See, Sinn, Power and Charity, 178–83.

Letter from Sir William Robinson to Mr. Chamberlain, 10 July 1895, prefixed to the Blue Book for 1894, British Parliamentary Papers, 432.

Dispatch from Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon, 20 June 1894, British Parliamentary Papers, 415.

On Francis and the Sanitary Board, see, Greenwood, ‘John Joseph Francis, Citizen of Hong Kong’, 36–8.

Dispatch from Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon, 20 June 1894, British Parliamentary Papers, 414.

Foster, ‘Bubo Plague in China’, 7.

Echenberg, Plague Ports, 303.

Benedict, ‘Framing Plague in China's Past’, 31.

Simpson, Preliminary Memoranda, 4–5, 9.

By the middle of the century, Hong Kong was acknowledged as a ‘redistributive depot’ for female prostitutes from the mainland who were shipped to the US, Singapore and beyond. Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san, 74; Howell, Geographies of Regulation, 199. On the debates about aliens in Hong Kong, see Braga, Rights of Aliens in Hongkong. On child adoption, domestic service and kidnapping, see Russell, Report on Child Adoption, where the issue of child slavery in Hong Kong is intertwined with anxieties over illegal commerce, speculation and the spread of contagious disease.

Norman, Peoples and Politics of the Far East, 23–7.

Lucas, Historical Geography of the British Colonies, 136.

Iriye, ‘Internationalizing International History’, 51; see Igler who discusses Iriye's comments in the context of Pacific trade and disease exchanges in ‘Diseased Goods’, 696.

Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race, 15.

Ballantyne, ‘Rereading the Archive’, 113.

See, Otis, Membranes.

Otis argues that in the late nineteenth century ‘notions of boundedness and continuity coexisted in time’. Otis, Networking, 7. For a contemporary account of this tension between ‘territories’ and ‘networks’, see King, ‘Security, Disease, Commerce’, 771–9.

Collingbridge, ‘The Milroy Lectures’, 863. On the debates about the economic impact of quarantine restrictions, see Harrison, Public Health in British India, 133–138; Dutta, ‘Plague, Quarantine and Empire’; see also Bynum, ‘Policing Hearts of Darkness’; Howard-Jones, Scientific Background of the International Sanitary Conferences, 78–80.

Gallagher and Robinson, ‘Imperialism of Free Trade’, 5.

On the new ‘New Imperialism’, see the arguments developed by Harvey, The New Imperialism.

See, for example, the contributions in Lakoff and Collier, Biosecurity Interventions, which explore the ways in which ‘securing health’ against new disease threats has drawn on fields such as national security, global humanitarianism and emergency management; see also the essays collected in Ali and Kiel, Networked Disease.