Wald, Erica. 2014. Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780-1868. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137270986 [Book]

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Abstract or Description

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 of 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.

Item Type:	Book
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137270993
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	History
Date:	March 2014
Item ID:	9051
Date Deposited:	18 Oct 2013 13:57
Last Modified:	01 Dec 2020 15:56
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/9051

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