EMPIRES of

PANIC
Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties

Edited by Robert Peckham

Empires of Panic
Empires of Panic

Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties

Edited by Robert Peckham

Hong Kong University Press
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© 2015 Hong Kong University Press

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Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix
List of Contributors xi

Introduction: Panic: Reading the Signs 1

Robert Peckham
1. Empire and the Place of Panic 23
Alan Lester
2. Slow Burn in China: Factories, Fear, and Fire in Canton 35
John M. Carroll
3. Epidemic Opportunities: Panic, Quarantines, and the 1851 57
International Sanitary Conference
João Rangel de Almeida
4. Health Panics, Migration, and Ecological Exchange in the Aftermath 87
of the 1857 Uprising: India, New Zealand, and Australia
James Beattie
5. Disease, Rumor, and Panic in India’s Plague and Influenza Epidemics, 111
1896–1919
David Arnold
6. Panic Encabled: Epidemics and the Telegraphic World 131
Robert Peckham
7. Don’t Panic! The “Excited and Terrified” Public Mind from Yellow 155
Fever to Bioterrorism
Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns
8. Mediating Panic: The Iconography of “New” Infectious Threats, 181
1936–2009
Nicholas B. King
vi Contents

Epilogue: Panic’s Past and Global Futures 203

Alison Bashford
Bibliography 209
Index 229
Illustrations

Cover image: Chart showing temperature and mortality of London for every
week of 11 years, 1840–50. William Farr, Report on the Mortality of Cholera
in England, 1848–49 (London: W. Clowes and Sons for H.M.S.O., 1852).
Courtesy: Wellcome Library, London.

Figure 0.1  “Black Friday” at the Vienna Stock Exchange, May 9, 1873. 11

Figure 2.1  Canton Fire of 1822. 44

Figure 3.1  “Chart Showing the Progress of the Spasmodic Cholera.” 59

Figure 3.2  “The Kind of ‘Assisted Emigrant’ We Can Not Afford to Admit.” 61
Illustration by Fritz Graetz showing the cholera personified as a Turkish
immigrant arriving in New York.

Figure 4.1  Location map of places mentioned in the text. 89

Figure 4.2  “Group of Veterans Who Served in the Indian Mutiny,” hosted at 101
a Government House Auckland fete held by Lord Ranfurly on April 24, 1900.

Figure 6.1  “The Eastern Telegraphic System and Its General Connections, 134
1894.”
Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong for generously sup-
porting a workshop on panic and empire with a grant from the Louis Cha Research
Fund. My thanks to Kam Louie, Daniel Chua, and my colleagues in the Department
of History for their encouragement. I have benefitted greatly from conversations
with friends and colleagues, who have helped me to think in new ways about panic’s
histories. In particular, I thank David Arnold for his comments and suggestions. I
also owe a debt to Alison Bashford, John Carroll, Harald Fischer-Tiné, Alan Lester,
Christopher Munn, Kerry Ward, and Christine Whyte. I am grateful to the two
anonymous readers who provided helpful comments on the draft manuscript. Clara
Ho, Serina Poon, and the production team at Hong Kong University Press were a
model of patience and efficiency throughout. Finally, my thanks to Maria Sin at the
Centre for the Humanities and Medicine for helping to oversee the panic project from
its inception.
Contributors

David Arnold is emeritus professor of Asian and global history in the History
Department at the University of Warwick and the author of numerous books on the
history of modern South Asia, and beyond, including: Colonizing the Body: State
Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (1993), The Problem of
Nature (1996), Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (2000), Gandhi
(2001), The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856
(2006), and Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity
(2014).

Alison Bashford is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the
University of Cambridge, and fellow of Jesus College. Her trio of co-edited books—
Contagion (2001), Isolation (2003), and Medicine at the Border (2006)—brought
together historians and geographers to consider place and disease. Her later work
has analyzed population and environmental history, most recently Global Population:
History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (2014). With David Armitage, she has recently
edited Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (2014).

James Beattie is senior lecturer in history at the University of Waikato. He teaches

and writes on environmental history and the history of science, and art collecting.
He is especially interested in the exchanges of ideas, people, and plants between
East Asia, South Asia, and Australasia facilitated by imperialism. His monograph,
Empire and Environmental Anxiety, 1800–1920: Health, Science, Art and Conservation
in South Asia and Australasia (2011), explores environmental and health connec-
tions between South Asia and Australasia. He is the co-editor of two recent books:
Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire (2014) with Edward Mellilo and Emily
O’Gorman, and Climate, Science and Colonization: Histories from Australia and New
Zealand (2014), with O’Gorman and Matt Henry.

John M. Carroll is professor of history and associate dean for outreach in the Faculty
of Arts at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include modern
Chinese history, Hong Kong history, and colonialism and imperialism in Asia. He
xii Contributors

is the author of Edge of Empires: Chinese Elites and British Colonials in Hong Kong
(2005) and A Concise History of Hong Kong (2007). His current project, Canton Days,
is a social and cultural history of the British community in China before the Opium
War.

Amy L. Fairchild is professor of sociomedical sciences in the Mailman School of

Public Health at Columbia University. She is a historian researching the broad social
forces that produce disease and shape public health policy, and a public health policy
analyst focused on dilemmas in the ethics and politics of contemporary health debates.
Her work’s central intellectual theme has been to explore the functions and limits of
the state, particularly when it seeks to address health issues that touch on groups
marginalized by virtue of disease, class, and race. She is the author of Science at the
Borders (2003) and co-author, with Ronald Bayer and James Colgrove, of Searching
Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America (2007).

David Merritt Johns is a PhD candidate with the Center for the History and Ethics of
Public Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and a fellow
with the Data and Society Research Institute, a think tank focused on the social,
cultural, and ethical issues arising from data-centric technological development. His
research examines the politics of evidence-based decision making and public health
policy development in arenas such as nutrition and preventive medicine. His articles
have appeared in Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, the
American Journal of Public Health, and Global Public Health. He is also a journalist, a
contributor to Slate magazine, and a former national public radio reporter.

Nicholas B. King is associate professor in the Department of the Social Studies

of Medicine, and an associate member in the Department of Epidemiology and
Biostatistics at McGill University. He holds a PhD in the history of science and an MA
in medical anthropology from Harvard University. He is the director of the MEDEC
Lab (Measurement, Ethics, and Decision-making Collaborative) and has published
widely on public health ethics and biosecurity.

Alan Lester is professor of historical geography at the University of Sussex. He is the

author, amongst other work, of Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-
Century South Africa and Britain (2001), and Colonization and the Origins of
Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British
Empire (2014) with Fae Dussart, and co-editor, with David Lambert, of Colonial Lives
Across the British Empire (2006).

Robert Peckham is associate professor in the Department of History and co-director

of the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine at the University of Hong Kong.
His research focuses on histories of infectious disease and medicine, particularly in
Contributors xiii

relation to empire. He is co-editor, with David M. Pomfret, of Imperial Contagions:

Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia (2013), and editor of Disease and
Crime: A History of Social Pathologies and the New Politics of Health (2014). His book
Epidemics in Modern Asia is forthcoming.

João Rangel de Almeida is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science in Berlin, and is currently preparing a monograph entitled Empires
of Health: Diplomats, Doctors and the Standardization of Epidemic Diseases, 1851–
1911. He received his PhD in science and technology studies from the University of
Edinburgh and has a keen interest in linking the history of medicine with current
international public health affairs. His research projects engage with public health,
standardization, the science of the unknown, and international relations.
Introduction
Panic: Reading the Signs

Robert Peckham

A persistent theme in colonial archives is the anxiety induced by Asia’s immensity:

by the scale of its territories and the magnitude and diversity of its populations. For
many colonial agents, Asia’s unruly vastness appeared to defy classificatory logic. The
nineteenth-century records of the Dutch East Indies, for example, reveal the uncer-
tain knowledge of those who governed, and the unease generated by rumors of local
dissent.1 Rather than evincing the operations of a centralized and sagacious colonial
state, the documents disclose pervasive doubt and uncertainty.
Colonial insecurity prompted the creation of ring-fenced spaces, enclaves of certi-
tude to mitigate the “indefinite and pervasive anxiety about being lost in empire.”2 As
Ranajit Guha has observed, “anxiety” rather than “fear” is perhaps more appropriate
to describe this colonial response, since it was not justified by a “definite causality.”3
There was frequently no identifiable reason for colonial disquiet, other than an inde-
terminate foreboding; a sense that something was about to happen.
In the crown colony of Hong Kong and in Britain’s quasi-colonial outposts in China
(see Chapters 2 and 6 of this volume), where small numbers of colonials presided
over much larger Chinese populations, this latent anxiety was often foregrounded
by sporadic anti-Western demonstrations. In his report on the 1891 census, Hong
Kong’s registrar general noted that European residents were beginning to regard
the colony “more as a permanent home, which has led to there being more of what
may be called a ‘family life’ than formerly.” Nonetheless, out of a total population of
221,441, there were only 795 British men and 300 women.4 Although unintelligible to
the majority of Westerners who had no knowledge of Chinese, indigenous “placards”
and the circulating rumors that invariably accompanied them called forth a language
of colonial counterinsurgency. This was certainly the case in 1894, when anti-British

1. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2009).
2. Ranajit Guha, “Not at Home in Empire,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 3 (1997): 482–93 (484).
3. Ibid., 485.
4. The number Europeans and Americans in the colony, including military and naval personnel, was
8,545 according to the 1891 census; “Census Report 1891,” Hongkong Sessional Papers (1891), 373–95
(374).
2 Robert Peckham

notices began appearing in Hong Kong and subsequently in the streets of Canton
(Guangzhou), even as colonial authorities sought to manage an outbreak of bubonic
plague with draconian sanitary interventions, including house-to-house visitations
(for an account of the plague in India, see Chapter 5).
The colony’s governor, Sir William Robinson, condemned the “literati” who were
responsible for producing the “libellous and malicious placards.”5 Rumors circulated
amongst the Chinese “that the Government had resolved, in order to stop the plague,
to select a few children from each School to excise their livers in order to provide the
only remedy which would cure plague patients.” As a consequence, “a panic spread,
like wild fire” among the local population.6 Pressure was exerted by the British on
the Chinese authorities in Canton to put a stop to the “lying rumours regarding the
treatment of the sick in Hongkong,”7 to prevent the “falsifications invented by story
spreading,” and to apprehend the “trouble creating scoundrels.”8 Panic was both
contagious and circular, produced by and producing rumor. The “panic-stricken”
Chinese sparked panic in the colonial authorities who were perennially alert to the
possibilities of sedition and rebellion, while the plague itself promoted wild rumors
and a panicked flight of Chinese and Europeans alike. On May 31, 1894, European
susceptibility to the disease was demonstrated when Captain George Vesey of the
Shropshire Regiment contracted the plague, dying a few days later. “The flight from
the colony to Japan and home was now almost a panic,” noted Dr. James Lowson,
acting superintendent of the Government Civil Hospital, in his diary.9 As Veena Das
has observed in her account of rumor in India, such “panic rumors created a kind of
screen in which aggressors came to identify themselves and even experience them-
selves as victims.”10
While seditious placards were being reported in the Hong Kong press, there was
intelligence from India of trees being mysteriously daubed with mud.11 In a manner
reminiscent of the circulation of chapatis (unleavened Indian bread) by watchmen
through the districts of northern India immediately before the 1857 Uprising, the
daubed-trees were decoded by mistrustful colonials as an ominous sign of pending

5. “Governor’s Despatch to the Secretary of State with Reference to the Plague,” Hongkong Sessional
Papers (1894), 283–92 (285).
6. “Educational Report for 1894,” Hongkong Sessional Papers (1895), 447–63 (450).
7. “Government Notification No. 318,” Hongkong Government Gazette, September 1, 1894, 731.
8. “Government Notification No. 223,” Hongkong Government Gazette, June 9, 1894, 506.
9. G. H. Choa, “The Lowson Diary: A Record of the Early Phase of the Hong Kong Bubonic Plague 1894,”
Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 33 (1993): 129–45 (135).
10. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: California University
Press, 2007), 111.
11. On the placards, see, for example, “The Hongkong Government and Chinese Traitors,” Hongkong
Telegraph, May 24, 1894, 2; on tree daubing, see “Tree Daubing in India,” Hongkong Telegraph, June 30,
1894, 3.
Reading the Signs 3

native insurrection.12 The coincidental enumeration of singular events, namely the

posting of malicious placards and the daubing of trees, could suggest spatial and tem-
poral continuities. Signs read as evidence of imminent revolt in one place at one time
might provide a key for decrypting similarly inscrutable signs in another setting.13
Rumor and panic, Das writes, “actualize certain regions of the past and create a sense
of continuity between events that might otherwise seem unconnected.”14
Colonial responses to such events highlight the uncertain knowledge that struc-
tured colonial protocol, the misrecognition that this gave rise to, and the critical role
of (mis)communication in producing panic. As Alison Bashford aptly remarks in the
epilogue to this book, panic is closely connected “with communication, the touch
of words, so close etymologically, to contagion. Communication and its means—its
media—are always required for panic to become a phenomenon beyond the individ-
ual and beyond the local. This ‘touch’ is how panic spreads, how it is communicated
or ‘made common.’” The precise meaning of these communications, however, was
often in doubt. As an article entitled “What the Chinese Really Think of Europeans”
noted in Fraser’s Magazine in 1871: “Outwardly the Chinese appear to be on friendly
terms with foreigners, but in their secret hearts they thoroughly dislike them.”15 Here
was the ambiguity of communication in a colonial context, where outward forms and
inner intent were invariably assumed to be discrepant, even as society was organized
around the black-and-white racial politics of face value. Agents of the colonial state
tended to assume that operative governance involved getting beneath “the surface of
affairs” in order to anticipate the violent manifestations of native “dislike” in agitation
and open revolt. This was a process that called for surveillance, information gath-
ering, and elaborate intelligence-assessment practices—crucial dimensions of what
Bernard Cohn has called colonialism’s “investigative modalities.”16
The entangled panics in southern China and India in 1894 illustrate a number
of themes explored in this book: first, the ways in which panics across the British
Empire were understood to reprise earlier panic events with history providing a criti-
cal context for reading the present and anticipating the future; second, the extent to
which panics were invariably conceptualized as imperial, transcolonial phenomena,
intimating a spatial and temporal continuum; third, the role of technologies, includ-
ing the telegraph, in the creation of new communication circuits that enabled novel

12. Kim A. Wagner, “‘Treading Upon Fires’: The ‘Mutiny’-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India,”
Past & Present, vol. 218, no. 1 (2013): 159–97.
13. Kim A. Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies, and the Making of the Indian Uprising
(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 61–77.
14. Das, Life and Words, 108.
15. “What the Chinese Really Think of Europeans,” Fraser’s Magazine. New Series. Vol. III. January to June
1871 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1871), 395–406 (395).
16. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986), 4–5.
4 Robert Peckham

forms of panic; fourth, the interrelationship between epidemics and panics, and par-
ticularly a contagionist model of panic, which accentuated its “pathogenicity” and
“infectivity”; and fifth, the complex manner in which indigenous and colonial panics
were coproduced.
Empires of Panic provides comparative and historical perspectives on panic as an
imperial phenomenon, particularly, although not exclusively, in relation to epidemics:
of cholera, plague, influenza, and late twentieth-century emerging infectious diseases.
Although there is now a considerable literature on the effects of panic, surprisingly
little attention has been paid to the nature of panics themselves and to the ways in
which they have been historically produced, defined, and managed in different set-
tings. In a series of case studies ranging from East Asia to the twenty-first-century
United States, contributors explore attempts made by Western government agencies,
policymakers, planners, and other authorities to understand, deal with, and neutral-
ize panics elicited by epidemic episodes and other crises. Empires of Panic examines
how technologies—from telegraphy to medical science and public health—served to
convey information about and constrain “panicked” bodies; it investigates the rela-
tionship between networks of empire and panics; and, finally, it considers disease
threats as producing particular sites of anxiety and forms of collective panic.
In each of the chapters, the focus is on continuities and discontinuities in responses
to panic and its interpretation from the early nineteenth century to the present. As
Alan Lester notes in Chapter 1, “Empire and the Place of Panic,” each of the chap-
ters is concerned with panic’s emplacement: from the topography of pre–Opium War
Canton to the hill stations of India, the mapping of disease epidemics, and the con-
tainment of panic and infection with the imposition of quarantine measures. The
emphasis is predominantly on the British Empire and the English-speaking world
with chapters on South Africa, Canton, Hong Kong, India, New Zealand, and the
United States. While this Anglo-focus is clearly a limitation, the purpose has been to
provide a preliminary overview of imperial panics, paving the way for more in-depth,
comparative, and inclusive studies in the future.

Primitive or Modern?

“The frequency of panic has been over-exaggerated,” the sociologist Enrico Quarantelli
asserted in the middle of the twentieth century: “Compared with other reactions
panic is a relatively uncommon phenomenon.”17 Since then, many scholars have chal-
lenged popular and official representations of panic, arguing that its occurrence is in
fact rare in disaster events. Yet, notwithstanding this growing body of evidence and
doubts about the value of “panic” as an explanatory category, representations of panic

17. Enrico L. Quarantelli, “The Nature and Conditions of Panic,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 60, no.
3 (1954): 267–75 (275).
Reading the Signs 5

continue to pervade the popular media, even as policymakers persist in strategizing

on the assumption that panic is a common, if not typical, response to disaster.18
Today, in part as a result of mass media and digital communication technolo-
gies (including the Internet), governments and state agencies around the world are
increasingly focused not simply on mitigating the “real” threats posed by natural
disasters, pandemics, conflicts, and financial crashes, but equally on handling and
allaying virtual anxieties triggered by the potential for such cataclysmic happenings.
As Lee Clarke and Caron Chess have commented, “planners and policy makers some-
times act as if the human response to threatening conditions is more dangerous than
the threatening conditions themselves.”19
Panic has been defined as a psychological state or an emotionally charged group
response—invariably construed as irrational—to some external menace, whether
natural or manmade, actual or imagined.20 It connotes “a collective flight based on
a hysterical belief.”21 Defined as an emotive response, the history of collective panic
should, perhaps, be studied in relation to the history of emotions, opening up the
question of what emotions are, and how emotion relates to cognition. For example, is
panic a social construction or does collective panic, as a particular kind of emotional
arousal, have a basis in biology? What is the relationship between the experience of
panic and its expression?22
Panic has been understood, at least from the nineteenth century, as the expression
of a “primitive” fear. As the early twentieth-century psychologist William McDougall
asserted in his influential analysis of collective psychology, panic was a vestige of
man’s animalistic past: “The panic is the crudest and simplest example of collective
mental life.”23 A tension has pervaded and continues to pervade definitions of panic.
On the one hand, panic is defined as a throwback to prerational (and premodern)
responses, an identification underscored by the word’s etymological derivation
18. There is an expansive bibliography on the “problem” of panic. For a useful overview, see Lee Clarke
and Caron Chess who cite Quarantelli: “Elites and Panic: More to Fear than Fear Itself,” Social Forces,
vol. 87, no. 2 (2008): 993–1014 (994). See also Ben Sheppard, G. James Rubin, Jamie K. Wardman, and
Simon Wessely, “Viewpoint: Terrorism and Dispelling the Myth of a Panic Prone Public,” Journal of
Public Health Policy, vol. 27, no. 3 (2006): 219–45.
19. Clarke and Chess, “Elites and Panic,” 994.
20. As Clarke and Chess note, definitions of “panic” have been inconsistent; ibid., 996. The Oxford English
Dictionary (OED) defines “panic” as a “sudden feeling of alarm or fear . . . lead[ing] to extravagant or
wildly unthinking behaviour.”
21. Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1962), 131. Original emphasis.
22. See William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001). For an insightful discussion of key issues in the history of emo-
tions, see the “AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions,” American Historical Review, vol.
117, no. 5 (2012): 1487–531.
23. William McDougall, The Group Mind: A Sketch of the Principles of Collective Psychology with Some
Attempt to Apply Them to the Interpretation of National Life and Character (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1920), 24. See Jackie Orr who quotes and discusses McDougall in Panic Diaries: A
Genealogy of Panic Disorder (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 6.
6 Robert Peckham

from the Greek goat-god Pan, associated with the wild, whose presence engendered
“panic” in those he moved among. Panic is associated with herd behavior, affecting
“collective outbursts” including rumors, crazes, and riots, and viewed in terms of a
base animal fight-or-flight instinct or the “intensification of instinctive excitement.”24
As McDougall observed:

The panic of a crowd of human beings seems to be generated by the same simple
instinctive reactions as the panic of animals. The essence of the panic is the col-
lective intensification of the instinctive excitement, with its emotion of fear and
its impulse to flight. The principle of primitive sympathy seems to afford a full and
adequate explanation of such collective intensification of instinctive excitement.25

This articulation of panic as a facet of the primitive clearly overlaps with empire’s
claim to dominion over “primitive” peoples. As a number of contributors note in
this volume, panic has frequently been conflated with the primitive within colonial
and imperial discourses. “Orientals,” for example, were viewed as particularly sus-
ceptible to panic. In the words of the colonial civil servant and historian William
Wilson Hunter: “Panic acts on an Oriental population like drink upon a European
mob.”26 The study of panic within a comparative, historical framework may thus
help to furnish “a phenomenology of the West’s own representations of other
cultures.”27
However, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, panic was also increasingly
associated with the modern collective. Accordingly, panic was deemed a preemi-
nently modern condition: one that was produced by new forms of mechanized trans-
portation and communication, by the pressures of urbanization and the dynamics
of industrial mass culture. In the 1890s, the French social psychologist Gustave Le
Bon identified the crowd’s irrational behavior as a feature of modernity, developing a
theory of the social that was to influence US military thinking and practice through
the Second World War.28 At the same time, the sociologist Gabriel Tarde examined
the crowd’s tendency to panic through “affect contagion,” understood as a form of
imitation or mimicry.29 Panic was equated with modern life and viewed as the expres-
sion of a modern psychopathology. As Anthony Vidler has suggested, the alienating

24. McDougall, The Group Mind, 25.

25. Ibid., 24–25.
26. William Wilson Hunter, A Brief History of the Indian People (London: Trübner & Co., 1884), 217.
27. Christopher B. Steiner, “Travel Engravings and the Construction of the Primitive,” in Prehistories of
the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism, ed. Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 202–25 (203).
28. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1896); J. W. Bendersky,
“‘Panic’: The Impact of Le Bon’s Crowd Psychology on U.S. Military Thought,” Journal of the History of
Behavioral Sciences, vol. 43, no. 3 (2007): 257–83.
29. Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation, trans. Elsie Clews Parsons (New York: Henry Holt, 1903).
Reading the Signs 7

and “paranoiac space of modernism” transmuted into “panic space.”30 It might be

argued that this “saturation” of social space with fear remains a feature of contempo-
rary societies, preoccupied with catastrophe and characterized by “high anxieties.”31
Others have argued that panic reflects a “pervasive set of [modern] anxieties about
the way technologies, social organizations, and communication systems may have
reduced human autonomy and uniqueness.”32 In this context, panic becomes a strat-
egy for conserving “a long-standing model of personhood—a view of the individual
as a rational, motivated agent with a protected interior core of beliefs, desires, and
memories.”33 Panic is understood as a specifically modern response to the erosion
of human agency in a progressively technological and interconnected world. As
Alan Blum has suggested, within postmodern approaches panic has continued to be
treated “as unreservedly equivalent to the mood of our time.”34
The contemporary emphasis on normalizing and personalizing panic, which
coexists with the notion of panic as a collective and exceptional experience, may
be related to this anxiety of modern “personhood.” Hence, people are now prone to
“panic attacks” and have “panic buttons” fitted by their bedsides in the event of a fall
or break-in. Here, panic is construed in terms of “mental operations” with a focus
on “perceptions, emotions, and self-discipline.”35 During the Cold War, strategies to
deal with private panic coincided with the political handling of collective panic in
the face of a potential nuclear crisis. Self-control and the management of mass panic
converged. The 1950s saw the development and mass production of antidepressants
in the United States, with the claim that an individual’s mental health could be regu-
lated. Concurrently, this period witnessed

an elaborate propaganda campaign involving films, literature, town meetings,

and educational programs designed to teach Americans to fear the bomb; to

30. Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2000), 1; The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1992), 225.
31. Brian Massumi, “Preface,” in The Politics of Everyday Fear, ed. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1993), vii–x (viii); Patricia Mellencamp, High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age &
Comedy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).
32. See Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2000), 7; see also Kirsten Drotner, “Dangerous Media? Panic Discourses and
Dilemmas of Modernity,” Paedagogica Historica, vol. 35, no. 3 (1999): 593–619.
33. Melley, Empire of Conspiracy, 14.
34. Alan Blum, “Panic and Fear: On the Phenomenology of Desperation,” Sociological Quarterly, vol.
37, no. 4 (1996): 673–98 (677). As Blum notes, for Baudrillard “panic” is identified with “the par-
ticular character of contemporary life” (674). On postmodernity and panic, see also Arthur Kroker,
Marilouise Kroker, and David Cook, “PANIC USA: Hypermodernism as America’s Postmodernism,”
Social Problems, vol. 37, no. 4 (1990): 443–59.
35. Joseph Masco, “Atomic Health, or How the Bomb Altered American Notions of Death,” in Against
Health: How Health Became the New Morality, ed. Jonathan M. Metzl and Anna Kirkland (New York:
New York University Press, 2010), 133–53 (144).
8 Robert Peckham

define and limit that nuclear fear in ways useful to the Cold War project; and to
move responsibility for domestic nuclear crisis from the state to citizens, enabling
all citizens to have a role in a new collective form of American militarism.36

Simulated nuclear attacks trained citizens how to react to a future crisis, the aim
being to transform the debilitating paralysis and mass panic occasioned by “nuclear
terror” into an energizing “nuclear fear.” As the head of the Federal Civil Defense
Administration asserted in 1953: “Like the A-bomb, panic is fissionable. It can
produce a chain reaction more deeply destructive than any explosive known. If there
is an ultimate weapon, it may well be mass panic—not the A-bomb.”37 With this “fis-
sionable panic” in mind, a process of converting panic-prone citizens into “Panic
Stoppers” was conceived with a checklist of how to “Make Fear Work For You.”38
Consequently, although civil defense policies aimed to cultivate anti-panic instincts
in susceptible US citizens, this panic politics and the language of fear it perpetu-
ated also had its benefits. It functioned as a means of facilitating public cooperation,
justifying interventions, and sanctioning extreme measures in the name of security.

Empires, Networks, and Oppositional Knowledge

The aim of this book is to historicize this process of securitization further by explor-
ing different species of colonial and postcolonial panic, tracking the interrelationship
between panic and changing imperial formations. The continuities and disconti-
nuities of empire provide a major thread throughout the book: from quasi-colonial
Canton (Chapter 2) to US “imperialism” in the twenty-first century (Chapters 7 and
8). Particularly following 9/11, scholars across the political spectrum have noted
the ways in which inherited imperial models have been reconfigured in US foreign
policy. As the cover of the New York Times Magazine pronounced in 2003, immedi-
ately before the US invasion of Iraq on March 19, “American Empire: Get Used to It.”39
Given the varieties of empire that have existed in history, observes David Harvey,
“we can easily conclude there is considerable room for manoeuvre as to how
empire should be construed, administered, and actively constructed. Different and

36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 144–45.
39. See Michael Ignatieff, “The Burden,” New York Times Magazine, January 5, 2003, 22–54. Cited in David
Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3. For works that focus on the
American “empire,” see Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000); Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New
York: Penguin, 2004); Andrew J. Basevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S.
Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire:
Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004);
and Anne-Marie Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Reading the Signs 9

sometimes rival conceptions of empire can even become internalized in the same
space.”40 Harvey’s interest is in defining US imperialism in relation to the logics of
territorial power and global capitalism. Meanwhile, other scholars have drawn atten-
tion to the role of science and technology in the processes of imperial governance.
Sheila Jasanoff, for example, has suggested that contemporary biotechnology may be
complicit in empire-making by different means, including “bottom-up resistance,
top-down ideological imposition, administrative standardization, and consensual
constitutionalism.”41 Empires, for Jasanoff, “can be seen as analogous to large techno-
logical systems, like electric power grids or civil aviation: so complex, heterogeneous,
loosely pinned together, even jerry-built on close inspection that their stability is the
thing that needs explanation.”42
As Nicholas King suggests in Chapter 8, tracing the evolution of panic through the
history of evolving technologies may provide an invaluable perspective on the opera-
tions of a “new” imperialism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Similarly, in Chapter 7, Amy Fairchild and David Merritt Johns delineate an imperial
narrative as they trace shifting responses to epidemic panics in the United States: from
yellow fever to George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” and the incorporation of epidemic
threats into a homeland security agenda via a Cold War politics of disease-invasion.43
Jasanoff is surely right to note that empires are “patchier constructs” than is often
assumed, characterized by “diversity rather than homogeneity” and by an often con-
tradictory impulse to integrate and differentiate.44 A critical theme in Empires of Panic
is how panic makes visible the discrepancies between the template for a regulated
state and the often-improvised policies and scant resources available to meet the
social, political, environmental, and biological challenges on the ground.
Much has been written about the extent to which transnational networks under-
pinned the creation, expansion, and entrenchment of Western empires in the modern
era. Global conduits, enabled by new technologies such as the railway, steam-powered
shipping, and telegraphy, facilitated transnational flows of people, animals, commod-
ities, capital, and information.45 While these novel pathways helped to knit diverse
dominions together, supporting global governance and a system of incipient global

40. Harvey, The New Imperialism, 5.

41. Sheila Jasanoff, “Biotechnology and Empire: The Global Power of Seeds and Science,” Osiris, vol. 21, no.
1 (2006): 273–92 (292).
42. Ibid., 275.
43. On the colonial context of the yellow fever epidemics, see, for example, Mariola Espinosa, Epidemic
Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878–1930 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009). See also Alejandro Colás and Richard Saull, eds., The War on Terrorism and
American ‘Empire’ after the Cold War (Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge, 2006).
44. Jasanoff, “Biotechnology and Empire,” 274.
45. See, for example, Alan Lester, “Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire,”
History Compass, vol. 4, no. 1 (2006): 124–41.
10 Robert Peckham

surveillance, the complexity of these selfsame networks also acted as a destabilizing

influence working to undermine empire.46
The interconnectedness of national markets, and in particular the importance of
the United States to the world economy, had become evident in a series of crises from
the 1850s. Writing in the wake of the 1873 financial panic, which had precipitated a
global economic recession, the economist Walter Bagehot was struck by the fragility
of the global financial system and by the contagious nature of market crises. Panic
had begun with the collapse of the Vienna Stock Exchange in May, and then spread
to North America in September before returning to Europe (Figure 0.1). London, the
imperial capital, for all its size, wealth, and power, was nonetheless patently suscepti-
ble to the vicissitudes of such “panics”:

In exact proportion to the power of this system, is its delicacy—I should hardly
say too much if I said its danger . . . even at the last instant of prosperity, the whole
structure is delicate. The peculiar essence of our financial system is an unprec-
edented trust between man and man; and when that trust is much weakened
by hidden causes, a small accident may greatly hurt it, and a great accident for a
moment may almost destroy it.47

Like the global money markets (Lombard Street), which empire helped to produce,
the imperial system was perceived as being at once “powerful” and “delicate,” prone
to contagious panics: global networks could be “weakened by hidden causes” and
“greatly hurt” by untoward occurrences, including wars, famines, and epidemics. As
the British geographer Halford Mackinder observed in 1899:

The dispersion of economic and commercial activity will tend to give a whole
world character to every considerable problem of the future, and to every consid-
erable economic problem underlying politics.48

In this new interconnected world, Mackinder suggested that local occurrences had
a tendency to escalate into global crises. As he noted tersely: “We are now a closed
circuit—a machine complete and balanced in all its parts. Touch one and you influ-
ence all.”49

46. As Warwick Anderson has noted, “in imagining the ‘global’ as the product of unprecedented flows and
circulations,” there has been a tendency “to ignore its uneven terrain, heterogeneity, and contestation”;
see “Making Global Health History: The Postcolonial Worldliness of Biomedicine,” Social History of
Medicine, vol. 27, no. 2 (2014): 372–84.
47. Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner,
1896 [1873]), 17.
48. Halford Mackinder, “The Great Trade Routes: Lecture II,” Journal of the Institute of Bankers, vol. 21,
no. 3 (1900): 137–55 (151–52). See also Robert Peckham, “Infective Economies: Empire, Panic and
the Business of Disease,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 41, no. 2 (2013): 211–37
(216–17).
49. Halford Mackinder, “The Great Trade Routes: Lecture V,” Journal of the Institute of Bankers, vol. 21, no.
5 (1900): 266–73 (271).
Reading the Signs 11

Figure 0.1
“Black Friday” at the Vienna Stock Exchange, May 9, 1873.

Bagehot had earlier observed how panics spread through the ramifying capillary-
like networks of an increasingly global, intra-institutional system; beginning as
“incipient panic,” which amounted “to a kind of vague conversation,” it intensified as
the network of actors grew, becoming proportionately more “diffused” and attacking
“more virulently than at first.” “A panic,” he asserted in what was to become a charac-
teristic pathological analogy by the end of the century, “is a species of neuralgia, and
according to the rules of science you must not starve it.”50 Here, then, was an irony
not lost on Bagehot: transnational networks, which underpinned imperial power and
wealth, coincidentally produced the conditions for disequilibration through conta-
gious panics.
According to such formulations, the history of panic is closely related to the history
of crisis. As Janet Roitman has recently argued, building on the work of Reinhart
Koselleck and others, “crisis serves as the noun-formation of contemporary historical
narrative; it is a non-locus from which to claim access to both history and knowledge
of history.” According to Roitman, “crisis moments are defined as instances when
normativity is laid bare, such as when the contingent or partial quality of knowledge
claims—principles, suppositions, premises, criteria, and logical or causal relations—
are disputed, critiqued, challenged, or disclosed.”51 Understood as the laying bare of

50. Bagehot, Lombard Street, 53.

51. Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 3–4.
12 Robert Peckham

partial knowledge claims, crisis has clear affinities with the uncertain knowledge and
consequential “epistemic anxiety” revealed by Ann Laura Stoler in her readings of
the colonial archive.52 Indeed, as many of the contributors argue in this book, panic,
like crisis, may function as a device “permitting and enabling certain narrations and
giving rise to certain questions, but not to others.”53 Panic is both a reflection of—and
a response to—uncertain knowledge, while functioning in conjunction with crisis as
“an enabling blind spot for the production of knowledge.”54
As the chapters in this volume make clear, state agencies, policymakers, and
planners, as well as emergency responders, often evoke panic in formulating and
implementing policy. “Panic” has invariably been employed by an elite to categorize
the irrational reactions of those deemed to be in some way subordinate. As Clarke
has argued, a top-down approach persists in the association of panic with an undif-
ferentiated “general public,” or more precisely, with a populace lacking authority.55
Panic, in other words, reflects a fundamental social asymmetry: it is what others do.
In the past, studies of panic have tended to be superior accounts of popular ignorance
and naivety, with a focus on the psychology of “irrational” crowds.56 Although the
social anthropology and history of the 1960s and 1970s—including the work of E.
P. Thompson, George Rudé, and Eric Hobsbawm—encouraged scholars to rethink
“the masses,” today it might be argued, the emphasis is turning back to panic as the
demonstration of a collective and often violent irrationality.57
Panic is rarely attributed to those in power. Yet, as the contributors to this book
show in their accounts of specific historical panics, “public” or popular responses
have always been entangled with “elite” responses. In his discussion of outbreaks of
bubonic plague and influenza in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India,
David Arnold illustrates the extent to which panics are compounded reactions: that
is to say, multiple panics are intertwined, each coproducing the other. The influenza
epidemic did not provoke panic in India, despite the high mortality figures (over
12 million), because agents of the colonial state did not panic in their response.58

52. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.

53. Roitman, Anti-Crisis, 5.
54. Ibid., 13.
55. Lee Clarke, Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006).
56. See, for example, Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984 [1960]);
Le Bon, The Crowd.
57. See, for example, E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 2002
[1963]); works by George Rudé, including, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in
France and England, 1730–1848 (New York: New York University Press, 1981); George Rudé and Eric
Hobsbawm, Captain Swing: A Social History of the Great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830 (New
York: Pantheon, 1968). For a contemporary interpretation of Canetti’s notion of a “universal fear” that
drives the human psyche and its impulse to come together into crowds, see Lesley Brill, “Terrorism,
Crowds and Power, and the Dogs of War,” Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 1 (2003): 87–94.
58. On statistics, postmodernity, and panic, see Kathleen Woodward, “Statistical Panic,” differences: A
Reading the Signs 13

Conversely, in the case of the plague, the institutional panic triggered by agents of the
colonial state resulted in draconian public health interventions that sparked another
species of panic amongst native communities.
Those defined by the authorities as “panicked” bodies invariably interpreted the
implementation of quarantines and other coercive state measures as a cover for more
sinister designs. Thus, on the one hand, the “panic” of an indigenous population
functioned as a “tool” against empire and a way of contesting imperial knowledge.
On the other hand, this very panic fueled an institutional overreaction driven by
elements within the state who responded in a “moral panic,” which, as Stanley Cohen
has noted, may be defined as a situation in which “[a] condition, episode, person
or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and
interests.”59 Panicked interventions by an elite to prevent the spread of popular panic
often produce other (and different) forms of panic.
From this perspective, it may be more useful to think of compounded “panics”
than of “panic” as a singular reaction to a specific event. Arguably, the advent of
modern technologies helped to shift panic from the plane of the oral (the whispered
rumor) to a panic that operated across different levels of communication simulta-
neously with unprecedented speed: panic became visual, legible, and telecommuni-
cated. Conversely, the inability to visualize threats triggered panic, as Kirsten Ostherr
notes in her reading of Panic in the Streets, a 1950 movie about a potential epidemic
of pneumonic plague in New Orleans. There, the authorities panic in the face of the
quandary about “how to conduct a search for contagious individuals whose symp-
toms will be internal and, therefore, invisible until it is too late.”60 Furthermore, as
several contributors to this volume argue, panic has often been prompted, not by
disease threats per se, but by the social, political, and economic forces that these
threats exposed and sometimes unleashed. Grappling with histories of panic may
consequently help to shed light on competing understandings of the world: on often-
obscured but formative tensions, struggles, and conflicts within a given society, as
well as on processes of social control and claims-making in relation to perceived risk
and public safety.

Panic-Crisis as Disease

Historically, panic has long been associated with infectious disease. The panic sparked
by the spread of cholera in India from 1817 is a case in point, and particularly the way
in which native suspicions of the British gave rise to conspiracy theories about the
Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 11, no. 2 (1999): 177–203.
59. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and the Rockers (London:
MacGibbon and Kee, 1972), 9.
60. Kirsten Ostherr, Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 20.
14 Robert Peckham

origins of the epidemic, creating a critical context for the 1857 Uprising (discussed
in Chapter 4). As Arnold has observed, Indians “saw a connection between cholera
and conquest,” and attributed the disease to the British.61 Native suspicions created a
breeding ground for subsequent rumors and panics.62
If the prospect of epidemic disease could instigate panic, panic itself has often
been conceived as a virulent infection. In her epilogue to this collection, Bashford
notes the connection between communication and contagion inscribed in the very
terminology used to designate the communicability of disease. The essential feature
of “rumor,” Das observes,

is that it is conceived to spread. Thus while images of contagion and infection are
used to represent rumor in elite discourse, this is not simply a matter of noncom-
prehension, on the part of elites, of subaltern forms of communication: it also
speaks to the transformation of language, namely, that instead of a medium of
communication, language becomes communicable, infectious, causing things to
happen almost as if they had happened in nature.63

In his history of crisis, Koselleck draws attention to the term’s medical associations,
which overlie its earlier judicial meanings. From the time of the Greek physician
Galen under the Roman Empire, crisis came to refer to an illness’s “observable condi-
tion and to the judgment (judicium) about the course of the illness” when it could be
decided whether the patient would live or die.64 Pathological analogies are similarly
invoked to describe panic. Bagehot, as we have seen, likened panic to a neural afflic-
tion and called it “a species of neuralgia.” Le Bon, in his account of modern crowd
psychology, characteristically observed:

Ideas, sentiments, emotions, and beliefs possess in crowds a contagious power as

intense as that of microbes . . . In the case of men collected in a crowd all emo-
tions are very rapidly contagious, which explains the suddenness of panics. Brain
disorders, like madness, are themselves contagious.65

Emotions spread like infective microorganisms. The analogy of panic with contagion
is progressively literalized so that panic, as a form of contagious connectivity, comes
to be equated not only with social disorder but also with madness. Panic-as-disease
belongs, in this sense, to a class of newly identified psychopathologies (along with
neurasthenia, hysteria, and agoraphobia), which were construed as the degenerative,

61. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Ninteenth-Century India
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 171.
62. Wagner, The Great Fear of 1857, 61.
63. Das, Life and Words, 119.
64. Reinhart Koselleck, trans. Michaela W. Richter, “Crisis,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 67, no. 2
(2006): 357–400 (360).
65. Le Bon, The Crowd, 128.
Reading the Signs 15

“warping” effects of modernity.66 These disorders were associated with the enervating
and disorientating influences of technology, flows of information, and capital.67
This elision between “real” infection and metaphoric infection is a key focus of
Empires of Panic, since many of the contributors explore the tensions between panic
as a “normal” and “extraordinary” condition. As Blum notes, panic is often construed
“as a normal social phenomenon,” even though it is applied to explain “extraordi-
nary departures from routine.”68 Its identification as a form of “hysteria,” or as a
“contagious” or “toxic” phenomenon that spreads in a process akin to communicable
disease, frames panic as a specific kind of pseudobiological aberration or distortion
of the typical.69

The Chapters

The first six chapters of the book explore imperial and colonial panics from the
beginning of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century. Chapters 7 and 8 are
concerned with postcolonial panics and how a prehistory of panics has been recon-
figured in the light of “new” threats and technological innovations. A key theme,
here, is the extent to which contemporary panics, which center on global intercon-
nectedness, overlap with a postcolonial cartography. In different ways, each of the
chapters investigates panic in relation to crisis, anxiety, communication, as well as the
interrelationship between partial knowledge and panic.
Alan Lester opens the book with an overview of different kinds of panic pro-
duced in different colonial settings of the British Empire. In particular, his interest
in “Empire and the Place of Panic” (Chapter 1) is in panics affecting settler societies
and how the panicked reactions of frontier communities to tales of isolated indig-
enous attacks often called forth more organized, violent, and “blanket” responses
from colonial states or militia-type bodies of settlers. The chapter also considers
white “moral panics,” where isolated instances of interracial sex—and especially
rumors of the black rape of white women—spurred hugely disproportionate state
and civil responses. Although these panics are less overtly to do with disease, Lester’s
examples suggest how colonial panics were often both the triggers for and product
of crises. Or, expressed somewhat differently, how one panic produced another in a

66. On the psychopathologies of modern urban space, see Vidler, Warped Space, 24–50.
67. George Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge and
Sophie Watson (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010 [2007]), 103–10.
68. Blum, “Panic and Fear,” 674.
69. Elaine Showalter notes how fears of alien abduction, chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome,
and the resurgence of repressed memories in psychotherapy are instances of “hysterical syndromes.”
She identifies “rumor panics” as a key feature of these contemporary “epidemics” that are spread by
“stories” and “narratives” diffused through popular culture; see Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and
Modern Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
16 Robert Peckham

self-perpetuating and reinforcing coproductive looping effect. The chapter concludes

by considering the interplay between scales of panic—from micro-level instantiations
to the transnational and global—arguing that the study of panic may help to reframe
ongoing debates in imperial and global history about the extent and importance of
transnational interactions in shaping colonial and imperial identities.
Panic, of course, is defined by its opposite: non-panic. In Chapter 2, “Slow Burn
in China: Factories, Fear, and Fire in Canton,” John Carroll argues that considering
instances of near panic, missed panic, or panic manqué, may illuminate the condi-
tions needed to produce panic. Carroll is concerned with Western preoccupations
about fire in pre–Opium War Canton: worries that extended to anxieties—perhaps
even to periodic fear—but failed to ignite into full-blown mass panic of the variety
examined by other contributors in the volume. Fire has a long history of concep-
tual intertwinement with panic, as it does with disease.70 Conflagration, disease, and
panic were certainly conflated in Hong Kong in 1894, when the panic triggered by
bubonic plague “spread like wild fire.” As Fairchild and Johns note in Chapter 7, Dr.
Israel Weinstein, commissioner for the New York City Department of Health, warned
in a radio broadcast of 1947 that smallpox could spread like wildfire through the
population. In the mid-twentieth century analogies of “fire, flood and red fever” were
central to the post–Second World War Truman Doctrine, where US insecurity was
emphasized and the spread of world communism imagined as a metaphoric conver-
gence of infectious disease and raging fire.71 A major theme in Chapter 2 (as well as in
Chapter 5) is the way in which localized crises served to heighten cultural and racial
differences. In the context of quasi-colonial Canton, fires raised questions about the
nature of Chinese state and society, the use of public and private spaces, and the
compatibility of East and West.
Crises are not always unmitigated catastrophes: they may also offer opportunities,
serving as alibis for political ends, and providing a rationale for state and private
interventions. As Priscilla Wald has noted, the “panic” provoked by popular repre-
sentations of disasters may serve expedient public health ends. In the early 1990s,
the molecular biologist Joshua Lederberg welcomed the melodramatic portrayal of
pandemic crises in fiction. “Even at their most sensational,” Wald remarks, “fiction
and film provided a way to educate the public about the threat and the science of
these deadly infections.”72 The “controlled” panic produced by such fictional

70. For example, Gregory of Tours described the spread of plague in Marseille as being “like a wheat field
set on fire, the entire town was suddenly ablaze with pestilence”; see Lester K. Little, “Introduction:
Life and Afterlife of the First Plague Pandemic,” in Plague and the End of Antiquity, ed. Lester K. Little
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3–32 (11).
71. Robert L. Ivie, “Fire, Flood, and Red Fever: Motivating Metaphors of Global Emergency in the Truman
Doctrine Speech,” Presidential Studies Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 3 (1999): 570–91.
72. Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2008), 31.
Reading the Signs 17

repre­sentations could function as a way of forestalling “real” panic, prompting the

viewing public to change their outlook and behavior.
In Chapter 3, “Epidemic Opportunities: Panic, Quarantines, and the 1851
International Sanitary Conference,” João Rangel de Almeida takes up this theme to
explore the political exploitation of infectious disease “shocks.” More specifically,
his focus is on the opportunities furnished by cholera epidemics and the panics
they incited. The chapter argues that European delegates to the 1851 International
Sanitary Conference in Paris used the cholera crisis as a way of negotiating new ways
of conducting diplomacy and settling scientific controversies while putting in place a
modern program of international epidemic governance. Rangel de Almeida suggests,
here, that institutional responses developed to deal with a particular crisis—that
of cholera—legitimated Western “health” interventions in the non-Western world,
creating a broader context for diplomatic relations and foreign interventions that
reverberates in the present.
An issue explored by a number of contributors to the book is the compounded
nature of panic touched upon earlier: in effect, the plurality of panics that are
subsumed within a single “panic.” In Chapter 5, “Health Panics, Migration, and
Ecological Exchange in the Aftermath of the 1857 Uprising: India, New Zealand, and
Australia,” James Beattie considers the ways in which two panics overlapped to an
extent that they became inseparable. While the Uprising of 1857 in India fuelled a
panic about the murderous intentions of the indigenous population, it also triggered
a health panic as the British worried about the pathological effects of the land and its
climate on their constitution. Beattie tracks unexpected and surprisingly overlooked
connections between Australia, New Zealand, and India. The chapter demonstrates
how fears of India’s tropical climate after the events of 1857 precipitated a flurry of
Australasian proposals for the health migration of British troops and officials from
India to the Antipodes. The chapter also shows how such fears led to the introduction
of Australian trees into India for perceived health benefits, as well as the development
of hill stations in Australasia.
Beattie invites us to rethink panic as an environmental predicament. India was
invariably viewed by the British as a country prone to panic. Historical accounts
tended to emphasize how native “mobs” were “seized by panic,” with panic under-
stood as a condition with dangerous contagious properties. According to these quasi-
miasmic and racial theories, panic emerged from an unhealthy Oriental environment.
Panic was construed as an Indian condition attributable to the enervating effects of
tropical climes and to mass urban living. At the same time, colonials revealed their
own panicked responses to the Indian environment after 1857.
The severity of a crisis and the magnitude of the panicked reactions it triggers
are not always commensurate. This is an insight developed by Arnold in Chapter 5,
“Disease, Rumor, and Panic in India’s Plague and Influenza Epidemics, 1896–1919.”
18 Robert Peckham

While the epidemic of bubonic plague resulted in an estimated 8.5 million deaths and
10 million by 1921, the influenza pandemic of 1918–19 caused a further 12 million
deaths in India in the space of only a few months. But, where plague provoked a major
“panic” that affected both the colonial regime and the Indian population, sparking
rumor, riots, repression, and mass migration from urban centers, the greater and
more abrupt mortality of the influenza episode passed without any apparent crisis.
Clearly, the scale of mortality alone does not explain the onset of a deep sense of
crisis in 1896–97 and its relative absence in 1918–19. So why, Arnold enquires, was
the influenza epidemic the “dog that did not bark”? In addressing this question, the
chapter looks at the contrasting epidemiology of the diseases and their cultural con-
struction, the very different governmental and public health responses to them, the
timing of the epidemics in relation to internal political and economic developments,
and the international situation surrounding them.
In Chapter 6, “Panic Encabled: Epidemics and the Telegraphic World,” Robert
Peckham considers how telegraphy shaped responses to and influenced the manage-
ment of epidemics in the 1890s, a period that saw the institutionalization of labora-
tory science, the development of an epidemiologically based public health, as well as
the “unification” of the globe by cable. Although the transformative roles of new tech-
nologies (such as steam-powered ships, railways, and the telegraph) are often cited in
relation to transnational mobility and the proliferating networks that characterized
empire, to date there has been little study made of the telegraph as a tool in the sur-
veillance of infectious disease, and to its role in “empire’s reterritorializing power.”73
Focusing on outbreaks of influenza in the metropole and the bubonic plague in the
crown colony of Hong Kong, Peckham investigates the uses made of the telegraph
as a means of collecting and disseminating information about infectious disease, as
well as the impact of condensed “telegraphic speech” on official discourse. The focus
is on the agency of language; on its role in the shaping of panic events. As Das has
observed in the context of panic-rumors, a characteristic in such situations is “the
perlocutionary force of words, their capacity to do something by saying something,
through which words come to be transformed from being a medium of communica-
tion to becoming bearers of force.”74
Peckham argues, first, that the telegraph functioned as a means of “pinpointing”
epidemics, not only tracking them as definable events in space and time, but also
fixing them in an apparently objective and technological language; second, that by
suggesting connections between disparate data, the telegraph served to amplify anxi-
eties. As Peckham puts it, telegraphic technology tended to exacerbate panics in the
very process of containing them.

73. See Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, Empires and the Reach of the Global, 1870–1945
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), 65.
74. Das, Life and Words, 119.
Reading the Signs 19

Chapters 7 and 8 extend the scope of the book into the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries to explore the afterlife of nineteenth-century epidemic panics in the
contemporary world. Fairchild and Johns undertake a theoretical and empirical
consideration of mass infectious disease panics in the United States. They argue that
contemporary concerns about panic rehearse earlier experiences of panic. Adapting
the notion of the “social drama” developed by the cultural anthropologist Victor
Turner, they propose the “panic drama” as a means of elucidating the “script” that
underlies late nineteenth and twentieth-century panic responses. Through the lenses
of yellow fever, influenza, smallpox, swine flu, and biowarfare (later called bioterror-
ism), they show how panic has been bound “into the very construction of epidemics.”
Their purpose is to trace how the “panic drama” has been modified over more than a
century, with dramatic components reconfigured—as well as examining the shifting
role that institutions and authority have played in this process—while the basic panic
narrative has been maintained.
The persistent but specific adaptations of the panic narrative are also the focus of
Chapter 8, which examines the iconography of infectious threats from the mid-1930s
to the H1N1 pandemic of 2009. Outbreaks of novel infectious diseases, Nicholas King
argues, are highly visceral, despite the fact that many of their constitutive elements are
imperceptible: pathogens are invisible to the naked eye, vectors are vanishingly small
or incomprehensibly diffuse, and many symptoms are invisible to all but trained spe-
cialists. The chapter considers the processes and technologies by which these invisible
elements are rendered visible, emphasizing the ways in which the visual field has
been privileged in the panic narrative. As King reminds us, graphic forms of repre-
sentation such as maps and statistical graphs (including William Farr’s cholera chart
reproduced on the cover of this book) have been vital in shaping public responses to
epidemics. Through analyses of films, photography, and news media, King identifies
a repertoire of images and associations—what he calls an “iconography” of new infec-
tious threats—that has been reworked to represent disease outbreaks over the past 80
years, with consequences for the evolving nature of “panic” itself. King shows how a
discourse of “newness,” shaped in part by the visual language of consumer culture,
connects “novel” pathogenic threats to a “new” global interconnectedness, obscuring
continuities. In so doing, King intimates connections between the ubiquity of fear-
inducing images in the media, the consumption of fear-mitigating products, and the
novelty of emerging diseases.75 The chapter concludes with a reflection on the rela-
tionship between this iconography of disease emergence “and Western, particularly
American, ambivalence towards modernity and the apparent dissolution of imperial
orders in the face of globalization.”
Chapters 7 and 8 indicate the central role of the United States and its politics in
the production of global disease panics; they further point to continuities between a

75. On “the saturation of social space by fear,” see Massumi, “Preface,” ix.
20 Robert Peckham

contemporary, postcolonial (United States-led) world and the ways in which colonial
spaces and histories continue to shape the viral imaginaries of the present. Finally,
in the epilogue, Bashford reflects on these underlying continuities but also considers
the pitfalls of excessively “presentist” approaches to panic, recapitulating the book’s
major themes with a backward glance and a projection into the future of pandemic
panics to come.

Thinking in Time

Empires of Panic explores panic both as a social condition and as the particular
instantiation of a crisis condition; it is concerned with panic as a sustained “slow-
burning,” an immanent structural phenomenon, and as a singular, explosive event;
with chronic “panics” and acute “panics”—and the in-betweenness of panics that are
neither wholly one nor the other. The book seeks to open up critical debate on what
panics are, how they have been understood, and the ways they have been managed
and deployed in a global world produced by empire. But the question remains: how
useful is “panic” in elucidating collective reactions to disasters?76 Today, it is often
claimed that we are living in a “risk society.” Certainly, contemporary life is character-
ized by a sense of perceived uncertainty in which current catastrophes are compared
and contrasted with former catastrophes: the financial crisis of 2008 and the H1N1
swine flu pandemic of 2009, for example, with the 1929 stock market crash and the
1918 flu pandemic, respectively; or the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster with
the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. What are the bases for such analogies? What can past
panics tell us about the contemporary world, about today’s panics?77
As Sheldon Ungar has argued, social anxieties are increasingly being articulated in
relation to nuclear, medical, environmental, and chemical threats.78 Yet, as the con-
tributors to Empires of Panic also suggest, contemporary panics continue to draw on
the assumptions of an imperial order and on inherited sites of anxiety centered on
race, class, and difference, to reveal the often-obscured postcolonial cartographies of
a deeply unequal and racialized world. As several contributors argue in this collec-
tion, racial difference and cultural distance have a capacity to amplify and generalize

76. Dirk Helbing, Illés Farkas, and Tamas Vicsek, “Simulating Dynamical Features of Escape Panic,”
Nature, vol. 407, no. 6803 (September 28, 2000): 487–90.
77. As Clarke has argued, the emphasis in thinking about and planning for disaster tends to focus on prob-
ability and risk, rather than on possibility; see Worst Cases.
78. Ungar focuses on the “scares” precipitated by the nuclear arms race, emerging diseases such as
Ebola and avian flu, and global climate change. He suggests that these novel sites of anxiety call for a
rethinking of “moral panic” research agendas; see Sheldon Ungar, “Global Bird Flu Communication,”
Science Communication, vol. 29, no. 4 (2008): 472–97 (472); “Moral Panic Versus the Risk Society: The
Implications of the Changing Sites of Social Anxiety,” British Journal of Sociology, vol. 52, no. 2 (2001):
271–91. For a critique of Ungar, see Sean P. Hier, “Risk and Panic in Late Modernity: Implications of
the Converging Sites of Social Anxiety,” British Journal of Sociology, vol. 54, no. 1 (2003): 3–20.
Reading the Signs 21

preexisting anxieties to produce different species of panic—a suggestion made by

C. A. Bayly in his account of the evolution of British intelligence gathering in colonial
India, and the misinterpretation of this intelligence by authorities with consequences
for their panicked response to the Uprising of 1857.79 It might be further argued that
today globalized financial and pandemic panics, and the panics induced by global
networks of terrorism, continue to feed on fears that reverberate from earlier (broadly
speaking colonial) times about the dangers and capriciousness of other races and
cultures. Panic, in other words, is always produced from a repertoire of former fears:
about oceans that might cause tsunamis, diseases that might one day become pan-
demics, and wars that could escalate into holocausts.
Panicked conditions may serve as a justification for ratifying sweeping political
reforms and acceding to radical state interventions. A case in point being the Model
State Emergency Health Powers Act (MSEHPA) that followed the Al Qaeda attacks
on Washington and New York in September 11, 2001. Understanding how panics
have been produced and understood in history, as well as the uses to which they
have been put, may help to foster a more critical engagement with the present.80 As
recent events have also shown, panic and anxiety can serve to highlight the need for
longer-term social action and act as catalysts for new modes of enquiry into emerg-
ing diseases or banking practices. In this sense, panic may have its uses beyond the
controlling calculations of the state.

79. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–
1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
80. Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New
York: Free Press, 1986).
1
Empire and the Place of Panic

Alan Lester

Many of the chapters in this book demonstrate how well-developed imperial systems
of communication not only enabled the dissemination of information and power
but also facilitated the diffusion of disease and panic during the latter half of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Implicitly or explicitly, they contribute to
a recent “spatial turn” in colonial studies, in which the geographies of empire are
taken as seriously as its histories, and through which the essence of empire—encoun-
ter and engagement between previously disconnected polities through new forms
of transglobal connectivity—is foregrounded.1 In this exploratory chapter, I use two
brief examples to suggest that panic was also an intrinsic accompaniment to the very
establishment of imperialism, particularly on settler frontiers. Panic, or rather the
politics and, perhaps, the semblance of panic, were fundamental to the establishment
and maintenance of those networks that sustained colonial power relations across an
unevenly integrated imperial terrain.
Panic may be the result of the fear of lives at risk. However, the question of which
lives, what or whom they are at risk from, and how that risk may be manifested
remains problematic. As David Arnold suggests in Chapter 5 of this volume, the
socially constructed nature of panic is demonstrated by the asymmetry between
actual mortality figures and the fear elicited by the threat.2 Although, in colonial
contexts, as Robert Peckham has noted, unreasonable beliefs and their “contagion”
were often ascribed by colonial observers to irrational non-Europeans, the emphasis
in my two examples—drawn from the eastern Cape Colony in the 1830s and 1840s
and Natal in the 1860s and 1870s—is on the panics reproduced by British colonizers
themselves; panics that both crystallized the insecurities occasioned by the force-
ful domination of radicalized others, and strategically enabled such domination. Of

1. Antoinette Burton, Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British Imperialism (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 14–15.
2. See also Philip Alcabes who notes: “More than 100,000 Americans die every year from unintentional
injuries, including about 40,000 fatalities associated with motor-vehicle crashes.” Conversely, there are
“seven- or eightfold fewer deaths from AIDS in the United States.” And yet the moral panic prompted
by AIDS far outweighed the force of campaigns for road safety; Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have
Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to Avian Flu (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 2–3.
24 Alan Lester

course, in reality, settler and “native” panics were by no means disconnected. As both
Luise White and Ranajit Guha have shown, in different ways, indigenous and colonial
panics were coproduced by the very encounters, engagements, and reformulations of
subjectivity that constituted colonialism, and as we will see in the case of Natal, the
prospective revision of African practices of polygamy was entangled with a white
settler panic over rape.3
The two panics that I introduce to make these points are seemingly geographically
self-contained and isolated instances. But, having introduced them, I then want to
suggest that they need to be seen as instances both calling upon, and calling forth,
new forms of networked communication. Each had causes and effects that extended
beyond their immediate locales. They were manifestations of imperial power pre-
cisely because of these translocal connections.
Secondly, I want to move beyond panics, which can be considered to belong
entirely within the realm of the human, to highlight the ways in which panics are
networked not just across space, but also across human-nonhuman boundaries. As
Daniel Headrick has demonstrated, imperial expansion was thoroughly dependent
upon technologies both connecting and expediting uneven power relations across
space. But colonial relations consisted of nonhuman actants that were more subtle
than steamships, guns, canals, cables, and railroads, and that ranged beyond even
quinine as a penetrative medical technology.4 The concluding section of my chapter
is intended to serve as something of a preface to the ways in which this book, with
its focus on the dissemination of panic, develops a more broad-ranging agenda for
more-than-human networks in imperial history.

Two Panics

Colonization was, as one might expect, fraught with danger. Resistance was expected,
but what form it would take, and where and when it would occur were never certain.
Rumor could easily shade into panic, and it was often panic within settler communi-
ties that did most to invoke intervention by colonial governments. Panic could be the
phenomenon that turned the private “enterprise” of settlers encroaching illicitly onto
indigenous peoples’ lands into the formal extension of colonial government. It called
forth governmental responses to insecurity more effectively than individual advo-
cacy or petitions, and those responses could render uncertain zones of sovereignty

3. Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2000); Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983). See also Homi K. Bhabha, “In a Spirit of Calm Violence,” in
After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 326–43.
4. Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
Empire and the Place of Panic 25

on colonial frontiers more solid, changing the status of indigenous inhabitants from
independent to subject people in the process.5 Panics could also have the effect of
racialization. While both Xhosa speakers in the eastern Cape and Zulu speakers in
Natal had been constructed by humanitarians and settlers as variably “civilizable”
according to humanitarian precepts of human universality through the 1830s and
early 1840s, the instances of panic and its articulation recounted here helped set-
tlers to solidify and communicate antihumanitarian representations of indigenous
irreclaimability. Through representations of the anxiety that black neighbors aroused,
settler communities were able to concretize their own notions of racial difference and
communicate them across a broader colonial terrain.6
My first example of what was a fairly widespread process is the way in which a par-
ticular British settler panic about Xhosa raiding on the eastern frontier of the Cape
Colony in the 1840s prompted the more effective colonization and racialization of
the Xhosa. Some 4,000 British settlers had been induced to emigrate to the eastern
Cape Colony by the promise of land and opportunity during the post–Napoleonic
War depression. Precariously established on a frontier with Xhosa-speaking chief-
doms, many of whom had been displaced but not defeated in previous frontier wars,
this community became the first target when an alliance of Xhosa chiefs attacked the
colony in 1834 seeking the return of lost land. Twenty-four settlers were killed in the
first onslaught. By the end of 1836, a scorched earth campaign by colonial forces had
forced the Xhosa to surrender. The Cape’s governor, Sir Benjamin D’Urban, declared
that, as an act of punishment and a deterrent to future attacks, further Xhosa lands
adjoining those claimed by the settlers would be annexed by the colony, renamed
Queen Adelaide Province, and the Xhosa expelled from them. The settler commu-
nity’s relief, represented most vocally by Robert Godlonton, editor of the settler’s
newspaper, the Grahamstown Journal (GTJ), was, however, short-lived.
Godlonton expressed the widespread outrage felt by the settlers when the influ-
ence of missionaries and humanitarians, riding high on the triumph of the abolition
of the slave trade, persuaded the British government to hand back the appropriated
land. The attack on the settlers was understood by metropolitan liberals as a last,
desperate resort, rather than a manifestation of the Xhosa’s inherent savagery. Instead
of forcing all the frontier Xhosa away from the settlers, the colonial government
5. Settler panics did not always produce such results. As the example of South Carolinian panic about
Cherokee attacks in 1751 shows, wars of conquest did not always eventuate and some panics would
subside without military intervention; see Gregory Evans Dowd, “The Panic of 1751: The Significance
of Rumors on the South Carolina-Cherokee Frontier,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 3
(1996): 527–60.
6. For the concurrent racialization of Khoesan in the eastern Cape, see Robert Ross, The Borders of Race in
Colonial South Africa: The Kat River Settlement, 1829–1856 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), and, for an argument that the humanitarian project of emancipation itself spurred racialization
in the colony as a whole, see R. L. Watson, Slave Emancipation and Racial Attitudes in Nineteenth-
Century South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
26 Alan Lester

would (reluctantly) have to treat them as an independent people to be “managed”

through treaties and diplomacy overseen by a new lieutenant governor, Andries
Stockenström.7
Through the late 1830s and 1840s, the GTJ enunciated and, to a great extent,
orchestrated, a mounting panic among the settlers. It published a litany of accounts
of stock losses, robberies, and murders committed by the Xhosa against unoffend-
ing colonists. The “plunder” of the colonial margins was represented as proof that
humanitarian endeavors to deal with the Xhosa were not only misguided, but fun-
damentally dangerous. Through its steady stream of complaints about the lack of
security under Stockenström’s treaty system and its alarmist reporting of specific inci-
dents of danger to which colonists along the frontier were exposed on an apparently
daily basis (although none were actually killed), the GTJ established that the frontier
was a “space of terror” inflicted by the “irreclaimable” Xhosa.8 Even D’Urban, as
John S. Galbraith notes, “considered the Grahamstown Journal a purveyor of rumors
that poisoned the atmosphere and made peace difficult, if not impossible.” In 1835,
D’Urban observed: “The atmosphere of Graham’s Town is charged with Panic, and it
explodes on every sort of improbable fancy from time to time, and these stories once
set agoing multiply and grow as they run.”9
I will return to this eastern Cape panic below, but first I want to move across a
nearly adjacent colonial frontier to Natal, some 30 years later and, at first glance, a
rather different kind of settler panic.
The panic in Natal began during the late 1860s, when the colony’s newspapers
started to report widespread fear of assaults on white women from African men in
Pietermaritzburg and Durban.10 Despite a lack of evidence and convictions, the scare
continued to mount until 1872, after which it subsided. As Norman Etherington
notes, “testimony about the threat” came predominantly “from white men who
claimed to speak on behalf of white women whom, they alleged, were unable to speak
for themselves without transgressing the accepted bounds of female decency.”11 Aside

7. For more details, see Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South
Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001).
8. Michael Taussig, “Culture of Terror—Space of Death: Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the
Explanation of Torture,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1992), 135–73.
9. Quoted in John S. Galbraith, Reluctant Empire: British Policy on the South African Frontier, 1834–1854
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 42.
10. As Pamela Scully notes, the emphasis in the literature has tended to be on the rape of white women by
African men, rather than the much more prevalent rape of African women by white men: “Rape, Race,
and Colonial Culture: The Sexual Politics of Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony, South
Africa,” American Historical Review, vol. 100, no. 2 (1995): 335–59.
11. Norman Etherington, “Natal’s Black Rape Scare of the 1870s,” Journal of Southern African Studies, vol.
15, no. 1 (1988): 36–53 (37).
Empire and the Place of Panic 27

from one case, which itself was far from clear-cut, the evidence that these men drew
upon was hardly overwhelming:

In May 1872 women of Pietermaritzburg reported dark figures lurking about who
vanished when chased. In February of the following year a storekeeper working
late thought he heard a noise in his daughter’s bedroom and went to investigate.
He found a previously locked window open and later saw what appeared to be a
nude black man sprinting away into the bush. In May 1874 a women was touched
by a man on the street who then ran off—reason enough thought the editor of the
Witness to form a Vigilance Committee to supplement the official police.12

Each of these southern African panics has conventionally been thought of as a

spatially delimited episode—something prompted by the particular circumstances of
each settler community and its relationship with local indigenous people at a given
time. But I would suggest that, as with other instances of panic, the two episodes
might more fruitfully be conceived as inherently trans-imperial. The foundations for
such a conception have been laid in much of the recent literature on empire, informed
by a “spatial turn.”
Recent scholarship on empire has seen multiple boundary crossings. Geographical
units have been traversed as the previously separate domains of British history, impe-
rial history, area studies, and the histories of former colonies have all become inter-
connected. Where to limit certain avenues of imperial historical enquiry has become
as significant as when. The conventional way of escaping the confines of a singular
spatial unit in order to gain broader perspective in the writing of history has been
the comparative method. Whereas this might enable us to identify certain parallels
and differences between places, interest more recently has focused instead on the
mutually transformative connections that helped to constitute places relationally.13
Attention has come to be focused on the “weight of positive, concrete and precisely
historical connections” rather than resemblance or discrepancy.14
Comparative histories tend to adopt a view of space and place that has recently
been critiqued by Doreen Massey. In this view, places are seen as discrete, bounded
entities, like billiard balls placed upon a table, which represents space as a whole.15
The “table” is an analytically discrete entity from the specific places—the “billiard
balls”—ranged upon it. Within Massey’s more relative conception of space and place,
the distinction between “billiard ball” and “table,” between place and space, becomes
blurred. Specific places are seen as emergent from the very same mobilities and rela-
tions that constitute space in general.
12. Ibid., 37–38.
13. Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002).
14. Gillian Whitlock, “A ‘White-Souled State’: Across the ‘South’ With Lady Barker,” in Text, Theory, Space:
Land, Literature and History in South Africa and Australia, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner, and
Sarah Nuttall (London: Routledge, 1996), 65–80 (68, citing Robert Wilson).
15. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 1995).
28 Alan Lester

Networked approaches have been one way in which this more relative conception
of space and place has infiltrated imperial history. The network, as both a descriptive
and an analytical device, allowed nodal points to exist at a variety of scales, from indi-
vidual people through institutional spaces such as the mission station or the labora-
tory, to agglomerations such as towns, cities, regions, and countries. The phenomena
that the historian is interested in can be seen as constituted by flows of capital, move-
ments of people, objects or organisms, and the communication of ideas in textual or
visual form, between these nodes, via the physical and imaginative routes connecting
them.16 The panics in the eastern Cape and Natal can both be seen in a different
light if their networks of causation and transmission, spilling beyond their immediate
colonial confines, are traced.
The imperial circuits of communication, constituted at this stage by the regular
passage of ships between the Cape and Britain, enabled bundles of the GTJ to be
taken to London, where metropolitan newspapers such as The Times extracted
them (often without acknowledgement) to constitute their own reports on colonial
affairs. Editors, like Godlonton and the settlers who corresponded and spoke with
him to convey the panic sparked by their apparent abandonment to the whim of the
“savages” upon their border, were well aware of the uses to which their words were
put in shaping metropolitan opinion. They utilized this channel of communication to
try to sway domestic opinion and policy in their favor.17
In conveying representations of settler panic and Xhosa savagery, however, the
British emigrants had to tread a difficult path. On the one hand, they needed to
convince metropolitan observers of the need for greater military protection and the
eventual conquest of the Xhosa. On the other hand, if they were to attract further
emigration and British investment to the region, and thus secure their own mate-
rial wellbeing, they needed to provide assurances of its safety. In 1841, The Frontier
Times attacked “those who would lead by exaggeration or ill-grounded statements all
distant persons to suppose that we are constantly in a state of danger and terror” on
the grounds that such representations would deter “capital and emigrants” from the
Cape’s shores.18 The problem that settlers were creating for themselves through their
communicated panic was made clear in comparative guidebooks for intending British
emigrants. Whereas the Australian Aborigines were represented in the Colonial
Magazine and East India Review as “fortunately for us . . . the greatest cowards on the
face of the earth,” the Xhosa would have to be met by a “stern exterminating system,”

16. Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race.

17. See Alan Lester, “British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire,” History Workshop Journal, vol.
54, no. 1 (2002): 24–48.
18. Quoted in John Mitford Bowker, Speeches, Letters and Selections from Important Papers (Grahamstown:
Godlonton and Richards, 1864), 104. See also Tony E. Kirk, “Self-government and Self-defence in
South Africa: The Inter-relations between British and Cape Politics, 1846–1854” (unpublished PhD
thesis, Oxford University, 1972), 61, 63–64.
Empire and the Place of Panic 29

which few potential emigrants were likely to relish encountering upon their arrival
in a new home.19
In the 1840s, however, most settlers’ priority was to reverse the treaty system,
reclaim Queen Adelaide Province, and call forth a greater British military presence.
In any case, many settlers were well aware that a larger garrison brought material
benefits of its own that compensated for any deferral of immigration.20 In 1838, The
Times published “information” received from the GTJ on the disastrous effect that
Stockenström’s treaties were having on the transfrontier trade, let alone the security
of emigrant Britons, using the Cape to make a broader point about the “supineness of
the Ministry in all that relates to the trading interest of the Country.”21 With London
merchants who traded with frontier farmers joining in the clamor, the new colonial
secretary was persuaded to suspend Stockenström, a strong defender of the treaty
system, from his post, citing his “unpopularity” as the main reason. Although the
new lieutenant governor distrusted the Grahamstown settlers (he described them
as “longing after the lands of the Kaffirs”), Stockenström’s treaties with the Xhosa
were breached in 1840, when colonists were allowed once more to cross the frontier
and retrieve “stolen cattle.” Then, in 1844, the new governor, Sir Peregrine Maitland
arrived with fresh instructions from London. He scrapped the treaties altogether.
Maitland agreed with Godlonton that the settlers were living in a “sea of troubles,”
with “murder and robbery of frequent occurrence within the Colonial Border.”22
Urged on by the settlers, he responded to a minor incident by formulating an ulti-
matum which initiated the 1846–47 frontier war. It was this war that would lead to
the more permanent annexation of Queen Adelaide Province, this time as British
Kaffraria, and the subjection of the Ciskeian Xhosa to British colonial rule.23
In Natal’s case, rather than prompting a realignment of colonial and metropolitan
interests so as to allow for further colonial expansion, the rape panic created oppor-
tunities to consolidate the nascent colonial state. The political effect of periodic moral
panics about the sexual threat of black and Asian men to white women in colonial

19. Quoted in Simon Dagut, “The Migrant Voyage as Initiation School: Sailing from Britain to South
Africa, 1850s–1890s,” paper presented at the international conference on “New African Perspectives:
Africa, Australasia and the Wider World at the End of the Twentieth Century,” University of Western
Australia, Perth, November, 26–29, 1999, 11. Australian frontiers were also actually the sites of panics
which called forth the extension of colonial sovereignty; see Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization
and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines Across the Nineteenth-Century
British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
20. Anthonie E. Du Toit, The Cape Frontier: A Study of Native Policy With Special Reference to the Years
1847–1866 (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1954), 52–53.
21. Times [London] (February 7, 1838), 5.
22. GTJ (January 9, 1847), reprinted in Robert Godlonton, Case of the Colonists (Grahamstown: Richards,
Slater and Co., 1879), 103.
23. For the devastating consequences for the Xhosa, see Lester, Imperial Networks and Jeffrey B. Peires, The
Dead Will Arise: Nongqawuse and the Great Xhosa Cattle Killing Movement of 1856–7 (Johannesburg:
Ravan Press, 1989).
30 Alan Lester

societies has been written about extensively.24 As Jock McCulloch has shown in the
case of Rhodesia, panics over the rape of white women by African men invoked state
responses that consolidated the specific boundaries of race, class, and gender uphold-
ing settler men’s privilege. They served to reiterate the legitimate claims of men both
to property in the bodies of women and to the rights of citizenship. During the first
decades of the twentieth century, such “panics were both an expression of the prob-
lems of constructing a white identity and a means by which it was achieved.”25
In Etherington’s analysis, the Natal panic was induced by both an emerging threat
to the tenuous grip on power that the relatively small white population of the colony
had established and a more immediate trigger. The trigger may have been a tax on
polygamous African marriages. Discussion of the tax, in the newspapers and in the
Legislative Assembly, publicized the notion that African men, their “outsized lusts”
thwarted through the inability to marry, might now be expected to find an outlet
within the white community. “At the same time that it enacted the new marriage
regulations,” the Assembly “passed a law imposing dire penalties on black men found
guilty of raping white females.” As Etherington writes, “because this act preceded
the period of greatest anxiety about sexual assault it is possible to speculate that the
discussion in the press and in the council was the cause rather than the consequence
of panic among the colonists.”26
But, as Etherington also notes, the context for this trigger was a set of more pro-
found developments that reoriented Natal in relation to other sites across and beyond
the region. The rape scare occurred at a time when the diamond mines of Kimberley
were attracting not only significant capital investment, raised by men like Cecil
Rhodes through contacts forged in places like the Athenaeum Club in London, but
also vast numbers of migrant laborers, many of them sent by their chiefs to earn the
wages to buy guns. As extensive migrant labor networks started to integrate the pas-
toral economy of Natal more fully with the new industrial economy of the Kimberley
region, so local settler employers found that their dependence on local African men’s
labor became more acute. Not only that, but large numbers of “Kholwa,” Christian

24. The phrase “moral panic” is used by Stanley Cohen to describe situations in which a section of the
community is gripped by fear out of proportion to any existing threat. Cohen’s analysis ascribes such
panics to fears about property and social control; see Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the
Mods and Rockers (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972). In the settler colonial context, where race
figures more obviously, see, for example, David M. Anderson, “Sexual Threat and Settler Society: ‘Black
Perils’ in Kenya, c.  1907–30,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 38, no. 1 (2010):
47–74; Henriëtte J. Lubbe, “The Myth of ‘Black Peril’: Die Burger and the 1929 Election,” South African
Historical Journal, vol. 37, no. 1 (1997): 107–32, and, in fiction, Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown (The
Raj Quartet) (London: Arrow, 1996).
25. Jock McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935 (Indiana:
Indiana University Press, 2000), back cover.
26. Etherington, “Natal’s Black Rape Scare,” 39. The rape law was disallowed in London the next year
because it meted out penalties according to the race of the criminal, not the nature of the crime.
Empire and the Place of Panic 31

converts who sought assimilation within the new colonial society, were becoming
efficient competitors in commercial agriculture. It was these realigning, spatially
extensive networks of industrial capital and migrant labor, repositioning Natal’s
political economy and bringing new threats to the privileges and control enjoyed by
settlers in the colony, that underpinned the rape panic of the late 1860s and early
1870s.
The effect of the panic was greater settler support for the consolidation of a colonial
state, which many settlers had preferred to hold at arm’s length beforehand. The panic
helped to render colonial government into a vehicle capable of reassuring the settler
community of its security. Theophilus Shepstone, secretary for native affairs and, in
Natal’s “Shepstonian system,” also its supreme chief, argued that the only remedy was
to create a police force whose duty “it should be to patrol among the estates and on
the main roads, so as to check and regulate the movements of . . . [African] men, to
prevent their wandering about the country without the knowledge of their employ-
ers, to curtail the temptation as well as the opportunity to commit the outrages of
which so much has of late been heard, and to contribute generally to the suppression
of all kinds of crime outside the boundaries of boroughs and townships.”27 In many
respects, Natal’s rape panic paralleled the rape scares and ensuing lynchings of the
southern United States during the Reconstruction period. These, too, reflected the
particular circumstances of an apparently weakened white grip on a subordinated
African American population.
Natal’s panic subsided after the excessively brutal, public punishment and humili-
ation inflicted on the chief Langalibalele who had refused to hand over guns earned
by migrant laborers on the mines. Etherington argues that, “although it is virtu-
ally impossible to prove that the Langalibalele campaign had the cathartic effect of
a lynching party in Dixie, the rape scare did abate rapidly after 1874.”28 The effect
of a panic over African men’s assaults on white women was the same: the calling
forth of a more interventionist, surveillance-prone colonial state; one with a license
to intervene where required in order to shore up white privilege even if that meant
limiting the freedoms that white settlers had grown accustomed to exercising. But
that effect—and, one might suggest, the causes of the panic too—was the product of
realigning trans-imperial and transregional networks of capital and labor mobility,
as much as they were the outcome of purely local forces. Panic, as the contributions
to this volume demonstrate, had scalar causes and repercussions well beyond its sites
of origin.

27. Ibid., 46.

28. Ibid., 51.
32 Alan Lester

Panics and the Nonhuman

If spatial boundaries have been crossed promiscuously in recent writing on empire,

so too have disciplinary boundaries. Social, economic, and cultural historians have
engaged more readily with historians of science and technology, and historians,
anthropologists, geographers, and environmental scientists have all started to con-
ceive of empires in similar ways: as assemblages comprised of networks including
both human and nonhuman actors. Much of this disciplinary boundary crossing
hints at the desire for a more syncretic approach to the past and present, to society
and nature, to the individual and the collective. With the struggle of some imperial
historians to draw hermetic boundaries around their subdiscipline receding, incipi-
ent trajectories in imperial history writing will continue to be most productive when
positioned within such broader interdisciplinary endeavors.29
The impetus for a syncretic approach to human and nonhuman (or “more than
human”) agency can be ascribed in no small measure to the work of Bruno Latour.
His work brings nonhuman actors into history in two ways; first, by showing how they
facilitate human agency, and second, by asserting their own active agency. Although
the things that imperial historians may want to track are usually phenomena seen as
intrinsically and exclusively human, such as political influence, debates over identity,
and contests over trade—things that people propel through networks—as Latour
notes, “we must be careful not to confuse what circulates once everything is in place
with the setups involving the heterogeneous set of elements that allow circulation
to occur.” Latour uses the example of the “natural gas that lets the Russians keep
their empire going.” In order for gas to circulate between the Caucasus and France,
nonhuman elements—such as steel tubing, pumping stations, and pylons anchored
in the permafrost—must continually be brought into alignment with human ele-
ments, such as international treaties, Russian mafiosi, willing Ukrainian politicians,
and “frostbitten technicians,” not to mention the millions of French consumers who
are generally oblivious of these elements unless a crisis of “network interruption”
occurs.30 Networks of imperial influence and colonial power relations were just as

29. There is now a strong tradition of specifically imperial environmental history, but I am thinking here
more of the merging of sociopolitical and environmental histories of empire in line with attempts
to rethink the boundaries between humanity and “nature” at large. Imperial historians might come
more instinctively to see human and nonhuman mobilities combining to reshape colonial place, space,
and experience. Some examples include Richard Drayton, “Maritime Networks and the Making of
Knowledge,” in Empire, the Sea and Global History: Britain’s Maritime World, c. 1760–c. 1840, ed. David
Cannadine (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 72–82; and Kirsten Greer, “Red Coats and Wild
Birds: Military Culture and Ornithology across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire” (unpublished
PhD thesis, Queen’s University, 2011).
30. Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013),
33. The Ukrainian crisis in 2014 and tensions between Russia and Europe over energy supply served to
focus attention on these networks.
Empire and the Place of Panic 33

reliant on nonhuman elements such as ships, ocean currents, trade winds, botanical
specimens, animals, printing presses, paper, and guns repeatedly being brought into
alignment to enable their circulations.
As things flow or circulate through the points of connection and transmission
enabled by these alignments of more than human elements, so certain minor thresh-
olds or gaps have continually to be overcome. This happens in different ways in differ-
ent kinds of network. Latour’s examples include the ways in which lawyers learn how
to achieve a trajectory from incident to court case through legal means, and scientists
learn how to effect proof of experimental results, taking findings from the labora-
tory to the published paper. Similarly, colonial officials learned how to persuade at a
distance through the art of dispatch writing, and close at hand through the personal
embodiment of virtue.31 Capacity within networks, or what we might define as power,
can be gained by individuals as they acquire the ability to cross these gaps between
the segments and stages of connectivity. But it is not only human agents who are able
to operate across these thresholds.
Previous work by the editor of this volume and many of its contributors has
shown that particularly significant “network interruptions” within empire occurred
when imperial channels of mobility carried disease alongside the personnel, com-
modities, ideas, and capital that imperial communications systems were constructed
to carry.32 Following Latour, we can see that bacteria, as “agents of identifiable dis-
eases . . . equipped with a capacity and volition to infect,” have an agency of their own
within such vast interconnecting “chains.”33 The agency of bacteria could interact with
the panicked agency of the people who maintained trans-imperial circuits of com-
munication. Bubonic plague—which spread from mainland China to Hong Kong in
1894, to Bombay in 1896, via the railway to Calcutta (killing seven million people
in India in the period 1896–1914), to Cape Town with the movement of personnel
during the South African War in 1900, Nairobi in 1902, and West Africa in 1908—
for instance, led to “extreme and drastic reactions” across and beyond the British
empire.34 Improvement boards and trusts were rapidly established in nearly every

31. See, for example, Alan Lester, “Personifying Colonial Governance: George Arthur and the Transition
from Humanitarian to Development Discourse,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
vol. 102, no. 6 (2012): 1468–88.
32. Robert Peckham, “Infective Economies: Empire, Panic and the Business of Disease,” Journal of Imperial
and Commonwealth History, vol. 41, no. 2 (2013): 211–37; Robert Peckham and David M. Pomfret,
eds., Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2013).
33. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1993), quoted in Robert Peckham and David M. Pomfret, “Introduction: Medicine,
Hygiene, and the Re-ordering of Empire,” in Peckham and Pomfret, Imperial Contagions, 1–14 (3–4).
34. Home, Of Planning and Planting, 87; Peckham, “Infective Economies.” On the global spread of plague
during the “Third Plague Pandemic,” see Myron Echenberg, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of
Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901 (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
34 Alan Lester

major city, and they were responsible for unprecedented demolition, slum clearance,
and racial segregation.
Within colonial discourse, of course, the nonhuman cause of the disease was
rapidly both humanized and racialized. The blame was placed squarely on “the
insanitary and immoral lives of the Asiatic races” rather than the imperial networks
of transmission that both sustained empire and enabled bacterial mobility. Aside
from new measures to displace local and immigrant South Asian and Chinese people
from areas adjacent to European quarters in most of the empire’s Asian and southern
African port cities, “indigenous customary practices were subjected to inspection,
regulation and disciplinary action by an army of sanitary inspectors.”35
It is this volume’s innovation to link in particular the political, cultural, and social
manifestations of panic to the mobility of diseases, fires, and other physical threats.
As its contributors do so, they are reconceiving imperial history as properly the study
of the nonhuman as well as the human, and of the trans-imperial as well as the local.
Panic, as the diffusion and amplification of small-scale events through networks and
across space, serves as a specific instance of nonhuman and human mobilities com-
bining and being juxtaposed so as to reshape identities, ideas, and practices across the
intricate webs of empire. From scares and rumors of slave revolts in the eighteenth
century to settler canards about the threat posed by indigenous people in the 1830s,
to moral panics about white women’s endangered virtue at the hands of a “black peril,”
to fears of contagious diseases in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
panic was woven into the fabric of everyday life for colonizers on multiple frontiers
of the British Empire. It was disseminated by personal encounters taking the form of
talk and gossip, and by newspapers. It was communicated between colonies on sail
and steam ships, and then by telegraph and air travel. It was frequently the catalyst for
turning colonizing intent into action; for rendering autonomous indigenous peoples
into subjects of empire, for tightening the governmental grip on such peoples, and
for effecting greater segregation between them and their more privileged colonizers.

35. Home, Of Planning and Planting, 87.

2
Slow Burn in China: Factories, Fear, and Fire
in Canton

John M. Carroll

From the mid-1700s until the Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing) in 1842, Westerners in
China were restricted to a tiny section of the city of Canton (Guangzhou). Here, trade
between China and the West was conducted according to the Canton System through
a group of Hongs, Chinese merchant houses specially licensed by the Qing govern-
ment and organized into the Cohong (Gonghang). According to the Qing govern-
ment’s “Eight Regulations,” foreigners were allowed to participate in trade only from
October to March, and were confined to their “factories” without their women and
families.
Although foreigners in Canton rarely had to worry about personal safety, fire
was a particular scourge, claiming lives but above all threatening trade. Foreigners
frequently worried about fire, particularly after the great conflagration of 1822 and
during the dry autumn and winter months when fires broke out more easily. In
November 1836, the Canton Press reported a fire in which many people had been
killed, either in the fire or in the river while trying to escape. To make matters worse,
“a great many” young women from brothels destroyed by the fire had been kidnapped
in the chaos.1 Even in cases where a fire did not take many human lives, it damaged
property. After a fire in December 1807, the missionary Robert Morrison reported
that some 300 houses were “reduced to ashes” and three fires in as many nights had
“consumed in all about 1000 houses.”2 In a fire in January 1832 that originated in a
timber yard, some 4,000 bales of cotton belonging to a “highly deserving and thriving

1. “Fires in Canton,” Canton Press, vol. 2, no. 12 (November 26, 1836): n.p. Kidnapping young women
from burning brothels appears to have been a common occurrence. In November 1832, a fire struck
Shameen (Shamian), an area one mile west of the factories and known for “its innumerable gambling
houses and others of still worse repute.” According to the Canton Register: “Large bands of robbers
resort, on these occasions, to the scene of destruction and are said to find their most valuable booty in
the seizure of the unhappy inmates of these dens of vice, whom they remove for subsequent sale. The
number of these banditti is sometimes so great as to overawe the police”; Canton Register, vol. 5, no.
17 (November 3, 1832): 122. After two fires occurred within three days in Shameen in February 1830,
some forty women were kidnapped from the ruins; Canton Register, vol. 3, no. 3 (February 3, 1832): 9.
2. Robert Morrison, Canton, December 18, 1807, CWM South China Journals, 1807–42, Folder 4, School
of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
36 John M. Carroll

young” Hong merchant were destroyed.3 Following a fire in November 1835, the
Canton Register reported how only one person had been killed (a man crushed by a
falling wall), but one pawnbroker’s shop had been burnt, and one of the grandsons
of Howqua, the richest and most powerful of the Hong merchants, had lost several
shops.4 In November 1835, the Press described the “prodigious” destruction of prop-
erty in a fire which had not led to any loss of life: “by this devastation, property to
an incalculable value, in goods, houses, and chattels, has been consumed and swept
away in the dreadful conflagration, leaving innumerable individuals bereft of a home,
and reduced to most unhappy circumstances.”5 In January 1836, a less destructive fire
nevertheless destroyed Carpenters’ Square, some 80 houses, and property estimated
at 60,000 to 70,000 dollars.6 A fire in September 1836 ruined approximately 30 houses
and “a good deal of property.”7
When fires broke out in Canton they triggered localized panics, although hardly
on the scale of panics induced, say, by epidemics or natural disasters. Nonetheless,
the “slow burning” anxiety about fire in Canton provides a useful perspective on
residual Western concerns and anxieties that threatened to tip over into a more gen-
eralized, collective mass response. “Panics and anxieties, as conceptual frameworks,”
writes Kim Wagner, “are not incompatible but stand in the same relation as event
and structure.”8 And as David Arnold suggests in his discussion of the plague and
influenza epidemics in colonial India in Chapter 5 of this volume, there is merit in
exploring why certain events escalate into mass panics, in contrast to others that may
be equally catastrophic but fail to ignite to the same degree. As Arnold puts it, the
question is why some dogs bark, while others do not. In short, the study of non-
panics, near-panics, or panics-manqué may help us to understand what panic is and
under what conditions it is produced.
An examination of Western concerns about fire in Canton also points to the perva-
siveness of colonial anxieties in empire that lurked behind official discourse: anxieties
about being isolated, lost, or overwhelmed in a foreign place and diminished by the
scale and unfamiliarity of the land and its crowds. As Ranajit Guha has argued, there
has been a tendency in the historiography of empire to assimilate these unfocused
and indeterminate anxieties into fears that are attributable to discernible causes. “The
result has been,” Guha writes, “to promote an image of the empire as a sort of machine
operated by a crew who know only how to decide but not to doubt, who know only

3. Canton Register, vol. 5, no. 2 (January 16, 1832): 10.

4. Canton Register, vol. 8, no. 48 (December 1, 1835): 190.
5. “Destructive Fire in Canton!” Canton Press, vol. 1, no. 11 (November 21, 1835): 89.
6. Canton Press, vol. 1, no. 21 (January 30, 1836): 161; “Fire: Carpenter Square Burnt Down,” Canton
Register, vol. 9, no. 4 (January 26, 1836): 13.
7. Canton Press, vol. 2, no. 1 (September 10, 1836): n. p.
8. Kim A. Wagner, “ ‘Treading upon Fires’: The ‘Mutiny’-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India,”
Past and Present, vol. 218, no. 1 (2013): 159–97 (161).
Slow Burn in China 37

action but no circumspection, and, in the event of a breakdown, only fear and no
anxiety.”9 Although, as Ulrike Hillemann has recently argued, neither “imperialism”
nor “informal empire” adequately explains the British presence in Canton before the
Opium War, unfocused and unsettling anxieties were pervasive there, too.10 As this
chapter suggests, Western reactions to fire in pre–Opium War China made such anxi-
eties visible, underscoring latent feelings of vulnerability.
Fire and panic, of course, have intertwined histories. As Robert Peckham notes
in his introduction, fire often functions as a metaphor for other species of crises.
The incendiary language of ignition, combustibility, firefighting, and containment
lend themselves readily to other crisis situations. Epidemics, for example, are often
imagined as “spreading like wildfire.” A recurrent trope during the 2003 SARS crisis
was that of infection as a fire “dying out.”11 Although fire in Canton may not have
sparked the kinds of colonial (and postcolonial) panics considered elsewhere in this
volume, fire became a critical site—a tinderbox, so to speak—that threw into relief
cultural values, aspirations, and assumptions. Fires amplified latent tensions, reflect-
ing concerns and frustrations that extended well beyond the material threat posed to
person and property by flames.
This was particularly the case in a society where Westerners often felt under siege.
In February 1838, the Canton Press wrote that “our residence here more resembles
perhaps that of the garrison in a fortress beleaguered by enemies than the existence
of visitors come to a friendly country to follow a peaceable and, to the country they
visit, a profitable calling.”12 As Tyler Dennett noted almost a century ago, “the for-
eigners were, in fact, voluntary prisoners.”13 Gideon Nye, a trader who later became
the American vice consul at Canton, recalled more playfully how the situation of
foreigners in Canton had once been “aptly likened to the condition of the Animals
in the Zoological Gardens of London.” The inmates were “free to play what pranks
they pleased, so that they made no uproar, nor escaped from confinement.”14 The
list of restrictions imposed upon Westerns by the Chinese could seem endless. C.
Toogood Downing, a British surgeon who spent two years in Canton, though mostly

9. Ranajit Guha, “Not at Home in Empire,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 3 (1997): 482–93 (487–88). On the
relationship between anxiety and vulnerability in empire, see also Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival
Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
10. Ulrike Hillemann, Asian Empire and British Knowledge: China and the Networks of British Imperial
Expansion (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 46.
11. Patrick Wallis and Brigitte Nerlich, “Disease Metaphors in New Epidemics: The UK Media Framing of
the 2003 SARS Epidemic,” Social Science & Medicine, vol. 60, no. 11 (2005): 2629–39.
12. “British and Chinese Relations,” Canton Press, vol. 3, no. 22 (February 3, 1838): n.p.
13. Tyler Dennett, Americans in Eastern Asia: A Critical Study of the Policy of the United States with
Reference to China, Japan and Korea in the 19th Century (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 48.
14. Gideon Nye, Jr., Morning of My Life in China: Comprising an Outline of the History of Foreign Intercourse
from the Last Year of the Regime of the Honorable East India Company, 1833, to the Imprisonment of the
Foreign Community in 1839 (Canton: n.p., 1873), 15.
38 John M. Carroll

downriver in Whampoa (Huangpu) where the foreign ships were moored, and in
1838 published three volumes on his time in China, observed how “not even the
slightest outhouse may be built, before the object and effect of its erection have been
thoroughly scrutinized, and the proper leave obtained from the authorities.”15
In the setting of the Canton System, fire took on particular significance. As Cathy
Frierson has argued in her cultural history of fire and arson in late imperial Russia,
while the economic toll of fires was considerable, conflagrations in nineteenth-
century Russia often took on a symbolic significance. For “progressives” advocating
reform, fires were a sign of the nation’s backwardness and an impediment to its trans-
formation into a rational, modern society. In other words, the history of fire here
becomes a history of contested cultural meanings in the drive for modernity.16 In this
chapter, the aim is similarly to examine the underlying social and cultural processes
revealed by fire, and in so doing to suggest that an analysis of specific fire-crises may
provide fresh perspectives on the reciprocal construction of “Western” and “Chinese”
identities.
For Westerners in Canton, fire said much about China and, more importantly,
about their own position within this tiny enclave. It showed the inadequacy of fire
prevention and firefighting in China. The reluctance to adopt proactive measures
to mitigate risks and effects of fire represented the incomprehensibility of Chinese
behavior and the irrationality and inhumanity of Chinese culture. Differences
between Western and Chinese attitudes toward fire raised questions about the nature
of Chinese state and society, about the use of public and private space, and about
the compatibility of East and West. These concerns were especially acute among the
British, who comprised the majority of foreigners in Canton, and whose East India
Company had incurred the most damages during the great fire of 1822. A slow burn
or a simmer, rather than a panic-inducing blaze or inferno, fire came to represent the
frustration and helplessness that many foreigners in Canton felt—especially after the
end of the East India Company’s monopoly on the China trade in 1833, which led
British merchants to demand better trading conditions and a more aggressive British
policy toward China.

Combustible Canton

Fire was a common feature of preindustrial urban life. “Uncontrolled fires,” write Greg
Bankoff, Uwe Lübken, and Jordan Sand, “affected every aspect of society in these flam-
mable cities, including the shape of the city itself.”17 The almost universal prevalence
15. C. Toogood Downing, The Fan Qui in China in 1836–1837, 2 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1838), I,
298.
16. Cathy A. Frierson, All Russia Is Burning: A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002).
17. Greg Bankoff, Uwe Lübken, and Jordan Sand, “Introduction,” in Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration
Slow Burn in China 39

of wooden structures, often containing flammable substances such as alcohol, animal

fat, and sometimes even gunpowder, meant that uncontrollable blazes could destroy
everything in their paths and put entire communities at risk. “Tinderbox” cities such
as Edo (later Tokyo), Hankou in central China, and Istanbul were especially notori-
ous for their flammability.18 In the young United States, fires broke out frequently, not
only in the newer settlements of arid California but even in cities on the wetter East
Coast. As Margaret Hazen and Robert Hazen observe, California and New York were
like “giant andirons flanking an entire nation that threatened to go up in smoke.”19
Many foreigners believed that fires were more common in Canton than elsewhere,
or at least that the effects were more devastating. According to Hosea Morse, who
lived in China for more than 30 years and later wrote a five-volume history of the
East India Company in China, “the danger of a conflagration was always present in
Canton, with its numerous fires for cooking in open pots.”20 In February 1828, the
Canton Register reported that another “very dangerous fire” had started in the timber
yards on the north bank of the Pearl River “at no great distance” from the factories,
destroying warehouses containing oil, rattan, fire crackers, and other combustible
materials.”21 The American trader William Hunter recalled how “during the north-
east monsoon fires were quite frequent in the densely populated suburbs lying north
of the factories.”22 Downing noted that fires “are very frequent in Canton, and are
sometimes so extensive as to threaten the total destruction of the town.” Houses were
“almost invariably built of wood, and as there is always a great quantity of even more
combustible materials about the premises, there is no telling to what extent the con-
flagration may be carried when once it is excited.”23
“The sight of a burning city is dreadful any where,” explained the Canton Register
in November 1835, “but its horrors are multiplied in China.” Part of the problem was
the layout of the traditional Chinese city, with its wooden houses and narrow streets,
surrounded by city walls up to 40 feet high and some 20 feet thick:

and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Greg Bankoff, Uwe Lübken, and Jordan Sand (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 3.
18. Lionel Frost, “Coping in Their Own Way: Asian Cities and the Problem of Fires,” Urban History, vol. 24,
no. 1 (1997): 5–16; L. E. Frost and E. L. Jones, “The Fire Gap and the Greater Durability of Nineteenth-
Century Cities,” Planning Perspectives, vol. 4, no. 3 (1989): 333–47. Cf. Jordan Sand and Steven Wills,
“Governance, Arson, and Firefighting in Edo, 1600–1868,” and Cornel Zwierlein, “The Burning of a
Modern City? Istanbul as Perceived by the Agents of the Sun Fire Office, 1865–1870,” in Flammable
Cities, 44–62, 82–102.
19. Margaret Hindel Hazen and Robert M. Hazen, Keepers of the Flame: The Role of Fire in American
Culture, 1775–1925 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 72.
20. Hosea Ballou Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China, 1635–1834, 5 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), V, 173.
21. Canton Register, vol. 1, no. 6 (February 4, 1828): 22.
22. William C. Hunter, The ‘Fan Kwae’ at Canton before Treaty Days, 1825–1844, By an Old Resident
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1882), 27.
23. Downing, Fan Qui, vol. 2, 225–26.
40 John M. Carroll

The rapid and uncontrollable spread and destructive effects of a fire raging in a
well thus closely walled in, the egress from which is through narrow gateways—
the terror of the women and children, driven out from their retired apartments—
the difficulty of escape to those who are, by a refinement in fashionable cruelty,
crippled in their feet—the beat and clamour—the shoutings of the firemen, the
falling in of roofs and burning rafters, the toppling down of walls, the hollow
murmuring sounds of the spreading devouring flames in the narrow avenues—
hope lost and ruin, despair, and a painful and horrible death approaching with
rapid and irresistible strides—are more easily conceived than described.24

John Davis, who had worked in Canton for 20 years with the East India Company,
described how in congested Chinese cities like Canton, most houses and shops had a
story above the ground floor with a “wooden stage or platform for drying goods, or
for taking the air in hot evenings. This custom contributes to make their houses very
liable to catch and to spread fires during a conflagration.”25
As in other cities (including in Hong Kong after the British occupied it in January
1841), fires in Canton were often caused by arson.26 Somewhat surprisingly given how
often arson can both reflect and fuel interethnic tensions, foreigners in Canton rarely
mentioned arson committed by Chinese against foreigners.27 They did, however,
note the prevalence of arson in Canton and the measures taken to prevent it. In
February 1828, the Canton Register observed that the “numerous fires which have of
late occurred in Canton, have made it necessary to be severe to the utmost extent of
the law in punishing incendiaries.”28 In December 1831, the Register reported that a
poor woman, her daughter, and two young children had been burnt to death in a fire
purportedly started by someone trying to burn down a rich neighbor’s house. Such
cases of arson were “very frequent,” despite the vigilance of the police, strict night
curfews, and rewards for informing on arsonists.29 Fires that local authorities “invari-
ably” blamed on “neglected embers under the Tea-kettle,” explained the Canton
Register in January 1832, were often caused by incendiaries.30 Downing explained
that arson was “supposed to be committed much oftener than it can be detected.
The city abounds with vagabonds, who set fire to the houses in order that they may
profit by the confusion, to commit their depredations.”31 Arson was so common in
the cool, dry, winter months, observed Davis, that each year the governor issued a

24. “Dreadful Fire: Destruction of the New City of Canton,” Canton Register, vol. 8, no. 47 (November 24,
1835): 86. Original emphasis.
25. John Francis Davis, The Chinese: A General Description of the Empire and Its Inhabitants, vol. 1 (London:
Charles Knight & Co., 1836), 344.
26. “Hongkong,” Canton Register, vol. 15, no. 7 (February 15, 1842): 34.
27. Hazen and Hazen, Keepers of the Flame, 101–2.
28. Canton Register, vol. 1, no. 6 (February 4, 1828): 22.
29. Canton Register, vol. 4, no. 24 (December 19, 1831): 129.
30. Canton Register, vol. 5, no. 2 (January 16, 1832): 10.
31. Downing, Fan Qui, vol. 2, 225.
Slow Burn in China 41

notice reminding people to “beware of the acts of incendiaries, who purposely set fire
to buildings with a view to rob and plunder in the confusion.”32 Morrison reported
how after the great fire of 1822 six Chinese were decapitated after being convicted of
arson.33 The fact that foreigners wrote so matter-of-factly about these punishments,
especially when they often commented on the cruelty of Chinese justice, reveals the
extent and severity of arson.
Whether or not fires occurred more often in Canton than in cities of similar size
elsewhere is difficult to determine. Based mainly on foreign records, Paul Van Dyke
has identified some 100 fires in Canton from 1763 to 1843, cautioning that the actual
number may have been 150 or higher since foreigners were in China for only part of
each year and may not have mentioned fires that did not affect them or their trade.34
But even 150 would be low compared, for example, to New York, where in 1830 fires
occurred three or four times per day and were so common that the city’s firefighters
became popular tourist attractions.35 In May 1835, a writer who argued in the Chinese
Repository against fire insurance claimed that the instance of fires in Chinese houses
was “but periodical” and that the “combustible appearance” of Chinese houses made
foreigners fear fire more than was necessary. The “sources of danger” were “much
less” than in Europe, houses and roofs were made from bricks and tiles as often as
they were in Europe, and wood was not used any more than elsewhere. Chinese
homes lacked chimneys and their inhabitants lit fires only twice per day and for only
a short period.36
For the most part, the foreign factories and their contents were less vulnerable to
fire than the rest of Canton and its suburbs. They were close to the river, so goods
could be moved relatively quickly to moored boats. Still, foreign merchants worried
about their investments. Foreigners kept fire engines in their factories, as did the
Hong merchants, with engines purchased from the foreigners.37 Such a fire occurred
on the evening of February 7, 1773, spreading to the factories and continuing until
almost daylight of the following morning. According to one account by the East India
Company, which by this time had fully occupied two of the 13 factories, the fire,

32. Davis, Chinese, vol. 2, 12.

33. Robert Morrison, “An Account of the Fire of Canton, in 1822,” in Memoirs of the Life and Labours
of Robert Morrison, Compiled by His Widow, with Critical Notices of His Chinese Works, by Samuel
Kidd, 2 vols., ed. Eliza Morrison (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1839), II,
Appendix, 33–39 (37).
34. Paul A. Van Dyke, “Fire and the Risks of Trade in Canton, 1730s–1840s,” in Canton and Nagasaki
Compared, 1730–1830: Dutch, Chinese, Japanese Relations, ed. Evert Groenendijk, Cynthia Viallé, and
Leonard Blussé (Leiden: Institute for the History of European Expansion, 2009), 171–202 (171).
35. Hazen and Hazen, Keepers of the Flame, 71.
36. “Fire Insurance in Canton,” Chinese Repository, vol. 4, no. 1 (May 1835): 30–32.
37. Van Dyke, “Fire,” 181–83; Patrick Conner, “The Fires of Canton in ‘Export’ Paintings,” Arts of Asia, vol.
38, no. 6 (November–December 2008): 110–23 (121); William C. Hunter, Bits of Old China (London:
Kegan Paul, Trench, 1885), 205–6.
42 John M. Carroll

which broke out after a particularly long dry spell, “burnt with great fury” and spread
rapidly toward the factories. Both of the English factories caught fire and were saved
only by “great diligence & perseverance.” More than 400 houses were burned and one
Hong was “entirely consumed.”38
More important here is that foreigners often believed there were particularly
“Chinese” features of fire and the risks it posed. We have already seen one of these
features in the Canton Register’s account of the horrors of fire in China: the difficulty
of escape for women, “crippled” in their bound feet. There were many more such
features. Downing observed that apart from

the deliberate acts of incendiaries, there is no doubt that many accidents of

this kind arise from the gross neglect of the householders themselves. They
seem perfectly careless of the consequences, but throw the fire about in every
direction.
Crackers are almost constantly exploding by hundreds in every corner,
while flaming ghos-paper is bandied about the apartments. Before every
image of the pagan deities at the corners of the streets, sticks of incense are
continually burning, which are made of the aromatic powder or dust of the
sandalwood.39

According to John Davis, the “greatest risk” to houses and shops in Canton came
from fires, which in “frequent instances” were not caused by “mere accident.” The
Chinese had “very generally” borrowed Western-style fire engines and had even
constructed their own “sufficiently well to answer the purpose.” But their “foolish
notion of fatalism” made them “singularly careless” about fire.40 This fatalism derived
from a “variety of superstitious customs and observances” connected to Buddhism,
Confucianism, and Taoism. Like “a considerable portion of the rest of mankind,” the
Chinese were “pretty generally fatalists, or believers in inevitable destiny.” But “the
practical mischiefs” of this peculiarly Chinese fatalism were most pronounced in
their “apathetic carelessness” toward the use of fire. Despite the “repeated conflagra-
tions” that devastated the city every year, even the “most casual observer” could not
fail to notice the “extreme carelessness with which burning paper and lighted sticks
of incense are left about their combustible dwellings, or pipes smoked and bunches
of crackers discharged in temporary edifices constructed entirely of matting.” Even if
some of these fires were set by arsonists, “a large number” could be blamed on “that
stupid belief in fatalism, which tends to paralyze effort and to banish caution.”41

38. Morse, Chronicles, vol. 5, 173.

39. Downing, Fan Qui, vol. 2, 226–27.
40. Davis, Chinese, vol. 2, 12.
41. Ibid., 129.
Slow Burn in China 43

Frustration and Helplessness: The Great Fire of 1822

Even in cities where fire is common, some fires become more legendary than others.
As Alan Krell has argued, certain fires—London in 1666, Edinburgh in 1824, and
Chicago in 1871, for example—tend to “enter the social imagination through various
combinations of cause, effect and discourse and become ‘Great Fires’.” From rather
ordinary origins, these fires “went on to draw out responses, literary and visual, that
became as celebrated as the fires themselves.” The “combination of fear and fascina-
tion,” argues Krell, is “always simmering in the reception of public fires.” Such fires
not only “destroyed structures and lives,” but entered the “more indeterminate space
of rhetoric, reconstruction and memory.”42
For foreigners in Canton, the “great fire” was the one that broke out on November
1, 1822, and raged for two days (Figure 2.1). This “lamentable catastrophe,” as East
India Company chief James Brabazon Urmston described it, began in the suburbs a
mile and a half north of the factories.43 The news of the fire reached the factories at
about 9:30 at night. The East India Company sent its fire engines to help extinguish
the flames, but no water could be found. As the flames spread and the wind shifted,
it became clear that the fire would soon reach the factories. Because the Company’s
shipment of woolens for the season had not yet been transferred to the Hong mer-
chants and were still in the Company’s warehouse, laborers were quickly hired to
move them to a more secure spot. When the magnitude of the fire soon made laborers
hard to find, sailors were called up from the foreign ships moored at Whampoa. The
Americans arrived first because their ships were anchored closer to Canton, followed
shortly by the British. Twenty-two people were killed, and the blaze devastated a
large portion of the western suburbs of Canton and destroyed thousands of shops.
The British moved most of their factory, including 700,000 dollars in the East India
Company treasury, into a warehouse owned by the Hong merchant Consequa and
were thus able to resume their trade within a week. Two of the other thirteen Hong
merchants, Puiqua and Mowqua, incurred particularly heavy losses.44
The fire of 1822 became the fire that foreigners in Canton talked about and
remembered, whether or not they had been in Canton when it broke out. “We well
remember the fire of 1822,” wrote the Canton Register in May 1835, “when the flowery
gaiety and glory of Canton was at once consumed, like the gaudy insect that rushes

42. Alan Krell, Burning Issues: Fire in Art and the Social Imagination (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 17,
51.
43. November 14, 1822, Canton, Urmston to Chair, Court of Directors, India Office Records
(IOR)/G/12/284 (Secret Letters received from China, June 27, 1821–February 6, 1823), British Library,
London.
44. November 1, 1822: Statement—Fire at Canton, IOR/G/12/227 (Canton Consultations, April 18, 1822–
February 4, 1823); Morse, Chronicles, vol. 4, 64–66; Robert Morrison, “A Review of the First Fifteen
Years of the Mission,” and “An Account of the Fire of Canton,” in Memoirs, ed. Morrison, 33, 183;
Conner, “Fires,” 112–17.
44 John M. Carroll

Figure 2.1
Canton Fire of 1822. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of The Martyn Gregory Gallery, London.

into the burning flame.”45 When reporting the “dreadful fire” in November 1835 that
destroyed part of the new city of Canton, the Register recalled how the “recollection of
the dreadful and extensive fire of 1822 occurred to many of the foreign residents, and
the most gloomy anticipations began to disturb their breasts.”46 Writing in 1836, John
Davis described the fire of 1822 as a “calamity of fearful extent, affecting equally the
Chinese and Europeans, and which will not soon be forgotten at Canton.”47 When the
foreign community debated the practicality of introducing fire insurance to Canton,
they referred to the fire of 1822.48 As Patrick Conner has noted, the 1822 fire also
seems to have been the first one to be commemorated in Chinese “export” paintings.49
The East India Company’s Select Committee described the fire of 1822 as a con-
flagration “without parallel in Canton.”50 Apart from Company records, the only
substantial accounts of this fire come from Morrison, who had arrived in China in
1807 and would die there in 1834, shortly after being appointed as interpreter to Lord

45. Canton Register, vol. 8, no. 23 (June 9, 1835): 91.

46. “Dreadful Fire,” 185–86.
47. Davis, Chinese, vol. 1, 104.
48. Canton Register, vol. 8, no. 23 (June 9, 1835): 91.
49. Patrick Conner, The Hongs of Canton: Western Merchants in South China, 1700–1900, as Seen in Chinese
Export Paintings (London: English Art Books, 2009), 90; Conner, “Fires,” 112–17.
50. November 1, 1822: Statement—Fire at Canton.
Slow Burn in China 45

Napier’s ill-fated mission to obtain better trading terms from the Chinese authorities.
For Morrison, the destruction from the fire of 1822 was particularly personal: the fire
destroyed not only his residence of many years but also 100 pounds of paper that he
had prepared to send to Malacca for a new edition of the New Testament. Writing to
the directors of the London Missionary Society 12 days later from “a Chinese ware-
house to which for the time being we have removed,” Morrison described how

on Friday evening, the first instant a fire broke out on the west side of Canton,
about a mile north of the European Factories, in a cake baker’s shop. The fire
increased & spread all the night of the 1st, & before the close of Saturday the
2nd, all the foreign Factories were entirely or partially consumed. On Saturday
night & Sunday morning the fire spread to the westward along the banks of the
river, at least a mile & a half, & did not cease in that direction till there were no
more houses to burn—thousands of Chinese shops & houses were destroyed, &
millions of property in a few hours reduced to ashes. Some estimate the loss of
the English East India Company at one Million Sterling. The furious & devour-
ing fire, the anxious crowds of clamorous houseless fugitives, running bearing
their effects from the flames, with drawn swords to defend them—hard-hearted
banditti, plundering the weak, cutting down & trampling to death the strong;
presented an awful & afflicting scene.51

In Morrison’s report to his directors in London we see all the characteristics

described by Krell: fear, fascination, incomprehension, horror, and awe. In his journal,
parts of which were later compiled by his wife after his death, Morrison wrote about
the fire in even greater length. His sentiments were echoed throughout the years by
the English press after fires. Following the fire of November 1835, for example, the
Canton Press wrote how “the whole of the melancholy occurrence” could be seen from
the terraces of several foreign factories. By midnight, when the fire had reached its
peak, “it conveyed to the mind some devoted city given up to pillage and the flames,
to sate the merciless revenge of some modern Nero! or like unto a mighty caldron
throwing up its flames and smoke, from the consuming materials with which it was
charged.” Had the fire destroyed the suburbs and spread beyond the city walls to the
foreign and Chinese factories, “the result might have been still more lamentable.”52
As would later fires, the 1822 fire exacerbated the foreigners’ sense of frustration
and helplessness in Canton. Although the fire could be observed from the terrace
of the apartments of the East India Company chief, no one could tell when it would
reach the factories. At midnight the foreigners began to prepare their papers and
other valuables. The demand for boats became so strong that some were unable to

51. Robert Morrison, Canton, November 12, 1822, CWM South China Incoming Correspondence, Box 2,
Folder 2, Jacket B, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Morrison also men-
tions the fire in his correspondence of November 14, 1822.
52. “Destructive Fire in Canton!” 89–90.
46 John M. Carroll

obtain any. Morrison explained how the fire engines belonging to the British factory
and the Hong merchants were summoned immediately:

But the streets being narrow, and no well-organized firemen, nor any efficient
co-operation from the Government, the engines were ill-supplied with water, and
made little or no impression on the fast-spreading conflagration. The Chinese
carrying away their property, generally accompanied by a man with drawn
swords or knives for its defence, and uttering loud cries, calling on people to clear
the way, filled the streets. A few English gentlemen, officers of the Company’s
ships, and others, endeavored to assist in extinguishing the flames, and in pulling
down the houses; but they met with no co-operation from the natives, and the fire
rapidly encreased [sic] its fury.53

When the danger of the fire became increasingly imminent by the early morning of
Saturday, November 2, the East India Company and the private traders each presented
written requests at the city gate, following established protocol, asking that the local
authorities order the military and the police to tear down the houses around the fire
in order to isolate it and save the remaining Chinese and foreign houses.54 Although
the requests were written in “the most earnest and importunate language,” they were
unsuccessful; the governor returned the Company’s letter unopened because it had
been sealed with the chief ’s private seal rather than with the Company’s seal. By eight
o’clock the fire had spread to the factories. After a day of “ineffectual struggles to
arrest to progress of the flames,” by Sunday morning most of the foreign factories had
been destroyed. The factories of four Hong merchants were completely destroyed, as
were thousands of shops and houses. Governor Li told Morrison that some 50,000
people had been made homeless and that the fire had been “Heaven’s will.”55
And even though the factories were rebuilt after the fire of 1822, heaps of rubble
remained in the square along the waterfront and became even larger over the years
as more rubbish was deposited. The American missionary David Abeel, who arrived
in Canton in 1830, later described how “the open space before the factories is the
rendezvous of multitudes of the natives, who assemble daily to transact business,
gratify curiosity, or murder time. It is level, for a short distance, beyond which it
stretches over a large pile of rubbish, deposited here after the desolating fire of 1822,
and retained, notwithstanding numerous applications for its removal, as a lasting and
growing nuisance to foreigners.”56 For the East India Company chiefs, getting these
unsightly heaps removed became part of a three-pronged attempt to have the land in
front of the factories cleaned up while enclosing it and extending their jetty. Neither
campaign bore immediate results. In March 1830 the Company sent a crew of sailors

53. Morrison, “Account of the Fire of Canton,” 33.

54. November 1, 1822: Statement—Fire at Canton.
55. Morrison, “Account of the Fire of Canton,” 33–35.
56. David Abeel, Journal of a Residence in China and the Neighboring Countries, from 1829 to 1833 (New
York: Leavitt, Lord & Co., 1836), 76.
Slow Burn in China 47

to extend the jetty by filling it in with the rubbish. The rest of this “obnoxious mound”
remained until the local authorities finally removed it in January 1831.57
The fire of 1822 also changed the layout of the factories and destroyed the fences
that had partially enclosed the open space in front of the factories commonly known
to foreigners as “the Square.” Aimed at controlling access to the Pearl River and to keep
out vagrants and curiosity-seekers, these fences had been erected in the 1790s. Soon
after the fire, Chinese of all walks of life congregated daily in the square.58 Downing
remarked how “throughout the square, either collected in groups, or traversing with
hasty but clumsy strides, are crowds of natives; shopkeepers, barbers, quacks, thieves,
rogues, vagabonds and coolies, with their long blue tunics, and with or without their
thick-soled shoes.”59 After the fire the British erected a garden and a wall enclosing the
area in front of their factory, though the Square remained open until it was re-fenced
in 1839.

Fire and “the Chinese Character”

As in any city, fire was big news in Canton. The English press was suspicious of Chinese
accounts of the damage caused by fire. The Canton Register explained in December
1835 how “our Chinese informant tells us that his countrymen greatly magnify their
losses on these occasions; and that one mace worth of property destroyed becomes
ten thousand in the fertile brain of the unlucky sufferer.”60 Still, the English press was
eager to report on fire and other disasters and misfortunes, often to great dramatic
effect. In November 1835 the Register described a “dreadful fire” that had destroyed
part of the new city of Canton:

The flames continued raging throughout the night, and the streets of the suburbs
were thronged by a dense crowd of people moving to and from the scene of
destruction, conveying their goods, or guiding their female and aged relations.
The clamour of men and clash of weapons as they cleared the way, shouting,
screaming, threatening, and complaining, were stunning and horrible. All the
bad characters of a vast population flew, like harpies, to a scene which promised
them employment in their vocation and a rich harvest. The ‘noisy and nasty’
Chinese were ten thousand times more noisy and nasty. Beds and bedding and
wearing apparel appeared to be the things first saved; then domestic utensils and
furniture and goods . . . The behaviour of the women was particularly remarked;

57. January 31, 1831: Offensive mound of dirt in front of the Factories removed, IOR/G/12/246 (Canton
Consultations, January 28, 1831–February 28, 1832); Conner, Hongs, 103; Morse, Chronicles, vol. 4,
193–94, 278, 291.
58. Johnathan A. Farris, “Thirteen Factories of Canton: An Architecture of Sino-Western Collaboration
and Confrontation,” Buildings and Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, vol. 14,
(2007): 76–77; Conner, Hongs, 100.
59. Downing, Fan Qui, vol. 1, 301.
60. Canton Register, vol. 8, no. 48 (December 1, 1835): 190.
48 John M. Carroll

it was most admirable; no complaining, no fainting, no screaming, but calmness,

resignation and entire self-possession. The tones of their voices were watched
as they occasionally gave directions to their children or servants, and they were
bland, subdued and polite.61

Unlike in India, the very nature of the Canton System segregated foreigners from
the Chinese, so the British were more often intrigued by, rather than afraid of, native
crowds. However, the description quoted above of the fire and the panicked response
it triggered among sections of the population suggests prevailing anxieties about the
violent propensities of the vast, dense, and unfathomable “Oriental” crowd.62
Here, the panic of fire gives way to another species of panic, with the flames
flushing out clamoring “harpies” and “noisy and nasty” throngs of Chinese men (in
contrast to the resigned women). What is striking about such reports is the way in
which the insecurities produced by the threat of fire could so readily shade into moral
concerns about the dangers posed to foreigners by “corrupted” native compradors
and servants. The perils of living in proximity to “such combustible materials” were
easily conflated with “the burning-shame” of immoral behavior, such as gambling.63
In March 1837, the Register wrote that a fire that had begun in a teashop where tea was
being dried “raged with little interruption for upwards of two hours.” Approximately
70 houses, “large and small,” were destroyed. A tea-packing warehouse burned with
“a brilliant flame,” and the terrace atop one of the houses continued to burn in com-
plete lines of fire for nearly an hour, presenting a magnificent spectacle.”64
The English press took particular delight in reporting fires caused by Chinese
ineptitude. In January 1831, the Canton Register noted how a fire in the governor’s
palace had been started by one of the viceroy’s domestics, who after smoking opium
had fallen asleep with the lamp still burning in his bed: “Much treasure is reported
to have been lost.”65 Later that March the Register described yet another fire in the
governor’s palace, this time destroying the apartments that had survived the fire in
January. Like the previous fire, this one had been caused by an attendant who had
fallen asleep over his opium pipe, his lamp still burning. Given that in China the
occupant of a house where a fire began could be subject to punishment for the public
injury caused, it was “highly disgraceful” that this had happened to the governor’s
family twice in only a few months. The governor had offered all the usual sacrifices
at the right temples to shake off this “evil omen,” deriving some consolation from the

61. “Dreadful Fire: Destruction of the New City of Canton,” Canton Register, vol. 8, no. 47 (November 24,
1835): 185–86.
62. The idea of the latent aggression of “Oriental” crowds was popularized in the work of Thomas De
Quincey, amongst others; see John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of
Imperialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991).
63. Canton Register, vol. 9, no. 5 (February 2, 1836): 20.
64. Canton Register, vol. 10, no. 12 (March 21, 1837): 51–52. Original emphasis.
65. Canton Register, vol. 4, no. 1 (January 3, 1831): 1.
Slow Burn in China 49

fact that a similar misfortune had occurred 60 years earlier, proving that the gover-
nor was suffering from “the inevitable decree of fate, which ordains a recurrence of
the same events, in every succeeding Chinese cycle.” Or so the Register’s “Chinese
informant” explained.”66
As they did in the fire of 1822, foreigners in Canton frequently complained that the
Chinese did not understand fire prevention and seemed unable to fight fire properly.
In July 1828, the Canton Register reported some signs of progress. During a recent
fire, the local authorities had destroyed the houses on either side of a burning house
to prevent the flames from spreading, a technique they had learned from foreigners
who had helped put out earlier fires in Canton. This, “like the general use of the
fire-engine, of watches, of telescopes, of woolens, &c. &c. shows that the Chinese will
adopt what approves itself to their judgement or taste.”67 In September and October
1836 the Register observed that fires in each month had been controlled by pulling
down adjacent houses to keep the flames from spreading.68 Still, Downing found it
“singular” that the Chinese took “so little precaution” to prevent fire from reoccur-
ring.69 Recalling the great fire of 1822, in June 1835 the Register argued that the fire
“could have been extinguished soon after it commenced, if the efforts of Europeans
had been encouraged; they could have pulled down the houses situated in the path of
the flames; but this measure was too vigorous for the apathetic Chinese, who abso-
lutely remained shut up in their houses until they were literally burnt out.”70
Foreigners often contrasted this lack of precaution with the efforts of the foreign
community, both in Canton and in the Portuguese territory of Macao farther down
the Pearl River. In January 1835 the Register reported how “nearly all the Macao and
European gentlemen were quickly on the spot and handsomely exerted themselves
in labourious services, entering the lower apartments of the house at imminent peril
and rescueing [sic] anything within reach.”71 After the fire of November 1835, the
Press bewailed the “weak, ignorant, and ill-applied efforts” of the Chinese—espe-
cially compared to “the precautionary measures” adopted by the foreign merchants,
“whose zeal to protect the property of their constituents was admirably displayed on
the occasion.”72
The way in which fire was handled in Canton seemed proof of what foreigners
often called the “Chinese character,” which they blamed for everything that was
wrong with China—including the Canton System and its restrictions. To Robert

66. Canton Register, vol. 4, no. 6 (March 17, 1831): 25.

67. Canton Register, vol. 1, no. 27 (July 12, 1828): 106.
68. Canton Register, vol. 9, no. 37 (September 13, 1836): 150, and Canton Register, vol. 9, no. 43 (October
25, 1836): 17.
69. Downing, Fan Qui, vol. 2, 226.
70. Canton Register, vol. 8, no. 23 (June 9, 1835): 91. Original emphasis.
71. “Fire at Macao,” Canton Register, vol. 8, no. 2 (January 13, 1835): 8.
72. “Destructive Fire in Canton!” 89.
50 John M. Carroll

Morrison, the fire of 1822 only further emphasized the weakness of the Chinese char-
acter, which, “formed by paganism and despotism, exhibited on this occasion, was
the opposite of generous and disinterested.” The government had not provided any
aid to the victims of the fire, nor had any voluntary subscriptions been established
for them. Instead, “a spirit of selfishness prevented those united efforts, and personal
sacrifices, which, humanly speaking, would have mitigated the evil.” This included
even the Hong merchants, some of whom had known the foreigners for 10 or 20
years, dealt with them daily, and developed friendships with them. Morrison opined
that, unlike the Chinese servants, who “generally stuck by their masters, and aided
honestly in saving their property,” not one of the Hong merchants who had survived
the fire with their factories intact “volunteered a night’s lodging, or a single meal to
the houseless and fasting Fan-kwei, ‘foreign devils:’ it was necessary for the foreigners
first to solicit them.”73
As they often did when observing the dearth of charitable and philanthropic ser-
vices in China, foreigners commented on the lack of provisions for fire victims. “Relief
for the sufferers,” wrote the American missionary Elijah Bridgman in December
1835 after another fire, “we have not even heard mentioned by a single native.” The
only contributions had come from foreigners in Canton and Macao. The mission-
ary Walter Henry Medhurst, visiting from Batavia, had preached a special sermon to
raise contributions, reminding foreigners in Canton of their obligation “to ameliorate
the condition of the people among whom we dwell, on all necessitous occasions.”74 In
yet another article on the “national character” of the Chinese, the missionary William
Milne argued that the laws of China worked

very powerfully against the exercise of benevolence cases where it is most needed.
Whatever crimes are committed in a neighborhood, all the neighbors around are
involved; and contrary to what is the case in most other civilized countries, the
law considers them guilty, until they can prove themselves innocent. Hence the
terror of being implicated in any evil that takes place, sometimes prevents the
people from quenching fire, until the superior authorities be first informed—and
from relieving the distressed, until it is often too late  .  .  .  It is easy to see how
powerfully this operates as a national check to benevolence.75

Responses to fire also highlighted British interpretations of Chinese attitudes

toward foreigners. As would also be the case in colonial Hong Kong (where, in 1844,
John Davis would become the second governor), the British in Canton were often
convinced that Cantonese of all ranks disdained foreigners more than other Chinese
did and that they were themselves possessed of a lower moral character. “Barbarians
and savages we may be thought by the ignorant in other parts of the empire,” wrote

73. Morrison, “An Account of the Fire of Canton,” 39.

74. “Fire in the City of Canton,” Chinese Repository, vol. 4, no. 8 (December 1835): 390–91.
75. “National Character of the Chinese,” Chinese Repository, vol. 1, no. 8 (December 1832): 30.
Slow Burn in China 51

Downing, “but in the vicinity of the commercial city, a portion of hatred and fear is
mixed up with the general feeling.”76 Davis described the Cantonese as “the very worst
specimens of their countrymen,” encouraged by local authorities to treat foreigners
“as if they were really a degraded order of beings.”77 Shortly after four foreigners had
helped put out a fire in February 1832, they encountered an official who “uttered
some hurried words in Chinese” and “motioned his hand, as if threatening to behead
them.”78 After the fire of November 1835, the Canton Press explained how the confla-
gration had “strongly exemplified” the “extraordinary adverse feelings” of the Chinese
toward against foreigners. Several Westerners had managed to enter the city and
show its “ignorant” inhabitants how to respond to the fire. But as soon as the fire had
subsided, the “shameful and most diabolical wretches” demonstrated their gratitude
by beating the foreigners. “This,” declared the Press, “speaks enough for China!”79
This does not mean that foreigners and Chinese never worked together when fires
broke out. As Paul Van Dyke has argued, because they threatened everyone, fires
could also lead to cooperation. Foreigners were not allowed into the inner city, but
everyone tried to help whenever a fire broke out near the factories. Foreigners and
Chinese cooperated to help extinguish the fires. Especially important were the “lin-
guists,” whose job was primarily to minimize tension and conflicts between foreign-
ers and Chinese and to help keep order.80 John Davis wrote how during the 1822 fire a
“considerable amount of property” was saved because a Hong merchant had lent the
East India Company his house and thus enabled the Company to resume its business
only a week after the fire.81 In 1822, the Hong merchant Tingqua dispatched 80 of
his own men to help Nathan Dunn of Philadelphia rescue his possessions (worth
some $150,000) by loading them onto small boats.82 After the fire that destroyed
Carpenters’ Square in 1836, the Canton Register reported how “all the foreigners in
Canton were immediately on the alert, and the Chinese fire companies, encouraged
and directed by the daring and strenuous efforts of many English and American
gentlemen, who, in very dangerous situations, directed the engine-pipes from the
tops of the burning houses, exerted themselves admirably.”83 One of the many duties
of the Hong merchants, William Hunter explained, was to help foreigners protect
themselves and their property during fires by dispatching their own boats and labor-
ers. Hunter recalled how in January 1839, when the factories seemed “doomed to
76. Downing, Fan Qui, vol. 3, 94.
77. Davis, Chinese, vol. 1, 37–38.
78. Canton Register, vol. 5, no. 4 (February 16, 1832): 21.
79. “Destructive Fire in Canton!” 89.
80. Van Dyke, Canton Trade, 88, and “Fire,” 177–78.
81. Davis, Chinese, vol. 1, 105.
82. John Rogers Haddad, The Romance of China: Excursions to China in U.S. Culture, 1776–1876 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 86–87. Haddad speculates that Tingqua and Dunn may have
been lovers, 94.
83. “Fire: Carpenter Square Burnt Down,” 13.
52 John M. Carroll

utter destruction” by another fire that had begun in Carpenters’ Square, they were
saved by engines owned by the Hong merchants Howqua and Mingqua and operated
“splendidly” by their coolies.84

Fire as Opportunity (or Not)

Fire often means opportunity. The London Fire of 1666 provided a chance to replan
London under the supervision of Sir Christopher Wren.85 The Great Lisbon Fire of
1755, Mark Molesky argues, was both a turning point in the European Enlightenment
and the beginning of a new political era in Portugal. The fire followed an earthquake
that caused European scientists, theologians, and philosophers (including Voltaire,
Rousseau, and Kant) to reconsider longstanding beliefs about god, man, and nature.
Molesky writes that the fire “helped pave the way for sweeping political and cultural
reforms and a rebuilding project that radically changed the layout and function of the
city center.”86 In his study of fire in nineteenth-century Montreal, Jason Gilliland sees
fire as an agent of urban morphological change. Considering the impact of fire on the
built form of Montreal, Gilliland shows how conflagration provided the opportunity
to make improvements to the urban environment by leveling structures that blocked
the way of capital accumulation.87 Closer to home, Alan Smart has demonstrated how
a large fire in December 1953 helped push the colonial government of Hong Kong
toward an ambitious public housing scheme that developed into a massive resettle-
ment program run by the new Resettlement Department and accompanied by an
expansion of education and medical services.88
Fire in Canton could also mean opportunity. It sometimes enabled foreigners
to gain the goodwill of the Chinese by helping to extinguish blazes. As the Canton
Register explained after the fire of February 1832, “the Chinese are fully sensible of the
advantages derived from the presence of foreigners on these occasions—almost the
only ones when even the mandarins welcome them with civility.” It also granted them
temporary access to a part of Canton to which they were normally denied admis-
sion. After the fire of November 1835 that destroyed part of the new city, several
foreigners managed to reach the city walls and then the gate on the northwest of the
city.89 In December 1835, Elijah Bridgman, the American missionary, explained how
84. Hunter, Bits of Old China, 205–6, 219.
85. Robert Peckham, “The City of Knowledge: Rethinking the History of Science and Urban Planning,”
Planning Perspectives, vol. 24, no. 4 (2009): 521–34.
86. Mark Molesky, “The Great Fire of Lisbon, 1755,” in Flammable Cities, 147–69.
87. Jason Gilliland, “Fire and Urban Morphogenesis: Patterns of Destruction and Reconstruction in
Nineteenth-Century Montreal,” in Flammable Cities, 190–211.
88. Alan Smart, The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters, Fires and Colonial Rule in Hong Kong, 1950–1963 (Hong
Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006). Cf. David Faure, Colonialism and the Hong Kong Mentality
(Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 2003), 31–32.
89. “Dreadful Fire: Destruction of the New City of Canton,” Canton Register, vol. 8, no. 47 (November 24,
Slow Burn in China 53

foreigners could walk on the city walls of Canton only “when some dire calamity
compels the authorities to be kind.” Such a chance had appeared earlier that morning,
when after a small fire Bridgman was able to walk along the western wall of the city.
Bridgman attributed this opportunity to how the “fankwei, it was supposed, might do
something towards checking its progress.”90 After a fire in late 1836, the Canton Press
reported on how “several Gentlemen, after the Fire had been subdued, perambulated
the walls of the city, which they were permitted to do, without any molestation.”91
After the fire in Carpenters’ Square in January 1836, a group of foreigners was able to
walk around the city “without interruption or annoyance.”92
More often than not, however, fire did not lead to the kind of change foreigners
desired. The fire of 1822, for example, convinced them of the need for more space
between their factories and the adjacent Chinese shops. Although the factories were
rebuilt, their plans for preventing another fire were not realized. The East India
Company petitioned the governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi, Ruan Yuan,
requesting that the ruined shops not be rebuilt as they were a fire hazard and that “a
space of ground should be allotted to the foreign factories without any interruption
of Chinese houses.”93 They did not “deny an overlooking providence,” but insisted that
the destruction of their factories had been caused by their “close contact with Chinese
houses being built with much wood in and about them,” and that “one half of the evil”
could have been prevented had the houses around the fire been torn down.94
Although the factories were rebuilt after considerable negotiation, the Chinese
shopkeepers produced their own petition observing that the fire had begun far from
their shops and explaining how many livelihoods depended on their shops; they were
“distressed natives begging deliverance from power and influence which would vio-
lently deprive them of their Shops,” and although they had “but a hundred shops”
these supported “a thousand families.”95 In February 1836, one “Senex” complained
in the Canton Register how the Chinese had not learned how to fight fire properly and
were already rebuilding an easily combustible customhouse that had been destroyed
in an earlier fire.96 In the same month, foreign merchants sent two petitioners to the
acting-governor asking him to forbid the customhouse to be rebuilt. In the first peti-
tion, Arthur Saunders Keating, a British merchant, supported by the foreign residents
of Canton, argued that the original building was “in reality, nothing but a common
1835): 185.
90. “A Walk on the Walls of the City of Canton,” Chinese Repository, vol. 4, no. 8 (December 1835): 536.
91. Canton Press, vol. 1, no. 21 (January 30, 1836): 161.
92. “Fire: Carpenter Square Burnt Down,” 13.
93. Quoted in Morse, Chronicles, vol. 4, 66.
94. November 5, 1822: Committee’s address to the Governor, IOR/G/12/227 (Canton Consultations, April
18, 1822–February 4, 1823).
95. December 12, 1822: Petition from Hog Lane shop owners, IOR/G/12/227; Conner, Hongs, 97–98;
Morse, Chronicles, vol. 4, 66, 74.
96. “Fires in Canton,” Canton Register, vol. 9, no. 5 (February 2, 1836): 20.
54 John M. Carroll

gambling house, and in consequence of its being so close to all the foreign factories, a
common place of resort for the servants of the foreigners to gamble at.” More impor-
tantly, covered with easily burnable thatch, it posed a “great danger” to “most of the
foreign factories” with their “quantities of valuable goods.”97

Fire and Grievances

Worries about fire in Canton never reached panic proportions, especially com-
pared with the other cases discussed in this volume. Still, concern was so great that
in December 1836 the Canton Press explained what it thought should be the most
important goal of the Canton General Chamber of Commerce, recently established
to help protect foreign trading interests:

This is the unprotected state of our property from fire. The houses of foreign-
ers here, as is well known to the residents, are so closely surrounded on three
sides by the suburbs of Canton, that whenever a fire breaks out there, they are in
the most imminent danger, and hardly a winter has gone over of late, that some
conflagrations, either in the city itself or in the suburbs, have not also threatened
destruction to our houses . . . It is now fourteen years since, with the exception
of a few apartments, the whole of the foreign factories were burnt, and since that
calamity the danger of a similar occurrence has by no means been diminished.98

Fire, in fact, became one of the main grievances against the restrictions of the
Canton System. In February 1838, the Canton Press explained how the biggest problem
in Anglo-British relations was “the affectation of the Chinese Government to treat
strangers coming from foreign countries to trade, as objects deserving its compas-
sion, whom it suffers to visit the country from motives of ‘celestial benevolence’ but
to whom it accords no right whatever, and who may be sent away agreeably to the
Imperial pleasure.” Leading the list were the usual complaints. Trade was confined
solely to Canton and dominated by the Cohong monopoly. British merchants could
be sent away from Canton “according to the pleasure of the Chinese Government,
without sufficient cause being assigned.” Unable to bring their women to Canton,
they were “debarred from the society of their families.” The restriction confining them
to the factory was a “restraint on personal liberty” that prohibited them from “taking
healthful exercise.” The law demanding a life for a life when a foreigner accidentally
killed a Chinese meant that foreigners lacked “the benefit of the law in force among
the Chinese” and could be punished according to “an oppressive law made expressly
for, and enacted only against, foreigners.” And, a grievance that is especially perti-
nent here: foreigners were unable to build warehouses to store their own property,
“which not only at present is completely under the control of the Chinese, but is in

97. “Fires in Canton,” Canton Register, vol. 9, no. 6 (February 9, 1836): 22.
98. Canton Press, vol. 2, no. 13 (December 3, 1836): n.p.
Slow Burn in China 55

considerable danger from fire, the warehouses of the Hong merchants being in the
most crowded parts of the suburbs, but on their southern sides, so that any fire break-
ing out during the winter, the northwind carrying it to the southward, endangers
their safety.”99
These grievances became especially clamorous in the mid- and late 1830s, as the
British, in particular, began to demand better trading conditions in Canton and to
demand a more assertive policy toward China. This is not to suggest that worries
about fire would play a large part in the lead-up to the war between Britain and China
in 1839. And these concerns may seem irrational given how the risk of fire was prob-
ably no higher than in other cities, and given how secure and safe foreigners actually
were in Canton, especially compared with foreign merchants in European colonies
in Asia such as Batavia and Manila. As tensions escalated in early 1839 after the
governor-general ordered foreigners in Canton to stop importing opium, the Hoppo
(customs supervisor) commanded the Hong merchants to block up the rear door of
the factories; he insisted that foreigners had no need to worry about fire, for the only
time their factories had been harmed was in 1822.100 But perhaps the tendency to
focus on isolated issues of panic and near-panic sometimes keeps us from noticing
longstanding and simmering concerns—in short, an objectless anxiety which is often
taken as fear and ascribed to specific causes, such as the breakdown of law and order,
that necessitate specific action. In fact, as Barry Hindess puts it, anxiety is “more
diffuse, lacking a clearly identifiable cause and failing therefore to invite an appro-
priate positive response.”101 In this tiny Western enclave in pre–Opium War China,
anxiety did not tip into full-scale panic. As other chapters in this volume suggest,
often colonial response to fears—and the assimilation of anxiety into a politics of
fear—were preconditions for panic’s emergence. In Canton what is striking is how
Western near-panics about fire both absorbed and reflected so many other worries
and grievances, which would only intensify as Anglo-Chinese relations deteriorated
and the two sides went to war.

99. “British and Chinese Relations,” n.p. Original emphasis.

100. Canton Press, vol. 4, no. 22 (February 2, 1839): n.p.
101. Barry Hindess, “Not at Home in the Empire,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and
Culture, vol. 7, no. 3 (2001): 363–77 (363).
3
Epidemic Opportunities: Panic, Quarantines,
and the 1851 International Sanitary Conference

João Rangel de Almeida

This chapter examines the often unanticipated opportunities that crises may furnish
to individuals, communities, and states. Epidemics—and the panic that commonly
accompanies them—may be thought of as “social disruptors” that create opportune
conditions for social reform, technological development, career advancement, or
the expansion of markets. The distraction and anxiety caused by the “shock” of cata-
strophic events may be exploited politically to push through legislation, wage war,
or curtail freedoms.1 As other contributors to this volume argue, epidemics and the
panic that they induce have served to legitimate the proliferation of biosurveillance
schemes and governmental control.2 In his account of Western anxieties in pre–
Opium War Canton (Chapter 2), for example, John Carroll notes how destruction by
fire might spell opportunity, just as Robert Peckham (Chapter 6) suggests how epi-
demic crises in the final decade of the nineteenth century consolidated and extended
the strategic role of telegraphy.
State responses to cholera in the mid-nineteenth century provide a good example
of this biopolitical enlargement. As Christopher Hamlin has observed: “It is in the
magnitude of the reaction to it that cholera stands out as the signal disease of the
nineteenth century.”3 Cholera produced widespread panic, prompting measures
to manage not only the disease itself, but also the volatilities of the panic-stricken
population. Such measures could be counterproductive: the deployment of troops to
keep order and to patrol quarantines often amplified fears in threatened populations,
exacerbating rather than diminishing panic.4 The term “cholera panic” was widely
employed in the press from the 1830s to describe the terror generated by the infec-
tious disease. While noting the role of newspapers in “inducing apprehension and
consequent depression of spirits,” contemporaries acknowledged how rumors could

1. For a popular account of the ways that such “shocks” are exploited as “therapy” by “disaster capitalism,”
see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto: Knopf, 2007).
2. See Alison Bashford, “Global Biopolitics and the History of World Health,” History of the Human
Sciences, vol. 19, no. 1 (2006): 67–88.
3. Christopher Hamlin, Cholera: The Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4.
4. Charlotte E. Henze, Disease, Health Care and Government in Late Imperial Russia: Life and Death on the
Volga, 1823–1914 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 50.
58 João Rangel de Almeida

propel terror and produce a “fear-inspired panic.”5 As one commentator remarked of

the 1832 New York cholera epidemic, panic-stricken inhabitants fled the city just as
those of Pompeii must have fled “as the red lava showered down upon their houses,
or when the walls were shaken asunder by an earthquake.”6 If authorities sought to
downplay mass fear of the disease by, for example, understating mortality figures,
they could equally exploit panic as way of changing behaviors and sensibilities—as
Hamlin puts it, making “normal practices transgressive” in order to sanction public
health interventions aimed at clearing up “nuisances.”7
The 1851 International Sanitary Conference, convened in Paris explicitly to deal
with the cholera “crisis,” serves as a case study for how epidemics may open up politi-
cal opportunities; in this case, by creating new diplomatic modus operandi and a
rationale for imperial interventions abroad through the regulation of sanitary affairs.
The aim of this chapter is to consider how European medical and diplomatic envoys
to the conference sought to exploit an international regulatory event to construct
policies aimed at controlling Ottoman public health affairs, ultimately extending
their influence over the strategic territories of the Ottoman Empire in the East. In
so doing, the chapter examines the interaction between epidemics and their panics,
national sovereignty, and imperial performativity. In a world marked by contested
boundaries between “civilized” and “non-civilized” societies (the Christian “West”
versus the Islamic, Ottoman “East”), epidemics allowed for a clear demarcation of
these spaces and the use of “civilized” knowledge and practices to control epidemic
risks. Even in cases where these measures were not fully implemented, the process of
negotiation in the face of a “real” infectious disease threat and the terror it triggered
provides critical insights into imperial agendas, while suggesting the complex ways in
which political expediencies were entangled with fears, expectations, and ambitions.
Cholera, which had previously only been endemic in India, began to diffuse
globally in several successive pandemic waves from the beginning of the nineteenth
century (Figure 3.1).8 During this period, European state officials and medical com-
munities carefully monitored the disease and were aware of its spread into the conti-
nent by the late 1820s. Medical missions, sent abroad by governments and scientific
academies to study the disease, failed to reach a consensus about cholera’s etiology. As
a medical category, cholera was far from clear and unified.9 Indeed, it was precisely its

5. See, for example, “The Press and The Cholera,” Times [London], September 15, 1849, 3.
6. Quoted in Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987 [1962]), 27.
7. Hamlin, Cholera, 118.
8. Different writers defend diverging dates for the onset and duration of successive pandemics. See Robert
Pollitzer, Cholera (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1959), 11–49.
9. Pamela K. Gilbert, Cholera and Nation: Doctoring the Social Body in Victorian England (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2008).
Figure 3.1
“Chart Showing the Progress of the Spasmodic Cholera.” Frontispiece to Amariah Brigham’s A Treatise on Epidemic Cholera: Including an
Historical Account of Its Origin and Progress, to the Present Period (Hartford, CT: Huntington, 1832). Courtesy of Princeton University, Historic
Maps Collection.
60 João Rangel de Almeida

elusiveness as a pathological entity that provoked apprehension.10 While some argued

that the disease was a contagious pestilence, others vouched for its noncontagious
nature; the majority of physicians and state administrators combined both positions
in a malleable way.11 Given the disease’s uncertain identity, it is not surprising that
there was a lack of consensus on how to prevent its spread.12 With simultaneous calls
for quarantine and environmental reform, health authorities struggled to offer con-
crete results to their populations.13
Predictably, cholera became a major cause of panic in Europe, driven by specula-
tion about its provenance, mode of transmission, and identity. However, the fears
that united Lisbon, Paris, London, Moscow, and Vienna were less connected with the
sheer number of deaths inflicted by the disease than with the cultural and political
associations of cholera. A disease imported from the colonial world, cholera violated
imperial expectations, countered enlightened ideals of progress, and challenged
scientific rationality. The disease was progressively “Asianized” (Figure 3.2).14 By
1832, Parisians were questioning how a “pestilential” and “uncivilized disease” could
break out in Paris, a city they believed to be the epicenter of the “civilized” world.15
As they faced once white bodies that had been transformed into dark corpses by
cholera, doctors and popular writers in London feared the annihilation of British
civilization and the degeneration of the nation. As Erin O’Connor notes, “Asiatic
cholera took shape in the Victorian imagination as an Oriental raider, a barbaric
force whose progress westward exposed the weak spots of an expanding industrial
culture.”16 Cholera made visible (and tangible) civilizational and racial tensions in
the metropole, opening up unique opportunities for debating matters of social justice
and introducing institutional reforms, which led to new sanitary, housing, and urban
management policies.
While much has been written about the social and cultural repercussions of
cholera in nineteenth-century Europe and North America, far less attention has been
paid to epidemic diplomacy. Cholera and the panic it triggered were crucial to the

10. On the elusiveness of the cholera as an “object-without-an-essence,” see Projit Bihari Mukharji, “The
‘Cholera Cloud’ in the Nineteenth-Century ‘British World’: History of an Object-Without-an-Essence,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 86, no. 3 (2012): 303–32.
11. Margaret Pelling, Cholera, Fever and English Medicine, 1825–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1978); Peter Vinten-Johansen et al., Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John
Snow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
12. Hamlin, Cholera.
13. See Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999).
14. Hamlin, Cholera, 39–46.
15. François Delaporte, Disease and Civilization: The Cholera in Paris, 1832 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1986); on France as antithetical to India and the “East,” see 17–18.
16. Erin O’Connor, Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2000), 22.
Epidemic Opportunities 61

Figure 3.2
Illustration by Fritz Graetz showing the cholera personified as a Turkish immigrant arriving in
New York, Puck, July 18, 1883.

development of multilateral public health initiatives, even as the often convoluted

negotiations about the imposition and regulation of quarantine measures served as
vehicles for preserving and extending national interests. In this chapter the emphasis
is on the instrumentalization of panic in the construction of an international archi-
tecture for managing epidemic disease. The aim, in other words, is to write disease
into diplomatic and international history.17
Many of the other contributors explore panic as a spatial phenomenon. Alan Lester,
for example, investigates how panics are networked across space and human-nonhu-
man boundaries (Chapter 1). “The network, as both a descriptive and an analytical
device,” he writes, “allowed nodal points to exist at a variety of scales, from individual
people through institutional spaces such as the mission station or the laboratory, to
agglomerations such as towns, cities, regions, and countries.” At the same time, efforts
to stem the flow of disease entailed mapping its progress (see Chapter 6). This track-
ing of infection across space revealed geopolitical complexities, particularly in Asia
and the Eastern Mediterranean, where states with growing imperial ambitions sought

17. Erez Manela, “A Pox on Your Narrative: Writing Disease Control into Cold War History,” Diplomatic
History, vol. 34, no. 2 (2010): 299–323.
62 João Rangel de Almeida

to gain ascendancy over the territories of the Ottoman Empire, which extended from
Europe to Anatolia, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa. Here, disease and
politics became intertwined, as the cooperation that had been stimulated by panic
was overshadowed by anxiety over the consequences of losing out economically and
politically to rival states.

Cholera, Quarantine, and International Regulation Opportunities

From an international perspective, cholera created new tensions between the

management of passenger and trade flows and port governance. The French state
administrator, Ségur Dupeyron, concluded in 1834 that the disease had its origins
in the Orient and that “commerce facilitated the transport of plague.” Since cholera
outbreaks followed major commercial routes, it is not surprising that quarantine laws
and practices were revived in Europe to avoid the diffusion of the disease. The idea
was to erect a “first line of defense”18 between infected and healthy places, or, in the
words of Valeska Huber, to develop “membranes” that would allow the passage of
ships in the Mediterranean but halt the spread of infection.19 In theory, local health
authorities would approach arriving ships to inspect their bills of health, passengers,
crew, and cargo. If none of these elements were considered compromised, the vessel
would be authorized to unload its contents freely. However, if authorities feared the
possible presence of choleric matters, ship, passengers, crew, and cargo would be
quarantined for the period deemed necessary to ensure the safety of the port and its
adjacent territories.
Given the impact of quarantine on international exchanges, heated debates took
place in medical and political milieus about the relative merits, efficacy, and detrimen-
tal repercussion of quarantine measures. Newspapers, parliamentary reports, journals,
academic papers, and pamphlets provided supporting and opposing opinions based
on personal experiences, financial considerations, or medical data. Facing demands
from passengers, merchants, and health authorities alike, diplomats endeavored to
negotiate international regulatory agreements that would bring more uniformity to
quarantine practices.20 Quarantine, although an important tool for avoiding epidemic
outbreaks and quelling panic, was a persistent source of contention and debate that
18. Krista Maglen, “‘The First Line of Defence’: British Quarantine and the Port Sanitary Authorities in the
Nineteenth Century,” Social History of Medicine, vol. 15, (2002): 413–28.
19. Valeska Huber, “The Unification of the Globe by Disease? The International Sanitary Conferences
on Cholera, 1851–1894,” Historical Journal, vol. 49, no. 2 (2006): 454–76; see also Valeska Huber,
Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013). On the metaphor of the “membrane” in nineteenth-century litera-
ture, science, and politics, see Laura Otis, Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth-Century
Literature, Science, and Politics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
20. Mark Harrison, Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2012).
Epidemic Opportunities 63

was rarely confined to state bureaucrats and physicians.21 Fractures often emerged
when assessing the prophylactic capacity of quarantines and evaluating their finan-
cial and personal costs: quarantines limited free maritime circulation, contributed to
higher transaction costs with the imposition of quarantine fees, and required the use
of public monies to fund the work of quarantine stations and associated staff.22
From a practical perspective, quarantine policies relied on extensive diplomatic
networks that surveyed the epidemic status of regions under their jurisdiction. In
preparation for international departures, a local consul from the country of desti-
nation would endorse a bill of health that accompanied the vessel. The document
attested to the epidemic status of the region of departure, and described the health
conditions of the vessel, its crew, passengers, and cargo. Consuls, merchants, and
sanitary administrators often complained about the lack of reliable data and the sci-
entific competence of diplomats to make decisions that could potentially compromise
the safety of arrival ports. In addition, the fact that the bill of health dictated the quar-
antine fate of a vessel left merchants uneasy, as they feared that commercial rivalries
influenced the information conveyed in these documents. Merchants suspected that
through false epidemic reports, consuls were attempting to control the flow of trade in
favor of the nations they represented: if a consul issued a false bill of health, the vessel
carrying it would be retained in lengthy quarantine while competitors unloaded their
goods and gained privileged access to markets.23
The haphazard legal framework of quarantines was also subject to stringent criti-
cism. In the 1830s, quarantine practices in the Mediterranean were far from stand-
ardized. According to Dupeyron, a vessel departing from Constantinople (Istanbul)
was subject to a quarantine of 60 days in Marseille but only 34 days in Venice or
Trieste.24 Many argued that because of these variations, quarantines were inefficient
and even useless. Arthur Todd Holroyd, an English physician, jurist, and explorer,
asserted that quarantine was “unphilosophical in theory, or pernicious in practice
[and full] of contradiction, absurdities, and inconsistencies kept up from ignorance

21. Anne Hardy, “Cholera, Quarantine and the English Preventive System, 1850–1895,” Medical History,
vol. 37. no. 3 (1993): 250–69.
22. In a seminal article, Erwin Ackerknecht connected personal political ideologies with quarantine
support. In his view, conservative and autocratic individuals were more likely to support the employ-
ment of quarantines than liberal ones. More recently, Peter Baldwin has argued for a link between
adopted prophylactic strategies and the geo-epidemic position of the countries where these measures
were practiced. According to Baldwin, countries closer to the epidemic center of a pandemic are
more likely to adopt quarantines than those that experience outbreaks later; see Erwin Ackerknecht,
“Anticontagionism between 1821 and 1867,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 22 (1948): 562–93;
Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe.
23. Mark Harrison, “Disease, Diplomacy and International Commerce: The Origins of International
Sanitary Regulation in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Global History, vol. 1, no. 2 (2006): 197–217.
24. Ségur Dupeyron, Rapport Adressé à Son Exc. le Ministre du Commerce (Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale,
1834).
64 João Rangel de Almeida

or interested motives.”25 Like many other radicals, he advocated for its cessation. In
contrast, Dupeyron, alongside several other physicians, politicians, state administra-
tors, travelers, and merchants, demanded that quarantine policies be reviewed and
drafted at national and international level.26
Whether in the form of eliminating or reforming quarantine, regulatory changes
were regarded as imperative. However, policy changes in the Mediterranean were
a complex and problematic affair. For instance, from a national perspective, France
only placed quarantine under the jurisdiction of central government in 1850. Until
then, local authorities such as the Marseille Intendancy enjoyed a fair amount of
autonomy in their operations. As the health of the local population was at stake, they
demanded control over the preventive mechanisms to deter epidemic outbreaks.27
Thus, these local authorities were able to design and impose policies, perform sani-
tary inspections, and enforce sanctions on offending captains, crews, merchants, and
passengers. The concentration of power in regional authorities undermined efforts
to create coherent national—let alone international—sanitary programs by favoring
local interests. Moreover, the dispersion of power across local authorities contra-
dicted contemporary ideas of central governments as power and policy brokers.28
From an international perspective, states found it impossible to modify quarantine
regulations without cooperation from other governments. J. Lewis, author of a report
on quarantine commissioned by the British Secretary of State for the Colonies in
1838, viewed it as “the main obstacle to maritime intercourse in the Mediterranean.”29
Lewis found the practice superfluous, but was aware that any attempt to regulate
quarantine would require international compromises:

If the English Government should change the Quarantine Regulations of Malta

and its other colonies in the Mediterranean, without previously obtaining the
approbation of the sanitary authorities of the neighbouring countries, the pra-
tique granted in those colonies would not be received elsewhere; and vessels
coming from any of those colonies would be subjected to a quarantine of obser-
vation . . . The latter liability would attach to ships of the Royal Navy; as well as to
merchant-vessels; so that no ship of war sailing from Malta could communicate

25. Arthur Todd Holroyd, The Quarantine Laws: Their Abuses and Inconsistencies; A Letter Addressed to
the Rt. Hon. Sir John Cam Hobhouse, Bart. M.P., President of the Board of Control (London: Simpkin,
Marshall & Co., 1839).
26. For example, in 1817 when the first cholera pandemic began, Henry Matthews left England in search of
better climates to improve his health, keeping a diary in which he reflected on the purpose and scope
of quarantines. See Henry Matthews, The Diary of an Invalid: Being the Journal of a Tour in Pursuit of
Health, in Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, and France, in the Years 1817, 1818, and 1819 (Paris: Baudry,
1836).
27. Françoise Hildesheimer, “Marseille, capitale sanitaire de la France,” Actes du 101e Congrès National des
Sociétés Savantes (Montpellier, 1985), 135–49.
28. See Stefan Berger, A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1789–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
29. “Memorandum Respecting Quarantine Regulations in the Mediterranean by Mr. Lewis, London, 26
June 1838,” Enclosure 4 in no. 10, 83.
Epidemic Opportunities 65

with any part of France, Italy, or Austria, without being previously subjected to a
quarantine of Observation.30

Unilaterally, Britain was unable to change the quarantine model practiced in the
Mediterranean. Any small legal and practical change had the potential to produce
ramifying “inconveniences far greater than those arising from the existing system.”31
This was far from an exclusively British concern. In 1850, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte,
the President of the French Republic, used similar arguments to justify the organiza-
tion of an international conference to regulate public health internationally. In his
view:

Quarantine measures provide the government with means to protect public

health against outside threats. However, their excessive use hinders the freedom
of our international relations. The restrictive principles practiced by foreign
powers cause great damage to French trade. Without reciprocity, our regulations
have been inspired by a liberal attitude. An agreement between the great powers
with Mediterranean ports will end obstacles, delays and costs imposed by quar-
antines. All our efforts are focused on reaching such an agreement.32

Confronted by similar challenges, Paris and London tried, without success, to create
forums dedicated to the international regulation of quarantine from 1838 onwards.33
Although important, the free flow of trade was not the only reason underpinning
the desired standardization of quarantine policies. The need to stop the increasing
number of epidemic outbreaks in Europe played an equal role. Yellow fever and
cholera, in addition to spreading fear and death, highlighted the fragility of anti-
epidemic measures practiced on the continent. Between 1800 and 1820, yellow fever
outbreaks in Spain made it clear that Europe was exposed to a degree of “exotic”
disease rarely experienced before.34 By the 1830s, cholera outbreaks were exacerbating
fears and doubts about the capacity of European societies to cope with new epidemic

30. Ibid., 85.

31. Ibid.
32. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, Discours et messages de Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, depuis son retour en
France jusqu’au 2 décembre 1852 (Paris: Plon Frères, 1853), 119.
33. From 1838, France and Britain actively endeavored to organize an international forum for the regula-
tion of quarantine. However, cabinet changes and unstable international climates meant that the organ-
ization of international public health initiatives was unsuccessful. Detailed diplomatic correspondence
can be found here: Great Britain Foreign Office, Correspondence Relative to the Contagion of Plague and
the Quarantine Regulations of Foreign Countries, 1836–1843 (London: Harrison, 1843).
34. In 1800, yellow fever outbreaks in Spain resulted in a death toll of more than 60,000, spreading fear
across Europe. Two decades later, new outbreaks in Spain justified a French intervention in the country.
Epidemic diseases and public health safety conditioned international political affairs; see Lawrence A.
Sawchuk and Stacie D. A. Burke, “Gibraltar’s 1804 Yellow Fever Scourge: The Search for Scapegoats,”
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, vol. 53, no. 1 (1998): 3–42; George D. Sussman,
“From Yellow Fever to Cholera: A Study of French Government Policy, Medical Professionalism and
Popular Movements in the Epidemic Crises of the Restoration and the July Monarchy” (unpublished
PhD thesis, Yale University, 1971).
66 João Rangel de Almeida

diseases. Calls for the international production and circulation of knowledge intensi-
fied. At the same time, many physicians and politicians demanded the creation of
central agencies to prevent and manage epidemics.35
These concerns led the French government to organize the 1851 International
Sanitary Conference in Paris.36 The invitation letter sent to potential participants
was clear regarding the object of the conference: “Health, and health only” would
be the concern of the delegates. There was an expectation that state envoys would
standardize quarantine practices in the Mediterranean and even improve the speed
of international exchanges. However, Paris demanded that reforms not “compromise
the sacred interests of public health.”37 The French plan was certainly ambitious. In
contrast to proposals put forward in previous debates on quarantine regulation, the
organizers envisioned a complex international epidemic governance scheme. Affixed
to the invitation letter was a seven-page list detailing the major points of what France
titled the Official Mediterranean Sanitary Law. In addition to quarantine reform, the
French Ministry of Foreign Affairs suggested the institution of a grand international
program in order to establish international sanitary laws, standard bills of health,
uniform sanitary authorities, and a shared judicial system. In short, epidemic panics,
coupled with hopes of easing international exchanges, created the opportunity for an
international governance of epidemic diseases that disregarded conventional politi-
cal boundaries. In an unprecedented move, states were invited to find solutions to a
scientific controversy through diplomatic channels and international law.

1851 as a Diplomatic Precedent

Opening on July 27, 1851, the International Sanitary Conference was hosted in
the Parisian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In total, 12 states with interests in the
Mediterranean—Austria, Britain, France, Greece, Portugal, the Roman States, Russia,
the Kingdom of Sardinia, Spain, the Ottoman Empire, Tuscany, and the Kingdom of
the Two Sicilies—appointed two delegates each, a doctor and a diplomat. Doctors
were expected to “represent the scientific element” while diplomats would protect

35. In 1838, for example, Dr. Bâtard proposed that a congress should be organized in Europe to research
ways of improving sanitary measures against epidemic diseases. The congress, which was to be com-
posed of physicians and state administrators, was expected to “elucidate the truth of the contagion of
plague and apply this knowledge into universal sanitary legislation.” In his view, the combination of
medical knowledge and systematic experimentation would allow old medical disputes to be solved,
and, at the same time, enable legislation to be produced that would forever free humanity from plague
and other epidemic diseases; see A. Bulard, “Congrès Sanitaire Européen,” Journal des débats politiques
et littéraires (November 10, 1838): 3–4.
36. Bonaparte, Discours et messages.
37. Arquivo Histórico Diplomático, Lisbon, Leg./Emb. Paris (hereafter AHD, LEP) Maço 6, Baroche to
Paiva, Lisbon, April 16, 1851.
Epidemic Opportunities 67

“the maritime administrative commercial” interests.38 Under the direct control of

their respective ministers of foreign affairs, delegates were entrusted with particular
agendas to defend in the sessions and commissions that composed the conference.
The 1851 International Sanitary Conference was unique in many ways. As an
international event dedicated to the circulation of knowledge, the conference was
part of a new trend that emerged in the early nineteenth century. According to the
Union des Associations Internationales, during the first half of the century, 26 inter-
national nondiplomatic conferences and congresses were organized in Europe.
These meetings were convened in major European capitals over two to three days
to debate particular issues related to physics, slavery, prison practices, economics,
and agriculture—to name just a few topics.39 Although they were often sponsored by
national governments, delegates to these events were not mandated by their states.
Delegates represented professional and individual views without directly implicat-
ing their states or having the tools or power to translate congressional decisions into
legislation.40 As a diplomatic event that aimed to regulate the world, the conference
was equally original. International conferences and congresses such as the 1814–15
Congress of Vienna were sporadically organized after major armed conflicts. These
events settled new political borders and negotiated war compensation agreements.
Thus, diplomatic conferences were exclusively composed of state-appointed del-
egates—professional diplomats or in some cases governmental members or heads of
state—mandated with clear national agendas.
The heterogeneous structure of the 1851 conference, attended as it was by del-
egates with very different professional backgrounds, underscored the lack of pre­
existing protocols to guide and regulate its operations. Antonio Segóvia, the Spanish
diplomatic envoy, wondered how to organize voting rights or even manage the work
of the conference. Granting one vote per delegate would erode distinctions between
diplomatic and medical expertise, while running the risk of weakening the repre-
sentative power of countries in cases where a country’s delegates voted against each
other. Although delegates such as Sir Anthony Perrier, who represented Britain,
insisted that delegations to the conference should be cohesive groups united by terms
of reference issued by each government and thus granted only a single vote, in the end
the conference set the diplomatic precedent of granting equal rights to physicians and
diplomats in a venue dedicated to the international regulation of epidemic affairs.41

38. Ibid.
39. Union of International Associations, Les Congrès Internationaux de 1681 à 1899: liste complète (Brussels:
Union des Associations Internationales, 1960).
40. Christophe Prochasson, “Les congrès: lieux de l’échange intellectuel. Introduction,” Cahiers Georges
Sorel, vol. 7 (1989): 5–8.
41. Conférence sanitaire internationale, vol. 1 (August 7, 1851), 5. The 1851 protocol decisions were revis-
ited in 13 further International Sanitary Conferences organized between 1851 and 1939. Although
they were organized by diplomatic institutions, the conferences did not always have diplomatic or
68 João Rangel de Almeida

To assess the program initially proposed and to organize the works of the confer-
ence, delegates elected a president—the French diplomatic envoy, C. E. David—and
organized ad hoc commissions. These commissions analyzed specific issues such as
the constitution of international tribunals, the organization of sanitary administra-
tions, and the standardization of sanitary fees. After intense debate, delegates also set
out the format of the final outcome of the conference: a draft Sanitary Convention
(Projet de Convention Sanitaire) and draft International Sanitary Regulations (Projet
de Règlement Sanitaire International). These documents represented the model of
international public health governance envisioned by the officially mandated par-
ticipants. Although they were merely drafts, the ratification of the documents would
transform them into international law. Thus, in this instance, international law was
co-drafted by professionals without a diplomatic background but who were consid-
ered expert enough to contribute to the international regulation of on scientific issues.

European Sanitary Authorities and the Uniformization Attempt

The crises produced by cholera epidemics provided opportunities for imperial expan-
sion. They also gave rise to debates about the feasibility of international public health
interventions, in particular the creation of standard sanitary authorities and the
establishment of international arbitration courts for sanitary matters.
On December 9, 1851, delegates congregated to debate the future organization of
sanitary authorities (magistratures or autorités sanitaires). France had urged govern-
ments to make these port institutions as uniform as possible. While they wished to
take the “laws and practices of each country” into consideration, it was suggested
that the new authorities should be organized along the same lines: first, sanitary
authorities should be headed by a state-appointed agent; second, they should include
a council of local dignitaries. The aim was to create a system controlled by centralized
states and internationally recognized as credible. By allowing a forum for local voices,
France hoped, to a certain extent, to integrate local peculiarities into the interna-
tional regulation of epidemic diseases. This was particularly important, since these
authorities required not only international but also national and local credibility in
order to operate with success.42 France also hoped to open up places on local sanitary
councils to foreign consuls in an attempt to break discriminatory practices against
foreign vessels and to allow the free flow of information between all interested parties.
Under the aegis of “international law,” consuls would be summoned every time that
decisions concerning their nations were made locally.43 Arguably, this centralization

medical envoys. In 1859, physicians were excluded while in 1866 diplomats were not appointed as
official envoys to the conference.
42. AHD, LEP, Maço 6, Baroche to Paiva, Lisbon, April 16, 1851.
43. Ibid.
Epidemic Opportunities 69

attempt aimed to provide a mechanism for controlling the emergence of panic. Or

rather, of multiple panics since, as a number of contributors show in this collection,
the threat posed by epidemics produced a contagious effect across media: from the
material pathways of trade to the transcontinental telegraphic cables which connected
global markets. As Alison Bashford rightly points out in the epilogue to this book, “A
history of panic and disease, then, turns out to be a history of communication and
technology.” The French proposals for a uniform sanitary system in 1851 relied upon
extensive transnational surveillance machineries underpinned by international law.
States would be better able to control the flow of information, the trust in sanitary
authorities would be reaffirmed, and the propagation of unwarranted and destabi-
lizing fears avoided. Not surprisingly, these proposals were strikingly similar to the
organization of the French sanitary system, which France hoped would be adopted as
an international template.44
Soon after the opening of the conference in July, the Program Commission
accepted and reinforced the initial French proposal by judging the project to estab-
lish international uniformity an “excellent idea.” The commission argued that “the
presence of consuls in [local] councils could not be more advantageous” and invited
delegates to determine the number of consuls to be included in each council and to
offer these diplomats deliberative powers on local sanitary affairs.45 Efficiency and
responsibility were the two buzzwords underpinning the commission’s report.
In mid-October, a new commission was appointed. Headed by the French physi-
cian François Mêlier, the Commission on the Organization of Sanitary Magistracies
or Authorities included diplomats from Britain, Russia, Tuscany, and Spain, and
two doctors from Portugal and Sardinia in addition to Mêlier himself. One month
later, the commission’s final report was read to the conference. The commission-
ers provided further details of the methods for organizing sanitary authorities in
Europe, clearly framing the hierarchies and competencies. In contrast with the initial
French invitation letter and the document produced by the Program Commission,
the Commission on the Organization of Sanitary Authorities perceived local health
councils as mere consultative bodies. All deliberative and executive powers would
now be held by a director of health.46 Directly appointed by central governments,
these new appointments were tasked with managing staff; executing sanitary laws

44. French attempts to model the world upon its own political and bureaucratic structures were not limited
to the conference; see Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990 (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990), 110. In the particular case of sanitary affairs, in 1768 the Duke of Praslin—the French
Secretary of State of the Navy—argued that “it was desirable for the communication between nations
and for the wellbeing of humanity and navigators that all quarantine stations in the Mediterranean
should be modeled upon [assimilés] Marseille”; Archive départmentales des Bouches-du-Rhone, C4464
cited by Hildesheimer, “Marseille, capitale sanitaire de la France,” 135.
45. Procés-verbaux, séance 7.
46. Procés-verbaux, séance 32.
70 João Rangel de Almeida

and regulations; assessing the sanitary status of arriving vessels; delivering bills of
health to departing ships; and surveying the sanitary conditions of the region under
each director’s jurisdiction. Due to their training and expertise, doctors were judged
to be the most suitable candidates to head the new sanitary stations. In the hope
of avoiding corruption and making these state agents accountable, the professionals
were to be compensated with a fixed salary paid by the state, a practice not wide-
spread at the time.47
Under the director of health, the institution of a local consultative board of health
completed the proposed sanitary reform. Composed of civil and military leaders,
notable citizens, members of local administrations, merchants, doctors, and chemists,
the board brought a local perspective to the national governance of epidemics while
promoting the local practice of hygienic measures.48 In addition, it was expected to
include a member of the diplomatic community. By inviting local consuls to elect a
delegate to the board, commissioners hoped to improve international trust in local
strategies for avoiding epidemic outbreaks. As witnesses, consuls could offer valu-
able accounts of sanitary conditions abroad while gaining knowledge of local sani-
tary conditions and policies. It was thought that the inclusion of foreigners, who had
access to privileged information through extensive diplomatic networks, would add
further sources of epidemic data for local consideration. Moreover, it was expected
that these consuls would also raise the international level of trust in the local epidemic
control practices through reports to their superiors. In order to avoid international
interference in local affairs, the consul-delegate was deprived of any deliberative
power. Instead, he was exclusively invited as an observer and it was anticipated that,
upon request, he would offer advice. Although local and international voices were
to be taken into consideration by the local board and the director of health, local
health authorities were clearly placed under the control and jurisdiction of central
governments.
In early December, delegates met to discuss the projects produced by the Program
Commission and the Commission on Sanitary Authorities. Ebeling, the Russian dip-
lomatic envoy, immediately announced that he was forced to abstain from voting on
any measure that obliged his empire to reorganize its sanitary institutions. Ebeling’s
declaration caused bewilderment. As an active member of the Commission on
Sanitary Authorities, the Russian diplomat had helped develop the reformist agenda;
however, when voting in the name of his state, Ebeling struggled to reconcile his per-
sonal convictions with the agenda pushed by his government. Russia did not wish to
abdicate its freedom and control over what it considered to be exclusively a national
affair.49

47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Procés-verbaux, séance 41.
Epidemic Opportunities 71

Russia was not the only state apprehensive about the commission’s intervention-
ist agenda. Austria refused to support measures that contradicted its own sanitary
policies, while the Two Sicilies and Portugal had reservations about an interna-
tional engineering of national sanitary affairs.50 In the view of the Austrian physi-
cian representative, Dr. Ménis, any international resolution should take the form of
guidelines. States could use these recommendations if they desired to reform their
sanitary systems without compromising their legitimate autonomy and control over
these issues. Forcing any mandatory organizational changes, Ménis argued, would
directly intervene in private national affairs. Each government had “its administra-
tive principles, its particular rules to manage state administration” that resulted from
demographical, geographical, and climatic peculiarities.51 If an international reor-
ganization of sanitary authorities did not account for these realities, it was destined
to failure: no state would adopt or execute these measures. Ménis believed that it was
pointless to work out a common model of sanitary organization given that many
nations were determined to maintain their heterogeneous administrative practices.
Austria had introduced major sanitary reforms not long before the start of the
conference. During its most recent reformist wave in 1847, a system similar to the one
under discussion at the conference had been instituted: sanitary affairs had been cen-
tralized under the Ministry of Trade, which, through its Central Maritime Sanitary
Council, regulated health affairs and quarantine practices.52 The Central Council also
coordinated a network of subordinate offices, each composed of one state agent and a
controller.53 The active resistance of Austria was primarily an attempt to maintain the
status quo of its sovereignty and to avoid the introduction of foreign diplomats into
its internal institutions, a measure not practiced in Austria.
Facing opposition, France highlighted the similarities between the Austrian system
of organization and the one under discussion. François Mêlier, the French medical
envoy, stressed that the conference’s attempt to standardize sanitary authorities at
an international level still preserved the autonomy of states over sanitary affairs.54

50. Ibid.
51. Ibid. During the conference, delegates struggled to square personal beliefs with state mandates and
international agendas. For example, when the delegates discussed the etiology of cholera, the British
medical envoy voted against his government’s orders in order to preserve his professional integrity.
52. Ronald E. Coons, “Steamships and Quarantines at Trieste, 1837–1848,” Journal of History of Medicine
and Allied Sciences, vol. 44, no. 1 (1989): 28–55.
53. During the debate on sanitary administration, Ménis described Austria’s national system in some
detail; see Procés-verbaux, séance 41.
54. Mêlier was closely involved with the conference’s organization as the author of the preliminary confer-
ence program attached to the invitation letter sent by France to all participating countries. He was
also a central figure in the quarantine dispute involving the French government and the Marseille
Intendancy in 1850. The French doctor was then appointed the government’s agent responsible for the
Marseillais health authority; Hildesheimer, “Marseille, Capitale Sanitaire de la France”; see J. Bergeron,
“Éloge de M. Mêlier. Lu dans la séance du 11 Décembre 1888,” Mémoires de l’Académie de Médecine, vol.
36 (1891): 1–38.
72 João Rangel de Almeida

Isolated, English and Spanish delegates voiced clear support for the pro-reformist and
interventionist agenda of the conference. Together, they repudiated Austro-Russian
attempts to preserve the status quo in a venue organized specifically to promote
change. As the Spaniard, Segóvia, concluded, “if each [country] was to stay in the
same way, it was useless to discuss [any agenda aimed at standardizing procedures].”55
Both delegates agreed that even if gradual, reform implied change and that the confer-
ence’s commitment to standardization was clear from the moment it was organized.56
However, the British support for centralization contained an important caveat.
Perrier regarded the system proposed by the conference as a positive strategy, accom-
modating the promotion of central control while allowing local interests to be taken
into consideration. Yet, as he eventually revealed, his country’s strategy was marked
by a double standard: Britain only intended to reform the organization of the sani-
tary institutions of its Mediterranean territories—Gibraltar, the Ionian Islands, and
Malta. Mainland affairs, it appeared, were to remain the exclusive responsibility of the
national government. No international organization should aspire to intervene in the
autonomy, control, and legitimacy of the British state.57 The capacity to demarcate ter-
ritorial boundaries as subject to uneven doses of international intervention was not
available to all countries. For instance, in contrast with Britain, the geopolitical reality
of Austria resulted in the likelihood of the subjugation of national health authorities
to international decisions. The sacrifice of autonomy would be felt in the very terri-
tory of the country itself, not in some rather distant possession that already enjoyed a
certain level of political autonomy.58 Territorial topology was clearly important when
assessing the impact of international intervention upon national sovereignty.
Although compromises could be attempted in order to solve disputes surrounding
the idea of standardizing health authorities, agreeing on specific details was far more
problematic for the delegates to the conference. In particular, delegates struggled to
support the idea of opening health authorities to foreign consuls. From the organ-
izers’ perspective, this measure allowed both local and international interest to be

55. Procés-verbaux, séance 41.

56. By the end of the 1840s, Whitehall started developing policies and infrastructures to impose and
supervise national sanitary standards within a frame of local autonomy. The 1848 Public Health Act,
for example, was a clear attempt to impose a public health central supervisory body; see Robert M.
Gutchen, “Local Improvements and Centralization in Nineteenth-Century England,” Historical
Journal, vol. 4, no. 1 (1961): 85–96; E. T. Stokes, “Bureaucracy and Ideology: Britain and India in the
Nineteenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Fifth Series), vol. 30 (1980): 131–56;
Carlo M. Cipolla, Miasmas and Disease: Public Health and the Environment in the Pre-Industrial Age
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
57. See Procés-verbaux, séance 42.
58. If this argument is explored to its full extent, one can perhaps see the conference as an opportunity
for the British government to claim and gain legitimacy so as to further control and order its over-
seas territories. Under the general veil of international sanitary reforms and the specific conference
mandate, Britain was “obliged” to intervene in its Mediterranean possessions. These policies could even
be claimed as “humanitarian.”
Epidemic Opportunities 73

easily taken into account by opening new channels of communication. The consul-
delegate would be able to offer official documentation that proved the sanitary status
of departure ports while directly observing and reporting on local initiatives in order
to curb epidemic risk and avert unnecessary local fears. In summary, the presence of
an international observer was aimed at raising trust in local sanitary activities and
potentially shortening—perhaps even avoiding—costly quarantines both locally and
abroad.
This measure was not wholly original. Both France and Sardinia already granted
diplomatic access to their local boards of health. In fact, British and Austrian envoys
sat regularly in these sanitary councils as consul-delegates.59 Even in countries where
councils were not open to foreigners, consuls were heavily involved in their work.
As the Turkish diplomat summarized, consuls certified bills of health, facilitated the
process of cargo quarantine, and witnessed the opening of letters and official cor-
respondence: they were a constant presence in the governance of epidemic matters.60
The novelty of this proposal of opening health authorities to foreign consuls, there-
fore, was not in its practice, but in its formal character. If accepted, a foreigner would
legitimately have the right to a permanent presence on the council without depending
on the goodwill of local or national authorities.
Formal ratification of such a role was indeed the pivotal issue at hand. If formal-
ized, the introduction of consuls could potentially degrade national autonomy and
control over territories and issues of sanitary governance. There were several aspects
of the issue that caused disagreement. First, as Ménis noted, the inclusion of consuls
in an official national body—even if local in its nature—was illegal in countries like
Austria where “the exercise of public functions [was] interdicted to foreigners.”61
Second, it was argued that the presence of foreign citizens on these boards would have
serious local consequences: introducing foreign elements into institutions that, first
and foremost, had been designed to protect local interests would compromise the
trust placed in them by local populations. How could they be sure that their interests
were properly protected when foreigners often had conflicting agendas imposed by
the states and merchants they represented?62 Third, because it would be the task of
local consular communities to elect a delegate, the measure did not allow “perfect
reciprocity.” For these reasons, a state with powerful diplomatic apparatus could, in
theory, secure the election of its consuls all over the Mediterranean while those less
powerful might fail to secure any seats at all. According to the Sardinian, Magnetto,
this would work against the national dignity of represented states, as it potentially
reified their inequality.63 Furthermore, the Portuguese diplomat pointed out that
59. Procés-verbaux, séance 41.
60. Ibid.
61. Procés-verbaux, séance 41.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid.
74 João Rangel de Almeida

smaller countries, like his own, risked being undermined by foreigners if they were to
have the same power as national authorities.64
Others were wary of foreign access to privy matters. Vitalis, the Greek envoy,
voiced his concerns that there could be a breach of national security if foreigners
were allowed to freely survey the works of important governmental bodies.65 On the
same note, the Roman diplomat contended that many of the affairs under discussion
in these authorities should not be disclosed to foreigners due to their confidentiality.66
Finally, as the Sicilian delegate, Carbonaro, put it, political reforms should result from
a recognizable need for change that was not present in this initiative: resident consuls
were already called every time that local councils needed them. To reserve a manda-
tory seat for a consul-delegate did not offer sanitary or organizational advantages but
instead imposed extra layers of problems.67
The concerns voiced by the opposition were dismissed by Mêlier and Segóvia as
out of tune with reality. Segóvia reminded his fellow delegates that the conference
had already redefined the structure of sanitary authorities. The new model removed
the executive and deliberative powers of local councils in order to give them a new
role as advisors to a state-appointed director of health. Thus, their lack of power
restricted the capacity of foreign councils to influence national sanitary policies.68
Furthermore, as Mêlier somewhat idealistically argued, foreign consuls would not
jeopardize national security or interest since they acted on goodwill: health, a matter
that concerned everyone, was not susceptible to national interest.69
In order to bypass the controversy, some delegates requested that the proposal be
withdrawn. Others, led by the Portuguese delegate, Mouzinho da Silveira, suggested
leaving the decision up to each nation’s individual discretion. Clearly, both of these
positions privileged the status quo and resisted change. Eventually, delegates followed
the Portuguese proposition and allowed each state to apply the measure voluntarily.
If desired, states could allow the presence of consuls in local councils, just as they
had before the conference. This decision may have reflected a growing anxiety over
national sovereignty, of which ministers of foreign affairs made their delegates aware
of. More importantly, the attempt to limit the exposure of sanitary institutions to
foreign governments was a symbolic move that avoided the formalization of a pro-
cedure already largely practiced. From a political perspective, abandoning the idea
of introducing foreign consuls may have been more profitable than trying to impose
it. In addition, by avoiding the formal introduction of foreign elements into local
institutions, states hoped to maintain the levels of trust in local health authorities,

64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid., séance 42.
69. Ibid., séance 41.
Epidemic Opportunities 75

thus avoiding the introduction of further uncertainty and possibly contributing to

the emergence of panic.

International Arbitration Courts and the Fear of Lost Sovereignty

The conflict between concerns for national sovereignty and the proposed program
reached its peak at the start of the debate on the creation of international arbitration
tribunals. The tribunals were to be composed of foreign consuls with jurisdiction over
all sanitary disputes, and would transfer the national control over judicial disputes to
international bodies. States would lose their autonomy and their right to address and
punish the infringement of sanitary law independently. Instead, new international
institutions, outside of national governmental jurisdiction, would have the capacity
to rule on crimes committed in national territories.
In the program circulated prior to the beginning of the conference, France
requested that delegates consider the creation of an “Arbitration Tribunal [Tribunal
Arbitral] in charge of hearing and ruling [sanitary infractions].”70 Departing from
this document, the Program Commission found it necessary to compose a three-
person subcommission in order to make an immediate assessment of the viability
of the measure. Together, Perrier (Britain), Segóvia (Spain), and Lavison (Austria)
questioned whether the conference had a mandate to debate the creation of an insti-
tution composed of foreign consuls with potential power to rule in national sover-
eign territories. If instituted, these tribunals could be capable of “decid[ing] upon
governmental decisions, or at least, to condemn their actions.” It was crucial, they
concluded, to ascertain whether the conference was authorized to pronounce upon
such paramount issues.71
It was clear to the subcommissioners that all participating states had received the
precirculated program of the conference and that this document had been instru-
mental in the decision to send a delegation to the conference. Therefore, members
of the subcommission presumed that all delegates were authorized to engage in such
discussions, since they were each chosen and mandated by their respective govern-
ments based on information provided in the conference program. Moreover, the sub-
commissioners argued that ignoring debate about these matters—as some delegates
suggested—would contradict the expectations of the organizers and participating
governments.
The subcommission suggested changing the name of the proposed arbitration
tribunal to “arbitration court.” A court composed of consuls belonging to the high
contracting parties and residing locally would be instituted in each major port—or, at
least, one per country. This court, after considering evidence on sanitary misconduct,

70. AHD, LEP, Maço 6, Baroche to Paiva, Lisbon, April 16, 1851.
71. Procés-verbaux, séance 7.
76 João Rangel de Almeida

would be empowered to settle pecuniary compensation. Nevertheless, all parties

would be allowed to appeal to local justice if unsatisfied with the verdict. More impor-
tantly, the court would only have jurisdiction over questions of sanitary regulation.
Any infraction of the future International Sanitary Convention would still be solved
through traditional diplomatic mechanisms outside of the courts.72 Nevertheless, the
existence of arbitration courts would offer a prompt solution to curb infractions and
raise the levels of trust in the international sanitary system envisaged in the confer-
ence. Perhaps organizers hoped that the introduction of efficient legal tools could
contribute to reducing local fears caused by the possible mismanagement of sanitary
affairs.
Upon reading the subcommission’s report, the Program Commission concurred:
the creation of common arbitration institutions was “the most difficult and delicate”
issue to be addressed by the conference. Nevertheless, in proportion to its difficulty
was its importance.73 The conference had to develop mechanisms that enhanced regu-
lation compliance and the punishment of inevitable offenders. Merchants, crews, and
passengers were all likely to evade international sanitary regulations, as indeed were
state authorities. Any international mechanism had to account for the wide range of
potential offenders.
The introduction of international courts also aimed to avoid the constant involve-
ment of diplomats in sanitary disputes: an expensive, inefficient, and time-consum-
ing option. Likewise, the commission hoped to prevent the situation of a state being
judged by a foreign court under the jurisdiction of a second state and its foreign law.
A possible solution was the creation of a shared institution under the jurisdiction of
international law and legitimately mandated to solve sanitary disputes. The courts,
the commission hoped, would provide the much-needed tools to “assure the loyal
and complete execution of the Convention and Regulation.”74
The idea of states being judged from outside their own legal institutions did not
gather enthusiastic support from the delegates. Even France, the country that had
suggested the creation of international sanitary tribunals, expressed concerns about
its own idea. David, the conference president and diplomatic envoy of the host state,
noted that such a measure could potentially infringe “the letter and spirit of all exist-
ing [international] treaties by which consuls were limited to exercise judicial author-
ity in foreign countries.”75 More radically, Ménis of Austria demanded the immediate
revocation of any attempt to introduce international tribunals disguised as courts.
In his view, the legitimacy and autonomy of each state’s judicial system should not

72. Ibid.
73. Ibid. There were other issues addressed by the conference that were also considered to be among the
most difficult and delicate issues to be solved: for example, deciding whether cholera was a contagious
disease.
74. Procés-verbaux, séance 7.
75. Procés-verbaux, séance 43. My emphasis.
Epidemic Opportunities 77

be sacrificed by any means. To interfere with national judicial matters offended the
dignity of represented government, he argued.76
From a practical perspective, the Sardinian, Magnetto, argued that no absolutist
state would support a measure that jeopardized its direct authority and control over
national affairs. To these governments, the word “court” “produce[d] the same horror
as that of Holy Office in France and in Britain.”77 Moreover, the diversity of European
legal traditions and judicial systems made any attempt at standardization impossible
in the eyes of the Greek diplomatic envoy. The most probable result, he concluded,
was an ever-growing number of illegal sentences likely to be subject to appeal. This
naturally defeated the purpose of instituting such courts.
Equally problematic were the stipulations to secure fair trials: the Program
Commission barred consuls of nations whose citizens or interests were under trial
to be appointed to the judging collective. This, the Greek noted, created an inevita-
ble legal loophole. Cases under trial were likely to involve vessels registered in one
country but captained by a citizen of another. The cargo could easily belong to a
merchant from a third nation, while passengers could potentially be subjects of all
contracting powers. The cosmopolitan nature of international transportation ini-
tiatives could result in cases where courts could not be appointed due to the lack of
impartial consuls.78 Moreover, as the Portuguese diplomat stressed, the ratification of
the International Sanitary Convention and Regulations required states to incorporate
international law into their national legal corpus, making it de facto national law. For
this reason, legal infractions transgressed national laws. He concluded that “the right
to judge infraction of laws [was] a liberty that should be allowed to each government.
This was a guarantee of order and national independency.”79 Silveira expected the
conference to “respect the liberty of nations.”80
Only Spain and Britain supported the idea of developing a network of international
sanitary courts. For Segóvia, it was clear that an alternative to the present system was
required, ideally one that would end the “countless complaints and endless diplo-
matic correspondence” exchanged when solving sanitary infractions and disputes.
An alternative, moreover, that would end the present dissatisfaction with verdicts
that made “one of the parties . . . always feel injured.”81 The alternative he desired was
a new network of international sanitary courts.
Segóvia understood that delegates feared the empowerment of foreigners to “judge
infractions committed by compatriots or state officials.” This fear and prejudice
dated back to ancient Roman civilization, he noted. However, times had changed.

76. Ibid.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid.
78 João Rangel de Almeida

Europe was now a modern and civilized continent where the degree of “distrust and
antipathy against foreigners was inversely [proportional]  to the civilization of the
people.” Whatever was “unfair to a Frenchman, to a Spaniard, or to a Russian, would
not be honest or fair to an Englishman, a Portuguese, or an Italian.” Consuls were
modern men who had “studied the laws and customs of the country” of residence;
they learned the language, established families, and worked toward the prosperity
of not only the countries they represented but also the communities where they
lived. Foreign consuls were a singular class of humanity, capable of judging sanitary
offences without prejudice.82
Despite Segóvia’s confidence in the good nature and impartiality of consuls, the
attempt to create international sanitary courts failed. Out of 24 delegates, 19 voted
against institutions they saw as a challenge to the autonomy, control, and legitimacy
of national legal systems. In a private letter sent to the English Foreign Office, its
delegates concluded that “the advantages of an Arbitration Tribunal, composed of
consuls, was admitted by almost all the members, but the dread of foreign influence,
and the desire to keep secret their motives for imposing quarantine measures, caused
a most strenuous opposition from the delegates of all the petty states.” 83 Even French
delegates failed to support their own proposal: “Mr David,” the English delegates
wrote, “joined the opponents and stated his belief that France would not admit of any
foreigner jurisdiction within Her Territory.” 84 It was clear that European countries
were powerful enough to avoid relinquishing autonomy over their legal apparatus.
While discussing the harmonization of sanitary institutions and the creation of
international courts, delegates considered multiple interventionist scenarios. Aiming
to create a common institutional framework, they hoped to institute an efficient and
accountable way of controlling epidemic diseases. During the process, delegates
struggled to articulate the emergence of an international order with the preserva-
tion of the autonomy, legitimacy and control of the states they represented. For these
reasons, they found it impossible to relinquish their states’ sovereignty and refused
to adopt any measure that would compromise such an important value. Delegates
agreed to standardize the structure of European sanitary authorities, but would not
allow either the election of foreign consuls to national institutions or the subjugation
of their states to the judicial control of international courts. Epidemic crises opened
several opportunities for the creation of transnational governance mechanisms, but
concerns about the sanitary and judicial independence of European states limited the
ambitious plan defended by some delegates. In many ways, as we have seen, epidemic
fear and panic were two leitmotifs that facilitated the organization of the conference.

82. Ibid.
83. Perrier and Sutherland to Palmerston, December 15, 1851, Great Britain, Foreign Office, Series 97
FO97/212, Public Records Office, Kew, London.
84. Ibid.
Epidemic Opportunities 79

However, fear and panic over issues of jurisdictions and trust also compromised the
development and implementation of effective international governance for infectious
disease.

“Oriental” Opportunities

The attitude of European delegates toward interventionism was profoundly inconsist-

ent: while delegates protested against interventionist reforms in Europe, they wanted
to make substantive interventions in the Ottoman sanitary services. When organizing
the conference, France invited participating countries to consider whether Oriental
arrivals should be granted free pratique in European ports.85 The French government
recognized that “Egypt and Turkey now had sanitary institutions that allowed nations
to relax [quarantine practices].”86 In fact, French ports already granted free pratique
to these arrivals on the condition that vessels had sailed for longer than eight days,
carried a valid bill of health, and kept a permanent onboard physician. It was thus
necessary to decide whether this policy could be extended beyond French ports and
uniformly practiced in Europe.87
The French relaxation of quarantine resulted from two major changes: first, the
Ottoman Empire had instituted sanitary authorities within its territory, and, second,
France had implemented a network of physicians in Turkey trusted to survey and
report on the Orient’s health conditions. The institution of the Constantinople
Superior Board of Health in 1838 allowed Turkey to develop mechanisms for the
central government of epidemic diseases. The Constantinople Board aimed to survey
public health conditions, prevent epidemic outbreaks, and eradicate epidemic dis-
eases that were already present in the country.88 Under the symbolic presidency of
a Sublime Porte minister, the board included an equal number of Ottoman officials
and foreign delegates from Austria, Belgium, Britain, France, Greece, Prussia, Russia,
Sardinia, and Tuscany. Regardless of nationality, all members enjoyed deliberative
powers. The board controlled 63 local boards of health, which “surveyed public
health conditions . . . executed or made executable sanitary regulations, and any other
decision communicated [by the Constantinople Board].”89

85. For a genealogy of “Orientalism,” see Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978). Delegates to
the 1851 conference generally used the “Orient” synonymously with the Ottoman Empire, in particular
when referring to Turkey and Egypt. The term Levant was used in the same fashion.
86. AHD, LEP, Maço 6, Baroche to Paiva, Lisbon, April 16, 1851.
87. Ibid.
88. The following description of the Oriental sanitary organization is based on the conclusions drawn by
the Conference’s Commission on the Organization of the Sanitary Service in the Levant. Composed of
diplomatic envoys from Sardinia, Turkey, and Greece, and Russian, English, Sicilian, and Portuguese
physicians, this commission made use of a large variety of documents which included Ottoman legisla-
tion and medical reports commissioned by several European powers.
89. Procés-verbaux, séance 29.
80 João Rangel de Almeida

The Ottoman sanitary reforms were not isolated; they resulted from extensive
restructuring policies that had been pursued by Sultan Mahmud II since 1826.90 The
need for reform derived from widely recognized military and economic weaknesses
that resulted in numerous military fiascos, an absence of reliable infrastructure within
the Ottoman territory and a general lack of competitive industries.91 In 1829, the
sultan created a bureaucratic apparatus to modernize the state. Through the Tanzimat
reforms, deliberative and executive powers associated with the sultan were progres-
sively transferred into the hands of state bureaucrats.92 At the same time, the Ottoman
financial system was reorganized, slavery abolished, and a legal code for commerce
and trade instituted. The new ruling elite, which had close European contacts, saw
the establishment of Western institutions as the only viable strategy for avoiding the
decline of the Empire.93
Although an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt had grown progressively
autonomous from Constantinople during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Under the rule of Muhammad Ali, Viceroy of Egypt, the country went through
radical reforms. Muhammad Ali restructured the armed forces, reorganized state
administration around a centralized bureaucratic structure, and expanded Egyptian
territory through the annexation of sections of northern Sudan, the western coast of
Arabia, Syria, and southwestern Anatolia.94 By doing so, he secured autonomy from
the Ottoman Empire while establishing close commercial and diplomatic contacts
with European powers.
On the sanitary front, in 1831 the Egyptian government created the Alexandria
Board of Health. This body was exclusively composed of foreign consuls who, on
the eve of its constitution, declared that “quarantine service [and all future sanitary
establishments] should be controlled, directed and manned by Europeans, since this
was the only way to achieve the success desired.”95 The European-dominated board
soon became a venue of intrigue where personal and national agendas were pro-
tected. Even more problematically, the board instituted a discriminatory policy that
often granted free pratique to European vessels while imposing hefty quarantines on
Ottoman ships sailing under the exact same circumstances. In large measure, the
discriminatory policies spelled the end of the Board of Health, and, in early 1840, the

90. On Ottoman reforms, see Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002 [1961]), 74–128.
91. Murat Gül, The Emergence of Modern Istanbul: Transformation and Modernisation of a City (London:
I. B. Tauris, 2009).
92. Youssef Choueiri, A Companion to the History of the Middle East (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 239.
93. Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, Egypt in the Reign of Muhammad Ali (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984), 26.
94. William L. Cleveland and Martin P. Bunton, A History of the Modern Middle East, 4th ed. (Boulder, CO:
Westview, 2009), 66.
95. LaVerne Kuhnke, “Resistance and Response to Modernization: Preventive Medicine and Social Control
in Egypt, 1825–1850” (unpublished PhD thesis, The University of Chicago, 1971).
Epidemic Opportunities 81

Board was nationalized.96 Eventually, following considerable diplomatic negotiation

in Cairo and Constantinople, foreign consuls regained access to the board but this
time with solely consultative rights.97 In addition to sanitary institutions engineered
by the Ottoman governments, France also developed its surveillance capacities
within the Empire. In 1847, a network of French physicians was established. The terri-
tory was divided into six zones: Constantinople, Smyrna (Izmir), Beirut, Alexandria,
Cairo, and Damascus. French physicians in the Levant were mandated to “meticu-
lously report on the health conditions of the region; to issue, for the convenience of
French consuls, [medical]  certificates [that allowed] dispatching bills of health; to
observe the health conditions of passengers, crews, and vessels departing to France;
and to study, in general, the country regarding its climate, [and] diseases.”98
While France was establishing its network of sanitary physicians, Austria also
developed medical institutions in the Ottoman Empire.99 Through these interven-
tions, both countries—like those with seats on the Constantinople Superior Board
of Health—were attempting to transfer Europe’s first line of defense against plague to
the Orient so that quarantines at their homeports could be safely reduced.100 With the
help of the Austrian government, the Ottomans established a Western-style medical
school in the late 1830s, and Metternich’s personal physician was entrusted to procure
Austrian teachers (and directors) for the new Constantinople school. The increasing
presence of Austrian physicians as medical professors and the development of close
ties between Austrian doctors and the sultan led to public health initiatives marked
by a distinctive Austrian flavor.101 The efforts developed by France and Austria to
improve Ottoman health conditions and to impose epidemic surveillance mecha-
nisms were part of larger national epidemic control projects. Thus, years before the
conference convened, European powers already enjoyed a considerable sanitary
influence both in Turkey and in Egypt.
Presided over by the Sardinian consul, Magnetto, and including the Turkish medical
delegate among its members, the Conference Commission for the Organization
of Levant’s Sanitary Service presented its report on November 11, 1851.102 Within

96. Ibid., 162–63.

97. Ibid., 164.
98. Procés-verbaux, séance 29.
99. The Ottoman government also welcomed French assistance in military and educational fields; see M.
Raccagni, “The French Economic Interests in The Ottoman Empire,” International Journal of Middle
East Studies, vol. 11, no. 3 (1980): 339–76.
100. Coons, “Steamships and Quarantines at Trieste, 1837–1848.”
101. Marcel Chahrour, “‘A Civilizing Mission’? Austrian Medicine and the Reform of Medical Structures
in the Ottoman Empire, 1838–1850,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in
History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, vol. 38, no. 4 (2007): 687–705.
102. In addition to Magnetto, the commission was composed of six other delegates: Dr. Bartoletti of Turkey,
Dr. Carbonaro of the Two Sicilies, Dr. Grande of Portugal, Dr. Rosenberger of Russia, Dr. Sutherland
of Britain, and the Greek consul Vitalis.
82 João Rangel de Almeida

a total of 35 pages plus two attachments, the commissioners considered the exist-
ing sanitary institutions and suggested a set of measures that, if practiced, could
finally allow permanent free pratique between Ottoman and European ports. The
commission appraised the sanitary reforms conducted by the Ottoman Empire; the
collaboration between Turkish officials and European consuls in the Constantinople
Superior Board of Health had successfully managed to make “the plague scourge dis-
appear throughout the extent of the Empire.”103 In Egypt, despite the lack of European
control, plague had also been eradicated due to the efficient practice of quarantine.
“The capacity of Egypt’s sanitary service men, their zeal and courageous persever-
ance”—the commission concluded—“added guarantees that Europe [needed] to relax
its rigorous [quarantines] against the country.”104
However, the commissioners believed that further conditions were required to
eliminate epidemic risk entirely and to allow the introduction of permanent free
pratique for vessels arriving from Ottoman to European ports. The commission
required the sultan to perpetuate the European presence in the Superior Health
Council of Constantinople through a legislative initiative. It was important to ensure
that the deliberative power that European consuls enjoyed was maintained and not
jeopardized by possible nationalization policies such as those in Egypt.105 Additional
physicians were expected to be appointed by the government in order to staff newly
instituted local sanitary boards in the vast Turkish territory. The government was
also invited to complete the construction of four quarantine stations and start work
on two others. In addition, the commission proposed the creation of new sanitary
regulations that included a penal code and a special tribunal to deal with sanitary
infractions.106 Finally, they desired to promote the Constantinople Superior Board of
Health as the de facto leading sanitary institution of the entire Ottoman Empire, with
powers to oversee Egyptian sanitary affairs.107 This did not mean the extinction of the
Alexandria Board of Health. On the contrary, this institution was to be reinvented:
foreign consuls were to regain the original deliberative powers that they enjoyed
before the Egyptian sanitary reforms, while local members of the board were required
to demonstrate that they held medical certificates from European universities before
their membership was accepted.108 Controlling sanitary institutions and practices in
the Ottoman Empire was an attempt to introduce trust and predictability into the
transnational system of epidemic surveillance and control. Such measures demon-

103. Procés-verbaux, séance 29.

104. Ibid.
105. Ibid.
106. Ibid. The new regulations were inspired by the work of the British delegate Dr. Sutherland. The full
list of hygienic measures to be instituted in the Orient, authored by Sutherland, was annexed to the
commission’s report.
107. Ibid.
108. Ibid.
Epidemic Opportunities 83

strated to signatory states and their populations that their biosafety was secured: an
important message to avoid potential fears and panics.
With regards to the network of doctors that France had instituted to survey the
epidemic status of the Ottoman Empire, the commission supported its expansion.
These doctors had contributed toward the production of more accurate bills of health
while also improving the local health conditions of territories under their jurisdic-
tion. The French doctors provided “incontestable services not only to their countries
of residence but to all Europe,” the commission noted.109 In total, the commission
hoped to create 26 medical stations in Egypt, Syria, and the remaining Ottoman
Empire. These European doctors were to remain autonomous from any Ottoman
intervention, being accountable only to their appointing governments.
During the debate on the commission’s report, the listed measures found support
from a majority of the delegates. In the process, the Turkish envoys never expressed
apprehension regarding the conference’s interventionist deliberations. Dr. Bartoletti
had been directly involved with the works of the commission on the Organization of
Levant’s Sanitary Service, and often acknowledged that his government agreed with
the proposed measures. However, Bartoletti stressed that international decisions on
Ottoman sanitary affairs were geographically restricted to its territories by the sea.
His government was not ready to relinquish its freedom and autonomy in governing
the vast Ottoman overland territory and borders.110 Delegates accepted the commis-
sion’s proposals, including this caveat, and agreed that following institutionalization,
free pratique could be established in the Mediterranean region in the near future.

Conclusion

The climate of panic experienced in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth
century as a result of cholera epidemics created unique opportunities for the develop-
ment of transnational schemes of public health. As delegates to the 1851 International
Sanitary Conference, doctors and diplomats acting as the official envoys of 12 states
created new ways to conduct diplomatic affairs and draft international law. The repre-
sentatives also envisioned new bureaucratic and judicial mechanisms to prevent the
spread of epidemic diseases while allowing the flow of vessels, passengers, and cargo.
The solutions proposed by the delegates to the conference derived from particular
conditions caused by specific epidemic outbreaks and the panics that these engen-
dered, which impacted upon trade and raised broader security issues.
The epidemic management program adopted by the 1851 International Sanitary
Conference carried different financial and sovereignty costs for each participating
state. From a European perspective, changes were regarded as possible so long as

109. Ibid.
110. Ibid., séance 44.
84 João Rangel de Almeida

they did not compromise strongly held notions of state sovereignty and independ-
ence. However, this power was unbalanced, since the Ottoman Empire would not
be able to maintain control over its own sanitary affairs. In terms of imperial per-
formance, the financial burden of the biosurveillance suggested by delegates was
also unevenly shared. For Europe, the sole financial cost of the program was the
salary of the doctors posted to the Orient. In contrast, Ottomans were expected to
finance the construction of new sanitary institutions and to maintain existing ones.
Additionally, while European states would gain access to legitimate mechanisms that
allowed them to intervene in Ottoman affairs, neither Egypt nor Turkey were able
to secure similar privileges in Europe. The Ottomans were required to forgo por-
tions of their autonomy, legitimacy, and control over sanitary matters within their
territories, without reciprocity. Such proposed policies were thus fundamentally
asymmetric: while international interventions in the Ottoman Empire were readily
justified by European delegates, similar interventions were deemed wholly unaccep-
table in Europe. Underlying this skewed approach were Orientalist assumptions that
the Ottomans were incapable of developing the necessary institutions for improving
and monitoring their own territorial and sanitary affairs.
Instituting the ambitious program of international public health governance
designed by the conference would bring significant advantages. With little invest-
ment, Europeans would be able to erect an epidemic defensive line in the Orient in
order to protect Europe from epidemic diseases, simultaneously allowing the free
circulation of cargo. Ottomans would also reap benefits from these new arrange-
ments. Like its European counterparts, the Ottoman merchant navy would profit
from the economic advantages of quicker sailing times within the Mediterranean.
In addition to the swifter transportation of passengers and goods, the eradication of
quarantine would improve the turnaround time for vessels embarking on new trips
and, potentially, increase profits associated with the volume of transported cargo and
passengers. Moreover, the eventual end of quarantine would decrease transaction
costs through the effective abolishment of expensive quarantine fees. The derived
economic gains would make the Mediterranean trade route even more competitive
when compared to the time-consuming Atlantic route between India and Europe.
These advantages were likely to increase the volume of taxable trade passing through
Ottoman territories, directly contributing to the fiscal revenue of Turkey and Egypt.
From a sanitary perspective, the Ottomans would also profit, at no cost to them-
selves, from epidemic monitoring networks composed of highly trained physicians.
The global circulation of knowledge that these professionals enabled was likely to
improve local health conditions or, at least, alert authorities to approaching epidemic
diseases in an efficient manner. Just as importantly, through their delegates, the
Ottomans could oversee any international interventions in their territories, thereby
regulating foreign activities in Turkey and Egypt. By conceding foreign access and
Epidemic Opportunities 85

control to national sanitary institutions, Constantinople conceivably avoided future

territorial incursions justified by epidemic episodes. This was a valid fear following
the 1820 invasion of Spain by France, which was justified on the grounds that Madrid
was incapable of controlling yellow fever outbreaks, which posed potential epidemic
risks to the French population.111
Through complex negotiations, delegates to the 1851 International Sanitary
Conference created shared international standards and practices in order to control
transnational epidemics. Acknowledging the innovative character of the conference
and the hard work of the delegates, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, the President of the
French Republic, honored diplomatic and medical envoys with the Légion d’honneur.
The future international sanitary order was detailed in two documents, which were to
be submitted for the ratification of participating governments.
To the disappointment of several delegates, the majority of states refused to ratify
the draft Sanitary Convention and the draft International Sanitary Regulations.
When delegates left Paris, it was presumed that the ratification of the Draft Sanitary
Convention and Regulation would proceed without obstacle. However, once delegates
returned home, the work developed in Paris was closely scrutinized by the govern-
ments they represented. Optimism gave way to apprehension and discontentment.
Ultimately, only France and Sardinia ratified the two documents. Nevertheless, the
1851 conference represented a crucial moment in the long history of international-
izing public health. The inability to follow through with these initial plans resulted in
recurring International Sanitary Conferences over the next 80 years.112
The long but anticlimactic 1851 conference anticipated many of the issues con-
nected with the use of scientific expertise to regulate an increasingly interconnected,
imperial world. The conference exposed tensions between competing national inter-
ests and a growing impetus for international collaboration in order to effectively
manage epidemics. Fears and panics were prevalent during the process of organizing
the conference, as well as during the event itself. Aligned with certain agendas, these
apprehensions had the potential to transmute into concrete sanitary regulations that
would mitigate institutional and public anxieties. However, counter-concerns over
the integrity of national jurisdictions and residual suspicions about the effectiveness
and motivation for international interventions ultimately blocked the process of cre-
ating a unified European sanitary program.

111. Sussman, “From Yellow Fever to Cholera.”

112. In total, 14 conferences took place between 1851 and 1938. These events were mostly hosted in
European cities with the exception of the 1866 and the 1881 conferences which were respectively
convened in Constantinople and Washington DC. As a result of the 1903 conference, the first per-
manent international institution for public health governance was instituted. The Office International
d’Hygiène Publique was eventually dissolved with the creation of the World Health Organization in
1948.
86 João Rangel de Almeida

While other chapters in this volume deal with the social, cultural, and political
dimensions of epidemic panics, here the focus has been on drawn-out diplomatic
maneuverings and transborder institution-building. These mid-nineteenth-century
processes may appear obscure and remote from the kinds of on-the-ground anxi-
eties, fears, and panics dealt with by other contributors. And yet, the history of this
epidemic diplomacy provides another important vantage on panic’s catalyzing role in
making the modern world. It also furnishes a critical context for reflecting on con-
temporary regimes of global health, as novel panics, unleashed by the dissolution of
postcolonial pacts in the Middle East and elsewhere, test the resilience of inherited
diplomatic mechanisms and their capacity to meet the cross-border threats of the
present.
4
Health Panics, Migration, and Ecological
Exchange in the Aftermath of the 1857
Uprising: India, New Zealand, and Australia

James Beattie

The First War of Indian Independence in 1857—the “Mutiny” or “Uprising” as Anglos

quickly coined it—gave the British a “shock which . . . can scarcely be understood in
your part of the world,” as one panicked officer wrote to a newspaper in New Zealand.1
As a result, he continued: “[n]umbers here are turning their eyes wildly about looking
for a land in which they can live in peace, without a chance of their wives and children
being cut into ribbons.” The officer, expressing confidence in his ability to “direct a
real emigration from India” to the New Zealand province of Canterbury, observed:
“Whenever I get an opportunity I always introduce New Zealand as the subject of
conversation. People are invariably interested and anxious for information.”2
The events of 1857 precipitated panic among the British in relation to the “murder-
ous” propensity of the indigenous population. Accounts from the time emphasized
its contagious quality, its uncontrollable spread throughout the subcontinent.3 The
Uprising also sparked panic about the best means of governing a colony whose sickly
climate, according to many British commentators, had not only severely limited
their ability to suppress rebellion, but had also induced disaffected Indians to take
up arms in the first place. Panic heightened already existing British anxieties about
India’s climate and people. That tropical climates and diseases could dull the fighting
mettle of British soldiers and had the capacity to render imperial administrators jab-
bering wrecks—victims of “brain fog” or, worse still, “Punjab head,” as some would
later describe such afflictions—were well known before the events of 1857.4 What

1. I use the term “Uprising” in this chapter, conscious of the different appellations which have been given
to the events of 1857, and in the knowledge of their changing meanings and contested nature.
2. “Pahari” to Editor, Murree, August 8, 1858 and August 12, 1858, reproduced in Lyttelton Times,
December 22, 1858, 4.
3. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–
1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); John William Kaye and George Bruce Malleson,
History of the Indian Mutiny of 1857–8, 6 vols. (London: W. H. Allen, 1889–1892).
4. David Arnold, “Introduction: Tropical Medicine before Manson,” in Warm Climates and Western
Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine 1500–1900, ed. David Arnold (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1996), 1–19; David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-
Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). The phrase Punjab head comes from
Bosworth Smith quoted in Frederick P. Gibbon, The Lawrences of the Punjab (London: J. M. Dent & Co.;
88 James Beattie

the Uprising did was to magnify growing anxieties about the feasibility of long-term
British residence in India. Panicked individuals like the officer quoted above, as well
as officials, urgently recommended health migration to other parts of the British
Empire as well as to high-altitude areas in India itself. In particular, Australia and
New Zealand were posited as possible solutions to India’s “problematic” climate.
As several authors have shown, the panic which accompanied the 1857 Uprising
marked something of a watershed in British attitudes toward India by heightening
anxieties about the perceived pathological nature of both its climate and people.5 My
intention in this chapter is to demonstrate the spatial and environmental dimensions
of health panics associated with the Uprising. In other words, I wish to highlight
some of the material and geographical impacts of the “colonial information panics”
associated with this signal event in the British Raj.6 These specifically relate to health
migration and ecological exchange among India, Australia, and New Zealand.
Examination of Australasian-Indian exchanges resulting from India’s post-Upris-
ing health panics provides new understanding of how definitions of the tropical and
temperate characteristics of India and Australasia sharpened in the second half of the
nineteenth century as a consequence of the events of 1857 (Figure 4.1). The chapter
shows how the Uprising helped to define the “problem” of India’s climate more clearly
to the British, but also how it helped provide them with a solution. The “problem” of
India’s pathogenic climate forced the British to appreciate more fully the perceived
health benefits and strategic importance of certain places in India (hill stations) and
Australasia alike. In the process, it also helped to settle debate about the relative suit-
ability of India and Australasia for white colonization.7 Furthermore, such concerns
underlined the spatial extent of the health panic, demonstrating how its impacts were

New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1908), 171; Dane Kennedy, “Diagnosing the Colonial Dilemma: Tropical
Neurathenia and the Alienated Briton,” in Decentering Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial
World, ed. Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006), 157–81.
5. Note, for example, David Arnold, The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science,
1800–1856 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005); Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race,
Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999);
Philip D. Curtain, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
6. Kim A. Wagner, “‘Treading Upon Fires’: The ‘Mutiny’-Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India,”
Past and Present, vol. 218, no. 1 (2013): 159–97 (160); Bayly, Empire and Information.
7. Although lessening, fears lingered into the twentieth century over the perceived effects on whites of the
tropical and subtropical climates of northern Australasia. With tropical climates held to restrict white
labor, the perceived climatic similarities between tropical northern Australia and tropical India—and
elsewhere—led to the introduction of Indian and Chinese laborers into this region. By the late nine-
teenth century, anxieties over the threat posed by Asia’s teeming masses, provoked especially by the
rapid rise of Japan, led to renewed calls to secure this region for white settlement. Accordingly, evi-
dence of the old age and health attained by many whites in northern Australia, along with the growth of
tropical medicine, renewed confidence in the possibility of white settlement in the north; see Warwick
Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Carlton South:
Melbourne University Press, 2002), 72–126.
Figure 4.1
Location map of places mentioned in the text.
90 James Beattie

felt well beyond the subcontinent through Australasian schemes to encourage migra-
tion from India and through transcolonial exchanges of plants and animals.

Climate and Migration

Even before the Uprising, the British were becoming increasingly pessimistic of ever
being able to successfully acclimatize to India. This was part and parcel of a general-
ized shift in European attitudes toward the subcontinent and its peoples that became
evident as Britain’s informal trading empire of the eighteenth century gave way to one
of formal territorial control. Territorial conquests in the nineteenth century brought
imperial troops into contact with new diseases, the effects of which heightened fears
about the impact of tropical climates on health. Military aggression supported per-
ceptions of Indians as foes, attitudes reinforced through the influence on officers and
men of the burgeoning Evangelical Movement. The Evangelical Movement stressed
the innate superiority of Christianity over Indian religions, and, by default, of any-
thing British over anything Indian. Scientific ideas reflected these broader political
and religious attitudes. As a consequence, many now regarded race as a fixed bio-
logical essence, incapable of change or adaptation to new circumstances. According
to this view, climate weakened the constitutions of all Europeans, especially those
of children and women. Later in the nineteenth century, fewer marriages between
European men and Indian women—due to the migration of single white women
to the subcontinent—further strained racial tensions.8 Geopolitical, religious, and
demographic factors meant nineteenth-century Britons regarded the “epidemiologi-
cal costs of territorial expansion” as “an intrinsic part of colonial discourse, whether
on moral, economical or medical grounds.”9
Nor were anxieties only limited to Europeans. For example, in the 1820s, a Maori
chief from New Zealand attempted to dissuade another, Titore, from visiting Bengal
on the grounds that “the Indian climate . . . [w]as very unhealthy; [being] . . . intoler-
ably warm, and so much infested with mosquitoes as to prevent sleep.”10 In the late
nineteenth century, Bengali Hindus, likewise, came to fear malaria’s degenerating
effects, against which Muslim families were seemingly immune.11 Taken together,
the bitter and bloody fighting of 1857 amplified and generalized these “pre-existing

8. The chapter draws from several sources, including Arnold, Warm Climates and Western Medicine;
Arnold, Tropics and the Travelling Gaze; and Harrison, Climates and Constitutions.
9. Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1997), 22.
10. Peter Dillon, Narrative and Successful Result of a Voyage in the South Seas, 2 vols. (London: Hurst,
Chance and Co., 1829), I, 196.
11. Arnold, “‘An Ancient Race Outworn’: Malaria and Race in Colonial India, 1860–1930,” in Race, Science
and Medicine, 1700–1900, ed. Ernst Waltraud and Bernard Harris (London and New York: Routledge,
1999), 123–43.
Health Panics, Migration, and Ecological Exchange 91

anxieties” about Indians and Indian environments; together they produced a general-
ized panic about the place of Britons in India.
As Kim Wagner has recently argued in an article examining the impact of 1857
on later British anxieties: “Panics and anxieties, as conceptual frameworks, are not
incompatible but stand in the same relation as event and structure; information
panics were transient but recurring episodes in the long-term pattern of systemic
anxieties within the colonial sphere.”12 In this sense, then, the panic induced by the
Uprising was a significant event which occasioned a wider structural shift in British
attitudes toward Indians, Indian environments, and especially Indian climates. In
social and political terms, it magnified racial divisions, discouraged racial mixing,
and significantly increased British military and official presence on the subcontinent.
Spatially, it encouraged segregation and the establishment of geographical bounda-
ries drawn along the lines of race.13
Yet, it also heightened British anxieties about how best to maintain racial purity,
their morals, and, ultimately, territorial control over such varied and homogenous
terrain and peoples. As I have argued elsewhere in relation to imperial development,
landscape aesthetics, and health policies, anxiety was a colonial condition caused in
some senses by the British realization that people and environments did not always
behave in ways expected of them.14 For Ranajit Guha, this story of anxiety is at the
heart of imperialism and forms a necessary corrective to its “triumphalist and pro-
gressivist moments.”15
Anxiety about the climate of India infuses British accounts of the Uprising. These
depict India’s climate as being almost as formidable a foe as the Indian militias the
British were fighting against. Disease undoubtedly reduced the effectiveness of
British troops.16 For example, during the campaign, The Calcutta Englishmen of May
3, 1857, reported how the effects of India’s sickly “climate has begun to tell upon the
soldier, and sickness prevails to a large extent” in Bengal.17 Notwithstanding the very
real demographic impacts of disease, the deployment of such an argument played
an important political—and racial—role. Images of Britons battling India’s climate
effectively served to belittle the skills, bravery, and tactical acumen of the “rebels.” For
example, in parliament in 1857, Lord Stanley praised Sir Hugh Rose’s heroic strug-
gle “against the severity of a terrible climate,” a climate he faced “again and again,
disabled but never giving up; encountering fatigue and suffering, and always showing

12. Wagner, “‘Mutiny’-motif,” 161.

13. See Arnold, Colonizing the Body; Nandini Bhattacharya, Contagion and Enclaves: Tropical Medicine in
Colonial India (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012).
14. Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety.
15. Ranajit Guha, “Not at Home in Empire,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 3 (1997): 482–93 (483).
16. Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–1914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Curtin, Death by Migration.
17. Cited in Otago Witness, July 17, 1858, 6.
92 James Beattie

himself ready to place himself at the head of his troops.”18 No less a figure than Queen
Victoria commended the “[g]allantry of the Troops employed against the Mutineers,
their Courage in Action, their Endurance under Privation, Fatigue, and the Effects
of Climate.”19 Blaming the climate, rather than the qualities of the Indians who rose
up against them, made it easier for the British to rationalize how they could have lost
control over a territory to a people who many Britons regarded as inferior intellectu-
ally and physically.
If the Uprising drove home the problem of India’s climate to the British, then its
aftermath heightened anxieties about the lingering dangers of its climate. Following
the formal transfer of control of India to the British crown in 1858, the House of
Commons sought to secure its hold over the subcontinent by increasing British troop
numbers relative to Indian soldiers and by seeking to reduce death and disability
among troops. Yet, as contemporaries pointed out, this ambitious plan faced a dis-
tinctive challenge in the form of India’s climate. The scheme to employ experienced
administrators to rule India, noted the Saturday Review in the early 1860s, “meets a
formidable and (and it may even be) a fatal impediment in the dangers of the climate.”
Proof, it continued,

of the perilous venture they [British administrators] make in going to India have
been pouring in. Lord Dalhousie returned only to die. Lord Canning, though
he has not suffered himself, has seen the fatal blow struck close to his side. Mr.
Wilson died. Mr. Laing’s health failed him. And it is notorious that, when the
two, principal legal appointments at Calcutta recently became vacant, the India
Office was forced to appoint gentlemen (happily able men) who were already on
the spot and acclimatised, from the sheer impossibility of obtaining in England
persons at once equal to the position of and willing or able to face the climate.20

Intriguingly, the writer seems to have accepted the possibility of European acclima-
tization, but pointed out that the immediate need for so many new administrators to
come directly from Britain to India made such a process impractical. And, what of
the health of British troops?
Finding suitable sanatoria for British troops stationed in India became an urgent
matter of imperial geopolitics. As a commentator observed in a colonial New Zealand
newspaper in 1858, the identification of appropriate sanatoria was “a most, impor-
tant one, both as it affects the efficiency of the Indian army, and as it may be condu-
cive to the peace and prosperity of the colony in which such Sanatorium [sic] shall
be established.”21 The panic generated by the Uprising triggered a flurry of official

18. Lyttelton Times, July 16, 1859, 3.

19. Hansard, December 3, 1857.
20. Cited in Otago Daily Times, April 24, 1862, 5.
21. Article from Auckland Weekly Register, August 16, 1858, n.p., reproduced in the Nelson-based news-
paper, Colonist, October 5, 1858, 3. Under New Zealand’s provincial system (1852–76), provinces
took responsibility for the promotion of colonization. As a result, provinces competed not only with
Health Panics, Migration, and Ecological Exchange 93

proposals to the British Raj from various Australasian colonies seeking to get Indian
authorities to dispatch British troops to their colonies.
In recommending medical migration for health, Australasian colonial writers
appealed to a wide body of work relating to medical geography and medical topography
that recognized the intimate connections between environment and health. Medical
doctors and the lay public alike acknowledged the health benefits of sea voyages and
of geographical relocation to climates and environments free from sudden changes
of temperature—ideally ones resembling as closely as possible the climate of the
migrants’ birthplace.22 Drawing from this literature, colonial writers stressed various
aspects of their settlement’s climatic advantages, all of which accorded with popular
medical opinion. Personal observation and detailed statistics pointing to the healthi-
ness of Europeans living there backed up such claims, especially information about
Europeans from India whose health had benefitted from residence in Australasia.23
In this sense, the health panic occasioned by the Uprising represented an oppor-
tunity for colonies and provinces, towns and cities—even different suburbs—to
attract settlers, but it also became a source of sometimes bitter tensions within and
among different polities. After all, the stakes were high: the very success of settler
colonies hinged on their ability to attract significant numbers of migrants. Featuring
prominently in the hundreds if not thousands of migrant handbooks produced—not
to mention the millions of words written in magazines, journals, and newspapers—
was the subject of migration and climate, including the benefits to Europeans from
India.24 Doctors cautioned against the “immediate return to a cold climate” such as
Britain’s, since this was “likely to be injurious to persons who have resided in India
and suffered from disease produced by the effects of the climate.”25
Health matters aside, there were other compelling reasons to avoid returning to
Britain. As a retired Indian military officer explained, when an Anglo-Indian com-
monly retires to Britain, he

overseas colonies but with each other for migrants. This effectively pitted province against province,
colony against colony.
22. J. M. Powell, “Medical Promotion and the Consumptive Immigrant to Australia,” Geographical Review,
vol. 63, no. 4 (1973): 449–76; Linda Bryder, “‘A Health Resort for Consumptives’: Tuberculosis and
Immigration to New Zealand, 1880–1914,” Medical History, vol. 40, no. 4 (1996): 459–64; James
Beattie, “Colonial Geographies of Settlement: Vegetation, Towns, Disease and Well-Being in Aotearoa/
New Zealand, 1830s–1930s,” Environment and History, vol. 14, no. 4 (2008): 583–610.
23. Conevery Bolton Valencius, “Histories of Medical Geography,” in Medical Geography in Historical
Perspective, ed. Nicholaas A. Rupke (London: Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at
UCL, 2000), 3–28.
24. See James Beattie, Emily O’Gorman, and Matthew Henry, eds., Climate, Science, and Colonization:
Histories from Australia and New Zealand (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
25. Military Sanatarium [sic]. Report of the Board of Commissioners, September 7, 1858 (Tasmania: no
publisher, 1858), in Tasmania: Miscellaneous 1857–1897, V354.946008 T 741, National War Memorial
Museum of Australia, Canberra, 5.
94 James Beattie

arrives in the country he calls home, and finds it a strange land; his friends are
dead, dispersed, or receive him coldly . . . he sits in a draught, and gets a cold in
this head: he is caught in a shower, and gets rheumatism in his shoulder: and he
concludes the climate of England has changed.26

Moreover, in Britain, the returning East India Company (EIC) man “is a mere
nobody.” “What influence [has he] on the affairs of even a village?”27 Another news-
paper wrote how: “The sickly Nabob, the childless wife, and the attenuated object of
consumption will soon be eager to reach” New Zealand to experience its salubrious
climate, where, “they may be restored to the blessings of health and enjoyment.”28
By heightening anxieties about residence in India at a time when the British were
committed to sending more troops and officials than ever before, the Uprising seems
to have reenergized schemes designed at encouraging the Indian government to direct
migration to various Australasian colonies. The Australian colony of Tasmania fired
one of the first salvoes in what would become an ongoing Australasian battle over the
diseased minds and bodies of Europeans from India. In July 1858, Sir Henry Young
established a Board of Commissioners to consider “the establishment in Tasmania
of a Military Medical Sanatarium [sic], and Post for Convalescents.”29 The commit-
tee, comprising military officers—some like Lieutenant-Colonel Hungerford (Bengal
Artillery) with experience in India—in addition to a politician and two medical
doctors, waxed lyrical of the benefits of offering

the disabled [British] Soldier [from India] the advantages of the Climate of
Tasmania; as, giving him four months in this Colony for the recovery of his
health, he could be returned to Calcutta or Bombay in six months after quitting
either of those Ports, in all probability quite efficient for duty.30

The committee favored Hobart Town as the site of the sanatorium. This site, the
report noted, made sensible use of existing buildings while maximizing the capacity
of existing shipping networks for rapidly moving troops. The regular mail steamers
plying their way between Australia and India meant troops could be dispatched to
Calcutta or Bombay in a matter of only three weeks, the committee argued, quicker in
fact than could be conveyed from the hill stations of India. Moreover, the mail vessels,
returning from Suez nearly empty, would provide “good accommodation for the sick
men in those vessels,” while offering troops the additional benefits of a sea voyage
considerably shorter than of that to Britain.31

26. The Canterbury Colony: Its Site and Prospects, Reprinted from Saunders’ Monthly Magazine 1852
(Dunedin: Hocken Library, 1976), 4.
27. Ibid.
28. Crayon, April 11, 1842, Auckland, reproduced in New Zealand Journal, November 12, 1842, 279.
29. The Hobart Town Daily Mercury, August 12, 1858, 5.
30. Military Sanatarium, 3.
31. The Hobart Town Daily Mercury, August 12, 1858, 5.
Health Panics, Migration, and Ecological Exchange 95

The official report reinforced its claims to authority by publishing detailed descrip-
tions of the medical geography of the island: including its vegetation, geology, and
rainfall, its seasonal climatic variations and disease occurrences, and its morbidity
and mortality rates.32 The report highlighted how Tasmania’s low death rate among
troops—of nearly eight per 1,000—compared favorably to both Britain’s (33 per
1,000) and India’s (nearly 50 per 1,000). This was attributed to an “absence of tem-
perature extremes on the island”33 and the island’s freedom “from marsh miasma” and
intermittent and remittent fevers.34 Personal observation reinforced the statistical evi-
dence. For example, the local member of the Legislative Council, Dr. E. S. P. Bedford,
confidently declared that Tasmania’s climate had produced “good effects” among the
“persons coming on sick leave to this Colony from India” whom he had examined.
Tasmania’s mild climate,

its cool nights; its equal fall of rain during the year; its freedom from malaria;
its bright and clear atmosphere; its scenery, and the general English aspect of its
Towns, buildings, and cultivations, all have great influence upon persons seeking
health after a residence in a warm climate.35

Only a month later, colonial boosters in Auckland, New Zealand, responded to

Tasmania’s proposal by agreeing on the necessity of overseas sanatoria. “Now that it
has become imperative to maintain a large European army in India,” the Auckland
Weekly Register stated in August 1858, “it has also become incumbent to” find a suit-
able sanatorium to which to send debilitated troops.36 But the newspaper diverged
from the Tasmanian committee’s recommendation of just where such a sanatorium
was needed.
“Without any desire to undervalue the salubrity of the climate of Tasmania,” the
Auckland Weekly News disingenuously declared, “we cannot close our eyes to the
many official reports that have been issued . . . with respect to the unhealthiness of
Hobart Town, or to frequent fevers and epidemics with which the chief towns of the
colony have been visited.” Tasmania’s “great and sudden alternations from extreme
heat to extreme cold, and that, too, often within the twenty-four hours, is much too
trying for invalids worn down by tropical disease.” Thankfully, Auckland experienced
“no such sudden extremes,” and possessed none “of the fever heats of Australia.” Nor
is it subjected “to the biting; hoar frosts, (with the accompanying fogs) of Tasmania.”
Auckland’s “mild and equable” climate and absence of “that convict element in its

32. Valencius, “Histories of Medical Geography.”

33. Military Sanatarium, 5.
34. Ibid.
35. E. S. P. Bedford, quoted in Military Sanatarium, 12.
36. Article from Auckland Weekly Register, August 16, 1858, n.p., reproduced in the Nelson-based newspa-
per, Colonist, October 5, 1858, 3.
96 James Beattie

organization” are other advantages favoring the New Zealand city over its Tasmanian
counterpart.37
Like the Tasmanian committee report (discussed earlier), Auckland’s referenced
both statistics and the opinion of medical authorities who had treated soldiers from
India in New Zealand. Such sources revealed that “deaths from fevers, liver com-
plaints, and diseases of the stomach and bowels are lower in New Zealand than in any
of the other countries named, so that it follows that New Zealand is by far the fittest
place for individuals suffering from any of these diseases.” Like Tasmania’s report, to
support its healthiness, Auckland’s drew from testimonies from medical officers from
India stationed in New Zealand.
Although it failed to name its sources, Auckland presented testimonies upholding
claims about its ideal climate from two military surgeons, Arthur Saunders Thomson
(1816–60), and Robert Keating Prendergast (1811–90). Thomson, an Edinburgh
University MD, had taken a lively and active interest in the effects of climate on
health and racial development ever since his doctoral thesis, which had examined
“the influence of climate on the health and mortality of the Indigenous Inhabitants of
different countries.” Its particular focus was on the mortality which takes place when
individuals emigrate “to climates differing in temperature and other circumstances,
from that of their native country.”38 Subsequent postings to Afghanistan and India
in the 1830s, and Auckland, New Zealand, in the 1840s and 1850s, had afforded him
ample opportunity of examining individuals subjected to different climates and for
compiling statistics on the impact of climate on health.
In New Zealand, Thomson published a series of influential medical geographies
extolling, in particular, the beneficial effects of New Zealand’s climate on troops from
India. These received widespread publicity from government and military officials,
and from among the general reading public. This was thanks to their reporting in
newspapers and to their appearance in Thomson’s popular two-volume general
history of the colony, The Story of New Zealand.39 As Thomson wrote:

To the Indian who has suffered from no disease, but whose mind and body are
exhausted and enervated by the high temperature and restless nights, which resi-
dence in the tropics produces, New Zealand will be found a peculiarly agreeable

37. Colonist, October 5, 1858, 3.

38. Arthur Saunders Thomson, Prize Thesis: Inaugural Dissertation on the Influence of Climate on the Health
and Mortality of the Inhabitants of the Different Regions of the Globe (Edinburgh: John Carfraw and Son;
London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, London; Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1837),
in Special Collections 3143, University of Edinburgh.
39. James Beattie, “Tropical Asia and Temperate New Zealand: Health and Conservation Connections,
1840–1920,” in Asia in Making of New Zealand, ed. Brian Moloughney and Henry Johnson (Auckland:
Auckland University Press, 2007), 36–57; Arthur Saunders Thomson, The Story of New Zealand: Past
and Present—Savage and Civilized, Two Volumes (London: John Murray, 1859); Wellington Independent,
vol. XII, no. 1, January 1, 1859, 3.
Health Panics, Migration, and Ecological Exchange 97

residence. I speak of this from my own personal experience, and that of one or
two others who have suffered from the exhaustion of an Indian life.40

Like Thomson, Prendergast had several years’ service overseas, in his case in Ceylon
(Sri Lanka) from 1838 to 1842, before arriving with the 65th Regiment in New
Zealand in 1846.41 Although the 65th Regiment had its headquarters in Auckland,
several detachments were scattered throughout the North Island. Prendergast, based
in Wellington, studied the health of troops in that town over a period from 1847 to
1858. In the context of colonial rivalry, what the Auckland proponent of the sanato-
rium proposal neglected to say was that Prendergast—in agreement with Thomson—
actually regarded Wellington’s climate, not Auckland’s, as the most favorable to
troops’ health.42
Accordingly, in early January of 1859, The Wellington Independent provided
detailed discussion of the findings of both Prendergast and Thomson’s reports,
pointing to several conclusions demonstrating the healthiness of Wellington
over Auckland. Drawing attention to the “Table showing the Aggregate Strength,
Admissions into Hospital, and Deaths from Disease, among the Troops serving in
the Provinces of Auckland and Wellington,” it pointed out “that the Troops Stationed
in the Province of Wellington were more healthy [sic] than those in the Province
of Auckland.” Likewise, it related how, immediately upon the arrival of the 65th
Regiment in Auckland in November 1846, “an Epidemic Fever of a low Typhoid char-
acter became very prevalent [sic], and caused great mortality especially amongst the
Children.” Weakened, 56 men were treated, of whom 52 survived. The “seeds of the
disease,” it explained, had travelled with the troops sent to Wellington in September
1847, leading to the treatment of 33 cases of fever, out of which two patients did not
recover, with one suffering a recurrence of the disease. After this, there was no recur-
rence of the disease under the period reported, 1853–55, despite 370 men being sta-
tioned there on average. Similarly, “the Returns of each Class of Disease,” the report
pointed out, “show the marked immunity from disease enjoyed by the men of the
65th Regiment” based in Wellington.43
Other provinces in New Zealand, as well as several Australian colonies, presented
similar proposals and arguments, again using the 1857 Uprising as a springboard for
40. Wellington Independent, vol. XIII, no. 692, May 29, 1852, 4.
41. “Officers of the 65th [Regiment] in New Zealand”: http://hicketypip.tripod.com/officers65th.htm
(accessed January 28, 2014).
42. Robert Keating Prendergast, “On the Best Test of the Climate of a Country,” Nelson Examiner and
New Zealand Chronicle, vol. XIII, June 24, 1854, 2. See also: Robert Keating Prendergast, Surgeon 65th
Regiment, To His Honor the Superintendent, Wellington May 14, 1854, New Zealand Government
Gazette (Province of Nelson), vol. 2, no. 9 (June 16, 1854), 53; Robert Keating Prendergast, May 14,
1854, New Zealand Government Gazette (Province of Nelson), vol. 2, no. 9 (June 16, 1854), 54; “Reports
on the Health of the Troops Stationed in New Zealand,” enclosures 1–3, Supplementary New Zealand
Government Gazette (Province of Wellington), vol. 5, no. 38 (December 27, 1858), i–xxiii.
43. Wellington Independent, vol. XII, no. 7, January 5, 1859, 5.
98 James Beattie

schemes to be able to help govern in India’s unhealthy climate. Noting “how the war
in India has only revived discussion” of the concept of establishing New Plymouth
Province as a national sanatorium for Indian troops, the provincial Superintendent
in February 1859 submitted a dispatch to that effect. The meteorological and health
statistics furnished, it noted, “convincing proof of the singular salubrity and equabil-
ity of our climate, which for some years has enjoyed a colonial celebrity.”44 In August
1859, the New Plymouth Provincial Government duly requested from the secretary
of state for war the establishment in New Zealand of a sanatorium “for the benefit of
Invalids from the Indian Army.”45 Also in that same year, Sir James Stirling (1791–
1865), governor of Western Australia, published a pamphlet promoting his colony’s
climate. According to the document, the colony of Western Australia possessed “a
sea-climate, fresh and invigorating; temperate in point of heat; equable in point of
temperature; free from sudden chills.”46
Panic occasioned by the Uprising heightened deeper anxieties about India’s patho-
logical environment, one that, unless measures were taken to annul its threat, threat-
ened ultimately to erase British rule in the subcontinent. The panic triggered a flurry
of responses from other colonial governments and officials, as well as from private
settlers themselves. For officials in India and the Australasian colonies, environment
respectively offered a potential cause and a potential solution to the ill-health experi-
enced by British troops and officials. As Alan Lester suggests in this volume (Chapter
1), panic took on a distinctly geographical dimension, not only in its association with
certain kinds of environments, but also in connecting different colonies. The next
section explores the panicked responses of private health migrants from India as they
sought somewhere peaceful and healthy for their families to live, and traces the out-
comes of official migration schemes.

Impacts of Proposals

Each of the panicked and opportunistic colonial proposals issued from Australia
and New Zealand received the imperial cold shoulder.47 Despite this, Australasian

44. Taranaki Herald, vol. VII, no. 342, February 19, 1859, 2.
45. See Dispatch Number 69 mentioned in “Government Gazette, Province of Taranaki,” New Plymouth
Provincial Gazette, vol. 7, no. 10 (May 25, 1859), 40; Henry John Tancred to His Honour, The
Superintendent, Napier, Colonial Secretaries’ Office, March 29, 1859, Auckland, HB, 3 1, 1859/Letter
No. 5, General Government Letters, National Archives (NA), Wellington.
46. J. Stirling, Observations on the Climate and Geographical Position of Western Australia, and on Its
Adaptation to the Purposes of a Sanatorium for the Indian Army in a Letter Addressed to J. R. Martin,
Esq (London: J. C. Bridgewater, 1859), 3.
47. See Dispatch Number 69 mentioned in “Government Gazette, Province of Taranaki,” New Plymouth
Provincial Gazette, vol. 7, no. 10 (May 25, 1859), 40. For discussion of the forwarding of the proposal,
see Henry John Tancred to His Honour, The Superintendent, Napier, Colonial Secretaries’ Office,
March 29, 1859, Auckland, HB, 3 1, 1859/Letter No. 5, General Government Letters, NA, Wellington.
Health Panics, Migration, and Ecological Exchange 99

colonies continued in their attempts to attract British health migrants from India,
while many private settlers from India also retired to the region. They were attracted
not only by fears of India’s climate and the dangers its people posed to their life, but
also by favorable descriptions of Australasia’s climate and preferable land grants.
For example, from the early 1850s, Auckland Province’s attempts to attract military
settlers included legislation specifically encouraging members of the EIC. Auckland
Province’s 1858 Waste Lands Act was extended into the remainder of the North
Island, as the New Zealand Waste Lands Act, 1858, an indication of the opportunities
the Uprising was seen to afford both colonies anxious for settlers and settlers anxious
for healthy colonies. The act was intended to encourage the settlement of naval and
military officers, and men, “belonging to Her Majesty’s Service or to Service of the
East India Company” in the North Island. Free land was granted based on a sliding
scale: a commissioned officer qualified for 400 acres; a warrant and noncommis-
sioned officer, 80 acres; and a private soldier, marine or seaman, 60 acres.48
Although this particular clause was removed in 1860, EIC troops and officers
had already by this time settled in different parts of the Colony, including in New
Plymouth Province, on North Island. Some came from among those already stationed
there with imperial forces, including from the 58th and 65th Regiments.49 It is diffi-
cult, if not impossible, to obtain detailed statistics of those who came from India to
New Zealand, or to correlate motives for settlement with health panics. Nevertheless,
returns from requests made by widows of ex-soldiers or by surviving soldiers who
had taken advantage of free land grants in 1860, reveal the tip of the iceberg of a
significantly larger number who had served on the subcontinent and subsequently
settled in New Zealand. For example, of 18 who applied in Nelson Province, six
had served in India; in Canterbury, the figure was six out of 29.50 More rewarding
are the letters, diaries, obituaries, and newspapers from the time, which hint at the
importance of health migration from India sparked by the Uprising. Individuals like
Mr. Chapman, encountered by Dr. Andrew Sinclair (1794–1861) while aboard the
Oberon, sailing between Dunedin to Bluff in 1860, seem not to have been uncom-
mon in New Zealand. Chapman, Sinclair wrote, was “a tall, thin, broken down man
in constitution from the Indian military service, who snivelled in his speech from

For the Governor’s messages of this period, see “Governor’s messages—outwards 16/5–21/8/1858”
[note: incorrectly dated], Internal Affairs 4, No. 296, NA, Wellington.
48. Summarized in Alex F. Ridgway, Voices from Auckland, New Zealand (London: Alex F. Ridgway &
Sons, 1862), 137.
49. James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Auckland:
Penguin, 1986), 59.
50. Military Land Claims, Nelson, 1259–1275: LS 66, Record 15, NA, Wellington; Military Land Claims,
Canterbury, 1285A–1294B: LS 66, Record 17, NA, Wellington.
100 James Beattie

hare lip and was now endeavouring to patch up and make the best of his shattered
constitution in a mild climate.”51
Particular places in New Zealand were notable for attracting migrants from India.
Located at the top of the South Island, the settlement of Nelson, noted Edward Payton
(1859–1944) in 1888, has earned itself the reputation as “the resort of men of means
who have come from India.” Indeed, several families from India settled in the region.52
Likewise a cluster of EIC military, attracted by the recommendations of friends and
family, settled in and around Christchurch. Many others also appeared in colonial
parliaments and provincial assemblies, and served as land officials and miners,
doctors and laborers throughout the Colony. They—and others—also named New
Zealand places after geographical regions and Britons associated with the Uprising.
For example, the settlement of Kirwee (now, Karwi, Uttar Pradesh), in New Zealand’s
Canterbury Province, commemorated its founder’s storming of the fort of the same
name in 1857, while at least a dozen ex-Mutiny veterans and their families settled in
the region.53 Several Scindes, numerous Napiers, and countless Kashmirs, too, still
grace street names and areas in New Zealand, while the province of Hawke’s Bay
boasts the towns of Meanee, Havelock, Napier, Hastings, and Clive.54 In 1900, there
were still sufficient numbers of “Indian Mutiny Veterans” alive in New Zealand to
gather for a sizeable reunion (Figure 4.2).
In the Australian colonies, indirect evidence also points to the importance of the
Uprising in precipitating the migration of many Europeans from India. Like those
coming to New Zealand, health figured as a prominent motivation, as did advan-
tageous provisions in settlement schemes aimed at attracting Indian migrants. For
example, Tasmania’s Immigration Act (1867) granted immigrants from India 30 acres
of land, in addition to other benefits to their families.55

51. Andrew Sinclair, Letters and Journals, March 1860, MS 1947, ATL.
52. E. W. Payton, Round about New Zealand: Being Notes from A Journal of Three Years’ Wanderings in the
Antipodes (London: Chapman & Hall, 1888), 171. I thank Tony Ballantyne for sending me this refer-
ence. See also Helena Drysdale, Strangerland: A Family at War (London: Picador, 2006).
53. James Beattie, “Making Home, Making Identity: Asian Garden-Making in New Zealand, 1850s–1930s,”
Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, vol. 31, no. 2 (2011): 139–59.
54. James Beattie, “Plants, Animals and Environmental Transformation: New Zealand/Indian biological
and landscape connections, 1830s–1890s,” in The East India Company and the Natural World, ed. Vinita
Damodaran and Anna Winterbotham (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 219–48.
55. Andrea Scott Inglis, Summer in the Hills: The Nineteenth-Century Mountain Resort in Australia
(Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2007), 56–57. See, also, Joyce P. Westrip and Peggy
Holroyde, Colonial Cousins: A Surprising History of Connections between India and Australia (Adelaide:
Wakefield Press, 2010).
Health Panics, Migration, and Ecological Exchange 101

Figure 4.2
“Group of Veterans Who Served in the Indian Mutiny,” hosted at a Government House
Auckland fete held by Lord Ranfurly on April 24, 1900. Reproduced with the kind permission
of “Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries,” AWNS-19000504-4-1.

Hill Stations and Gum Trees

While EIC officials and military eagerly retired in droves to the colonies—liberally
planting Simlas and Scindes throughout Australasia and the rest of the Empire—
British officials in India instead looked to the restorative properties of the subcon-
tinent’s high-altitude climates as a means of maintaining British rule. Following the
Uprising, hill stations assumed ever greater importance in India as centers of civil and
military administration. Indeed, by the century’s end they were regarded as essential
to maintaining the fighting fitness of imperial troops and the mental dexterity of the
Indian Civil Service.
Although individuals like Lord Clyde might have found the climate of the hill
station of Simla “nearly as exhilarating as any in Europe,”56 or, like Elizabeth Muter,
have fancied themselves “again in an English dell, with the trickling water rolling over
the mossy stones,”57 the ever greater numbers of factotums, functionaries, and flun-
keys flocking to the hill sanatoria began to cause a deterioration in their healthiness
and environment, leading in turn to wider anxieties about their strategic usefulness,
and ultimately the ability of the British to maintain an empire in India. The pall of
cholera, observed Muter gloomily, hung miserably over the hill station of Murree.
“Mysore, Chickmagoor,” moaned another, “from its elevation and situation, enjoys

56. Wellington Independent, May 24, 1859, 5.

57. Elizabeth Muter, Travels and Adventures of An Officer’s Wife in India, China, and New Zealand, 2 vols.
(London: Hurst and Blackett, 1864), I, 125–26.
102 James Beattie

the most temperate climate; yet it has the worst reputation for fever” because it stands
“in the midst of paddy flats.”58
As a consequence of such health anxieties, a host of public health measures were
instituted in hill stations and at other British centers of population. Drawing from
medical geography, with its emphasis on public health, and informed by growing fears
of Indians as sources of pollution, key aspects of these measures included the detailed
monitoring of health and environment, provision of clean drinking water, improved
barrack design, better nutrition, and spatial separation of whites from Indians. For
Nandini Bhattacharya, the public health measures instituted in hill stations and other
colonial enclaves were reforms premised on ideological belief in the healthiness of
the hills over the plains and were instituted regardless of the actual rates of disease in
hill stations.59 The ideological importance of disease in generating panic and anxiety
is reinforced by the sometimes disproportionate reaction of colonial authorities to
such threats. Although troop mortality rates dropped from the early 1880s,60 major
outbreaks of disease still broke out in India, spreading to other areas and feeding
significant health panics, sometimes regardless of the actual mortality impact of the
disease (as David Arnold shows in Chapter 5).61
Amidst these health fears, administrators sought to plant eucalyptus trees.
Colonists praised them because of their perceived ability to absorb, and thus neu-
tralize, what contemporaries regarded as the noxious effluvia of decaying animal
and vegetable matter—the miasma of which lay people and doctors alike sought so
keenly to avoid. They also esteemed their ability to drain swampy ground, another
site regarded as sources of miasma. Although primarily introduced into India to meet
the rapidly expanding fuelwood needs of hill stations—needs precipitated by the cold
of such places and by their ever larger populations denuding such regions of existing
timber—foresters and medics attached great hope to the health-giving properties of
the eucalyptus.62
Eucalypts would “improve the health and add to the wealth of the country,”
enthused one correspondent in the Indian Forester, the key professional organ of

58. “Malaria and the Value of the Eucalyptus,” Indian Forester, vol. 7, no. 4 (April, 1882): 336.
59. Bhattacharya, Contagion and Enclaves.
60. Harrison, Public Health, 97; Radhika Ramasubban, “Imperial Health in British India, 1857–1900,”
in Disease, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European
Expansion, ed. Roy MacLeod and Milton Lewis (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 38–60.
61. Dhrub Singh, “‘Clouds of Cholera’: and Clouds Around Cholera, 1817–70,” in Disease and Medicine
in India: A Historical Overview, ed. Deepak Kumar (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2001), 144–65; I. J.
Catanach, “Plague and the Tensions of Empire: India, 1896–1918,” in Imperial Medicine and Indigenous
Societies, ed. David Arnold (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 149–71.
62. Brett M. Bennett, “The El Dorado of Forestry: The Eucalyptus in India, South Africa, and Thailand,
1850–2000,” International Review of Social History, vol. 55, supp.S18 (2010): 27–50; Robin W. Doughty,
The Eucalyptus: A Natural and Commercial History of the Gum Tree (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2000), 128–29.
Health Panics, Migration, and Ecological Exchange 103

Indian forestry.63 Initial attention in India centered on particular qualities of the blue
gum (Eucalyptus globulus), praised by forester J. L. Laird for its “utility in hygiene.” Not
only did the tree absorb moisture from the atmosphere, but, its healthful emanations,
he noted, possibly neutralized or even destroyed the deadly but unseen miasmas.64
While acknowledging the exaggerated nature of some of its claimed health benefits,
as a drainer of miasmic marshes, the forestry writer J. E. O’Connor explained, the
eucalyptus genus was second to none, “absorbing daily ten times its own weight of
water from the soil.”65 Accompanying these reports were glowing accounts of eucalyp-
tus plantings redeeming malarial wastelands in North Africa and southern Europe.66
In areas deemed climatically appropriate, medical doctors enthusiastically
advanced tree-planting programs as a means of improving a locality’s healthiness.67
The widespread service of medical doctors in forestry, botany, and other areas related
to resource management in India reinforced the connections believed to exist between
environment and health in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.68 In the wake of
the Uprising, it also made it more likely that such figures would be acutely aware of
the strategic importance of tree planting for reasons of health.
This seems to have been the case, as witnessed by a large-scale increase in the
activities of tree planting around the hill stations. Various figures from Australia now
working in an official or unofficial capacity in India, or with strong connections to it,
also encouraged or led some of the experimentation.69 For example, the governor of
Madras Presidency, Sir William Thomas Denison (1804–71), was a former governor-
general of Australia, who enthusiastically plugged the species’ health-giving

63. E. Morton, “Arboriculture in Its Relation to Climate,” Indian Forester, vol. 1, no. 2 (October, 1875): 151.
See, also, Ashley Hay, Gum: The Story of Eucalypts and Their Champions (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove,
2002), 71–103; Kenneth Thompson, “Trees as a Theme in Medical Geography and Public Health,”
Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, vol. 54, no. 3 (1975): 518–23.
64. J. L. Laird, “The Eucalyptus Globulus: From a Botanical, Economical and Medical Point of View,
Translated from the French by J. E. Planchon, Professeur à la Faculté de Montpellier,” Indian Forester,
vol. 1, no. 2 (October 1875): 175–77.
65. J. E. O’Connor, “The Cultivation of ‘Eucalyptus Globulus’ and other Australian Gums in India,” Indian
Forester, vol. 2, no. 2 (October 1876): 120–35.
66. See Doughty, The Eucalyptus: A Natural and Commercial History; Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods:
Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930 (Los Angeles and London: University of
California Press, 1999).
67. Dr. J. Maitland cited in “Plantation of Australian Trees, Nilgiri Hill,” in Hugh Cleghorn, The Forests and
Gardens of South India (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1861), 180–81.
68. Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of
Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Beattie,
Empire and Environmental Anxiety; James Beattie, “Natural History, Conservation, and Scottish-
trained Doctors in New Zealand, 1790–1920,” Immigrants & Minorities, vol. 29, no. 2 (2011): 281–307.
69. Cleghorn, Forests, 339; G. Foster, “Plantation of Eucalypti,” Indian Forester, vol. 2, no. 3 (January 1877):
324.
104 James Beattie

properties.70 Botanical gardens and private settlers in Australia also sent eucalyptus
seed to their Indian equivalents.71
By December 1859, medico-forester Hugh Cleghorn reported that some 10,000
Australian trees had been planted in the neighborhood of the hill station of
Ootacamund (Utakamand).72 Their primary purpose was to meet the growing fuel-
wood needs of the hill station which, by this time, had some 7,420 houses, and a popu-
lation of 2,500 Europeans, 34,500 natives, 500 East Indians.73 As an 1857 report on the
Nilgiri Hills shows, contemporaries regarded the benefits of eucalyptus as manifold.
They ranged from the supply of fuel and the furnishing of building materials, to an
ability to “create and improve the soil, and secure the permanency of the springs,”
and provide “shelter from the violent winds” and modification of the climate.74 Dr. J.
Maitland considered “tree-planting to be . . . of great importance, both in a sanitary
and economic point of view.” Maitland’s observations over three years led him to
believe “that the larger proportion of disease at Wellington than at the neighbouring
station at Kúnúr, is due” to environmental factors “as, in all other respects, height,
temperature, exposure, &c., there is scarcely any appreciable difference between
the two places.” By “planting trees judiciously,” he believed, “great benefit would be
derived, not only from the shelter they would afford, but from the good effects pro-
duced by a moderate quantity of vegetation in purifying the atmosphere.”75
Surveying South India’s uplands in 1882, Dietrich Brandis (1824–1907), India’s
first Inspector General of Forests, commented that their planting has “altered the
appearance of the country.” “[L]arge trees, chiefly Eucalyptus globulus, Acacia melan-
oxylon and Acacia dealbata” surround the hill stations of Wellington, Ootacamund,
and Coonoor (all in the Nilgiris).76 In 1883, Ootacamund was “almost surrounded by
a forest of these trees,” while on the Nilgiris eucalypts grew four times as fast as teak.77
In 1873, some 16,000 various eucalypts were growing in Ranikhet (Uttarakhand).78
Yet, the eucalyptus trees introduced into India did not grow in the places where
they were most wanted—on the malarial plains. In the 1870s, for example, Madras’

70. Doughty, The Eucalyptus: A Natural and Commercial History, 129.

71. Cleghorn, Forests, 339; for complaints at the “heavy charges” incurred from importing Australian
seeds, see O’Connor, Eucalyptus Globulus, 131.
72. Hugh Cleghorn, “Second Annual Report, 1858–59,” December 31, 1859, in Cleghorn, Forests, 42–43.
73. Cleghorn to Secretary to Government, R. D., Utakamand, November 8, 1859, no. 836, “Firewood of the
Nilgiri Hills,” in Cleghorn, Forests, 158.
74. “Plantation of Australian Trees, Nilgiri Hills,” in Cleghorn, Forests, 171.
75. Dr. J. Maitland cited in “Plantation of Australian Trees, Nilgiri Hills,” in Cleghorn, Forests, 181.
76. D. Brandis to Editor Ootacamund, April 7, 1882, “The Forests of South India,” Indian Forester, vol. 7,
no. 4 (April 1882): 366.
77. D. Brandis, “On the Distribution of Forests in India,” Indian Forester, vol. 9, no. 5 (May 1883): 224;
O’Connor, Eucalyptus Globulus, 120.
78. O’Connor, Eucalyptus Globulus, 128.
Health Panics, Migration, and Ecological Exchange 105

sanitary commissioner unsuccessfully attempted to introduce eucalypts.79 Repeated

failures established the climatic limitation of its growth; namely, to the hill stations of
southern India. Those areas on the subcontinent outside of southern India proved to
be either too dry or too humid to permit the successful growth of eucalyptus. It was
not until the 1920s that research revealed that most eucalyptus introduced into India
came from Australia’s temperate south, not its north. Thereafter, especially from the
1960s, more ecologically appropriate species were planted, along with the creation of
new hybrids.80
Just as the health panic generated by the Uprising had led to a flurry of official
proposals from Australasian politicians and boosters to establish sites for conva-
lescent troops from India, as well as encouraging the migration of private settlers
from India to the Antipodes, so the identification of healthy areas in India and the
need to keep them healthy precipitated further biological connections with Australia
through the introduction of eucalyptus. These exchanges of people and plants point
to the geographical and environmental dimensions of health panics. The transna-
tional dimensions of panic generated by the Uprising also encompassed those over
migrating labor and their potential for revolution, as witnessed with the transporta-
tion of Indian convicts from the subcontinent to the Straits Settlement following the
events of 1857, as Rajesh Rai has recently highlighted.81 Finally, if panic heightened
anxieties about India’s climate, exchanges of people and plants with Australasia also
served to reinforce worries about the healthiness of particular colonial environments
in Australasia, as the last section of this chapter reveals.

Interchangeable Imperial Places

As thousands of Australian species were introduced into India to enhance the health-
iness of hill stations in the wake of the Uprising, so officials in southern Australia
and New Zealand drew from Indian experiences—and sometimes Indian plants—in
establishing their own hill stations. While most Australasian colonists believed in the
healthiness of their new colony’s climate, they recognized that, like hill stations, the
salubrity of some local areas might deteriorate and require improvement. Swamps in
Australasia, in particular, elicited fears of miasma. In consequence, marching to the
drumbeat of progress, settlers across Australasia set about transforming them into
swathes of verdant pasture, activities, they believed, that brought both financial and
health benefits.82 Yet drainage seldom proved as quick or as easy a process as many

79. Ibid., 124.

80. Brett M. Bennett, “A Global History of Australian Trees,” Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 44, no. 1
(2011): 125–45.
81. Rajesh Rai, “The 1875 Panic and the Fabrication of an Indian ‘Menace’ in Singapore,” Modern Asian
Studies, vol. 47, no. 2 (2013): 365–405. I thank Robert Peckham for alerting me to this source.
82. Anderson, Cultivation of Whiteness, 20, 35–8.
106 James Beattie

hoped.83 Sometimes the healthiest—and cheapest solution—was to get as far away as

practicably possible from such waterscapes, at least until such time as they had been
drained.84
This is what some individuals did in the early years of the establishment of
Christchurch, capital of the South Island Anglican colony in Canterbury Province,
New Zealand. The fledgling city suffered one outbreak of disease after another as its
engineers and medical authorities battled the challenges posed by the city’s swampy
soil, crisscrossed by creeks and washed by tidal flows.85 (Indeed, the so-called New
Zealand death—drowning—was particularly prevalent in Christchurch, owing to
the propinquity of waterways and pubs.)86 Respecting neither the inebriate nor the
teetotaler, typhus and typhoid, along with other remittent and intermittent fevers,
recurred with unerring and sometimes deadly frequency in the colonial settlement.87
By the time of his urgent recall to India following the Uprising, Sir John Cracroft
Wilson had already established a hill station above miasmic Christchurch. Although
likening Canterbury’s climate to that of the hill stations of Nainee Tal, Munsooree,
and Simla, Wilson chose to live above the malarial morass of Christchurch.88 That
way he could avoid the disadvantages posed to health and transportation by the
swampy nature of the town below. Wilson’s naming of the area above Christchurch
in which he chose to live recalled its Indian namesake, Cashmere (Kashmir). New
Zealand’s Cashmere, like India’s, Wilson explained, rose abruptly over flat plains and
had a similarly healthy climate to match.89
Wilson introduced into his New Zealand property a veritable cornucopia of plants
and animals brought from India on a ship he chartered from the subcontinent. These
included Himalayan rhododendrons and bamboos (some of which decidedly did not
survive), as well as many other different plants. Some, if not all, would have been
planted by the retinue of Indian servants Wilson brought out with him, some of
whom he also employed to drain the swamp at the bottom of Cashmere. Intriguingly,
the grounds of the residence Wilson had built mimicked aspects of the Indian hill
stations in other ways, including having Indian plants ringed by eucalyptus trees, no

83. Geoff Park, “‘Swamps which Might Doubtless Easily be Drained’: Swamp Drainage and Its Impact
on the Indigenous,” in Environmental Histories of New Zealand, ed. Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking
(Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002), 151–68.
84. Beattie, “Colonial Geographies of Settlement,” 583–610.
85. Geoffrey Rice, “Public Health in Christchurch, 1875–1910: Mortality and Sanitation,” in A Healthy
Country: Essays on the Social History of Medicine in New Zealand, ed. Linda Bryder (Wellington:
Bridget Williams Books, 1991), 85–108.
86. Peter Holland, Home in the Howling Wilderness: Settlers and the Environment in Southern New Zealand
(Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2013).
87. Rice, “Public Health,” 85–108.
88. Sir John Cracroft Wilson, Transcript of Diary/Recollections, 1854, of Canterbury, typed transcript by
Ron Chapman, 1989, Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand, ARC1989.80, 41.
89. Beattie, “Making Home, Making Identity,” 141.
Health Panics, Migration, and Ecological Exchange 107

doubt chosen for the shelter and fuelwood they provided, but perhaps, too, because
of their perceived health benefits.90
Across the Tasman, the need for a temporary refuge from the heat was more much
apparent than in New Zealand’s somewhat fickle climate, where heat one day fre-
quently contrasted with a bone-chilling “southerly buster” the next.91 In March 1858,
for example, the South Australian Register recorded how “[t]he extreme heat of the
weather experienced for the last few weeks has greatly tried the physical endurance of
weak and susceptible persons.” At least, it noted, the lack of humidity resulted in only
a handful of deaths.92 Countless private letters and diaries complained of Australia’s
excessive summer heats, its searing oven-like winds and piercing light. As Warwick
Anderson has shown, specific complaints associated with Australia’s heat lasted well
into the 1870s, revolving around fears of how “the antipodean climate could both
deplete and over-excite the otherwise phlegmatic British constitution.”93
Although inspired by Indian models, Australia’s hill stations differed from the sub-
continent’s in several significant ways. Andrea Inglis has argued that Australia’s hill
stations did not replicate the rigid class divisions and military hierarchies of India.
Nor did they develop as attempts to flee an alien environment. Instead, as Inglis has
shown, through their incorporation of particular aspects of Australian nature and
scenery, they facilitated greater appreciation of Australian environments. By the
late nineteenth century, Inglis contends, they contributed to Australian national-
ism, by promoting appreciation of the native nature around mountain resorts. Inglis
also demonstrates their seasonal nature. For example, the Blue Mountains, north of
Sydney, catered to upper- and middle-class needs, by offering relaxing walks in cooler
summer temperatures, and providing luxury accommodation amidst pleasingly pic-
turesque scenery. Places fulfilling similar needs sprang up in other parts of Australia.
South Australians had the summer balm of the Adelaide Hills while Queenslanders
could flee to Toowoomba.94 As the colorful meteorologist, Indianophile, theosophist,
and gardener Clement Wragge (1852–1922) explained:

[No] finer place for a sanatorium can be found than residence in a gum-tree
forest in the dry belt of country of Southern Queensland at a reasonable elevation.
There the percentage of oxygen as compared with other atmospheric constituents
in slightly above the normal, and thus must the lungs have vigorous action in
purifying the blood and rendering the individual less susceptible to disease; and
to remove one stricken to such an environment probably means to cure him.95

90. Beattie, “Plants, Animals, and Environmental Transformation.”

91. See, Holland, Home in the Howling Wilderness.
92. South Australian Register, March 11, 1858, 3.
93. Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 25.
94. Inglis, Summer in the Hills.
95. “The Coming Summer: Our Defence of the Brisbane Climate,” Wragge, vol. 1, no. 10 (September 18,
1902): 73.
108 James Beattie

Responding, perhaps, to residual pessimism about the suitability of white resi-

dence in Australia’s semitropical and tropical north,96 Wragge admitted that while
“we have our hot days . . . there is always Toowoomba, and our hills—always have
we Wynnum, Manly, Cleveland, and the other balmy spots on Moreton Bay—and
the heat is of that soft seductive nature, tempered by sea breezes, which can only be
experienced in coastal districts bordering the seductive tropics.”97 Continued debates
about the benefits of Indian laborers—along with those from the Pacific Islands and
China—for working the plantations of Australia’s tropical north reveal the limits
to some of the confidence expressed by the likes of Wragge, at least beyond “semi-
tropical” Brisbane.98
As India’s hill stations had introduced eucalyptus, so several of Australia’s hill sta-
tions introduced perceived health-giving plants from India. They also constructed
buildings modelled on those of India’s hill stations, themselves derivative of English
styles. In Victoria in 1884, its governor (1884–89), Henry Loch (1827–1900), rented
the Mt. Macedon property, Rosenheim, as a summer retreat. Its function elicited
comments by the pastoralist and gold commissioner, Thomas Alexander Browne
but better known as the novelist Rolf Boldrewood (1826–1915). Browne described
Macedon as “the Simla of Victoria.”99 Macedon’s “deodars, Himalayan spruce, Assam
tea, Rhododendron Dalhousie, and Indian ducks on the State Nursery Lake,” notes
garden historian Paul Fox, “had been re-created in the image of an Indian hill
station.” The mock-Tudor construction of the new two-storied governor’s residence
in Macedon closely resembled the commander-in-chief ’s recently constructed abode
in Simla (India), further enhancing that image.100
These complicated borrowings involved assemblages of different plant and build-
ing styles, but with local variations, much as how, for example, the Bengal bungalow
developed in form and function through time and over space.101 This evidence also
suggests the creation of imperial landscape of health, constructed in part as a result

96. On which, see Anderson, Cultivation of Whiteness; Meg Parsons, “Creating a Hygienic Dorm:
The Refashioning of Aboriginal Women and Children and the Politics of Racial Classification in
Queensland 1920s–40s,” Health & History, vol. 14, no. 2 (2012): 112–39; Alison Bashford, “‘Is White
Australia Possible?’ Race, Colonialism and Tropical Medicine,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 23, no.
2 (2000): 248–71.
97. “The Coming Summer,” 73.
98. David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 1850–1939 (St. Lucia: University of
Queensland Press, 1999); Julia Martínez, “Plural Australia: Aboriginal and Asian Labour in Tropical
White Australia, Darwin, 1911–1940” (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wollongong, 1999).
99. Rolf Boldrewood, Old Melbourne Memories (Melbourne: George Robertson and Co., 1884). Quoted in
Paul Fox, “The Simla of the South,” The Changing Landscape: The Garden in the Landscape: Proceedings
of the Australian Garden History Fifteenth Annual National Conference, Melbourne, 21–23 October
1994 (Ballarat: Australian Garden History Society, 1994), 10, 11.
100. Fox, “The Simla of the South,” 11.
101. Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1984), 14–64.
Health Panics, Migration, and Ecological Exchange 109

of the connections established by the health panic following the 1857 Uprising. This
event led to the migration of many officials and military to the Australasian colonies.
Some migrants introduced the concept of the hill station from India into Australasia,
while others argued for its importance based on the high profile of such institutions
in the wake of the Revolution. Visiting Darjeeling in 1890, Indianophile, irrigator, and
politician Alfred Deakin (1856–1919) noted in his diary, “cleared patches of garden
and dry grass like Macedon—gardens on steep slopes and crests of hills,” seemingly
genuinely unaware that the model was India and not the other way round.102 Such
intertwining of ecologies, buildings, and landscapes suggested by descriptions of Mt.
Macedon and by its resemblance to Darjeeling, illustrates the complex assemblages of
people, places and plants, that imperialism could throw together.

Conclusion

The events of 1857, in catching British forces off guard and throwing postwar imperial
strategists into panic, starkly revealed British susceptibility to what they regarded as
a pathological climate. The Uprising and its aftermath heightened existing anxieties
about the salubrity of India’s climate, signaling a shift in British attitudes and inten-
tions toward India and Indians. In the urgent search for a climate best able to main-
tain the readiness of troops and officials, other parts of the British Empire eagerly
threw open their doors to sickly soldiers, enfeebled officers and fading factotums.
They presented their own colonies as able to render remarkable changes to bodies
blasted by the heat and disease of the Indian subcontinent. In the event, despite the
many enticing schemes put forward, only, it seems, private retirees sought shelter in
Australasian sanatoria. Still, the centrality of the hill station to the British Raj in the
wake of the Uprising made it imperative to ensure the healthiness of such places,
and led to further ecological exchanges between India and Australia. Finally, the very
concept of the hill station itself provided a model for combating Australia’s summer
heat and the sickly swamps of Christchurch, New Zealand.
The health panic associated with the 1857 Uprising demonstrates the importance
of considering matters of migration, health, and landscape change across Empire,
not just within either white settler colonies or tropical colonies. Panic, in bringing
about wider structural change in British India, had significant geographical and envi-
ronmental dimensions, which extended beyond the subcontinent. Panic triggered
complex interchanges among colonies in India, Australia, and New Zealand, leading
to new patterns of environmental change, migration, and political discussion. It also

102. “Alfred Deakin, “Diary, Indian 1890–91,” Deakin Papers, National Library of Australia. Quoted in Fox,
“The Simla of the South,” 13.
110 James Beattie

underlines the importance of considering as the cultural and material dimensions of

imperial health and environmental history as interrelated and coproduced.103

Acknowledgements

This chapter builds upon work previously reported in “Imperial Landscapes of

Health: Place, Plants and People between India and Australia, 1800s–1900s,” Health &
History, vol. 14, no. 1 (2012): 100–20; and Empire and Environmental Anxiety: Health,
Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia, 1800–1920 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). I thank the editors of Health & History for their permis-
sion to draw from earlier material, Catharine Coleborne and Ondine Godtschalk for
their comments on this chapter, the research assistantship of Nicola Lemberg, and
the encouragement of David Arnold, Robert Peckham, and Maria Sin. Research for
this chapter was made possible by a FASS Contestable Research Grant, University of
Waikato.

103. James Beattie, Emily O’Gorman, and Edward Melillo, “Rethinking the British Empire through Eco-
Cultural Networks: Materialist-Cultural Environmental History, Relational Connections and Agency,”
Environment and History, vol. 20, no. 4 (November, 2014), 561–75; James Beattie, Edward Melillo, and
Emily O’Gorman, eds., Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire: New Views on Environmental
History (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
5
Disease, Rumor, and Panic in India’s Plague and
Influenza Epidemics, 1896–1919

David Arnold

Disease—or the threat of it—has been a potent source of rumor and panic in modern
times. Cholera, plague, influenza, AIDS, SARS, and avian flu have all in their time
provoked fear and dread among those groups that appeared most at risk or caused
waves of terror that have engulfed entire societies. It is not always the most deadly
diseases that have had this effect: malaria, for instance, seems rarely to have precipi-
tated widespread panic. Nor has the level of response necessarily been in relation to
those diseases that were most stigmatizing or disfiguring, like leprosy, tuberculosis,
and syphilis, whose social impact was constrained by secrecy and denial or which
were managed through practices of social exclusion and institutional incarceration.1
Perhaps the greatest turmoil occurred in epidemic episodes that combined disease,
rumor, and panic, united in a single moment of actual or incipient catastrophe, or
those epidemics whose causes and consequences were unknown and whose advance
appeared so rapid and overwhelming as to be unstoppable.
The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the role of rumor and panic by comparing
and contrasting two of the most destructive episodes in the disease history of modern
India. In 1896–97, India was struck by bubonic plague, part of the third global pan-
demic that began in southern China and Hong Kong in 1894, and which over the fol-
lowing 50 years resulted in an estimated 10 to 15 million deaths worldwide, 12 million
of them in India alone.2 Even before India had fully recovered from this catastrophe,
it was hit by a second and still more destructive disease. The influenza outbreak of
1918–19 has been described as the greatest pandemic in world history, leaving in its
wake an estimated 30 million dead.3 According to official statistics, influenza resulted
in 12.5 million deaths in India, a figure that has subsequently been revised upwards

1. That said, as was evident following the death of Father Damien in 1889, a disease like leprosy could
become “an imperial danger” and cause a worldwide scare; see Zachary Gussow and George S. Tracy,
“Stigma and the Leprosy Phenomenon: The Social History of a Disease in the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 44, no. 5 (1970): 425–49.
2. Myron Echenberg, “Pestis Redux: The Initial Years of the Third Bubonic Plague Pandemic, 1894–1901,”
Journal of World History, vol. 13, no. 2 (2002): 429–49.
3. Howard Phillips and David Killingray, “Introduction,” in The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19:
New Perspectives, ed. Howard Phillips and David Killingray (London: Routledge, 2003), 2, 4.
112 David Arnold

to 18 or even 20 million.4 While plague and influenza caused heavy mortality around
the globe, India’s experience of both pandemics—given the size and the poverty of
its population—was particularly severe. In the case of influenza, India was much the
hardest hit of any country and by an epidemic that was itself the most destructive of
its kind ever known.5 As one health officer remarked: “In its rapidity of spread, the
enormous number of its victims, and its total fatality,” influenza in India “reached a
virulence before which even plague with all its horrors” faded “into insignificance.”6
And yet, where plague provoked full-scale panic, unleashed a spate of wild rumors,
triggered mass migration from cities, caused riots, and incited state repression, the
greater and more temporally concentrated mortality of the influenza epidemic gave
rise to abundant rumor but otherwise passed without any major panic or upheaval.
Clearly, the relative scale of mortality does not alone explain the onset of panic in
many parts of India in the late 1890s and early 1900s and its absence in 1918–19. So
why, in terms of panicked reactions, was the influenza epidemic, to quote Sherlock
Holmes, the “dog that didn’t bark”?7
By examining these two major epidemic episodes side by side, and looking in par-
ticular at their impact on the principal cities of India, this chapter tries to explain why
plague sparked such drastic state action and intense public response while, barely 25
years later, the influenza epidemic did not. In attempting to explain this difference,
the chapter looks at the nature and understanding of the two diseases, the very differ-
ent responses they produced, and the timing of the epidemics in relation to internal
political and economic developments, as well as the international context in which
they occurred.

India’s Plague Panic

The response in India to the unfolding pandemic of bubonic plague in the 1890s and
1900s can be understood as a reciprocal panic episode, with one crisis response feeding
upon the other. The initial sense of panic came from the Government of India. The
outbreak of plague in Hong Kong in 1894 caused alarm that it might rapidly spread

4. Karl D. Patterson and Gerald F. Pyle, “The Geography and Mortality of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 65, no. 1 (1991): 4–21 (18); Mridula Ramanna, “Coping with the
Influenza Pandemic: The Bombay Experience,” in Phillips and Killingray, Spanish Influenza, 86–98. For
a revision downwards to around 14 million, see Siddharth Chandra, Goran Kuljanin and Jennifer Wray,
“Mortality from the Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919,” Demography, vol. 49 (2012): 157–65.
5. I. D. Mills, “The 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic: The Indian Experience,” Indian Economic and Social
History Review, vol. 23, no. 1 (1986): 1–40 (2).
6. N. H. Choksy, “Influenza,” Administration Report of the Municipal Commissioner for the City of Bombay,
1918–19 (Bombay: Times Press, 1919), 2, 78.
7. A phrase also used to describe the apparent lack of reaction elsewhere: Myron Echenberg, “‘The Dog
that Did Not Bark’: Memory and the 1918 Influenza Epidemic in Senegal,” in Phillips and Killingray,
Spanish Influenza, 230–38.
Disease, Rumor, and Panic 113

to Calcutta and Indian ports.8 The Government of India’s sanitary advisers feared that
once the disease gained a foothold in the country (as it did in Bombay in July–August
1896), it would surge across the subcontinent in an almost unstoppable epidemic. The
speed of state action was further prompted by concern that, once plague had become
established on the subcontinent, it would advance into the Middle East and Europe,
reawakening fears and folk memories of the devastating Black Death five-and-a-half
centuries earlier. An emergency international sanitary conference convened at Venice
in 1897 threatened an embargo against the importation of goods from India, directly
engendering British commerce with India.9 Drastic state action seemed necessary to
allay international fears and save India from economic as well as epidemic disaster.
Moreover, even though the epidemiology of plague was as yet poorly understood,
India’s public health experts were confident that, if sufficiently drastic action were
taken, the epidemic could be contained.
In October 1896, the municipal authorities in Bombay were granted extraordi-
nary powers to suppress the outbreak. This was followed in February 1897 by the
Government of India’s Epidemic Diseases Act.10 With its “wide and summary powers,”
applicable to the whole of British India, the act was one of the most extreme set of
measures ever employed by the colonial regime in India. It authorized the health
authorities to confiscate or destroy any property (including houses) that they believed
to harbor the disease; gave them the right to prohibit fairs and festivals where these
might endanger public health; permitted the hospitalization and segregation of sus-
pected plague victims; allowed the rapid disposal of the dead to prevent the spread
of disease; and instituted systematic inspection of travelers by road, rail, and sea to
search for physical signs of infection and detain plague suspects.11 In Bombay city, an
emergency plague committee was formed under an Indian Army general to enforce
these highly unpopular measures, signaling an extension to India of the militarized
and highly interventionist approach previously adopted in Hong Kong. Indeed, some

8. Editorial, “The Plague in Hongkong, and the Measures to Prevent Its Introduction into Calcutta,”
Indian Medical Gazette [hereafter IMG] vol. 29 (1894), 263.
9. On the plague epidemic and its handling in India, see David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State
Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth–Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993), chap. 5; Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo–Indian Preventive Medicine, 1858–
1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chaps. 5–6; Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, “Plague
Panic and Epidemic Politics in India, 1896–1914,” in Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical
Perception of Pestilence, ed. Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992), 203–40.
10. India, Legislative, nos. 37–46, February 1897, National Archives of India, New Delhi.
11. On the Bombay outbreak and official responses to it, see P. C. H. Snow, Report on the Outbreak of
Bubonic Plague in Bombay, 1896–97 (Bombay: “Times of India” Steam Press, 1897); W. F. Gatacre,
Report on the Bubonic Plague in Bombay, 1896–97 (Bombay: “Times of India” Steam Press, 1897).
114 David Arnold

of those involved in implementing anti-plague measures were “Hong Kong doctors,”

members of the Royal Army Medical Corps who had previously served in that city.12
The nature and scale of these interventionist measures are remarkable, especially for
a regime that still, in the aftermath of the Mutiny and Rebellion of 1857–58, remained
broadly committed to a policy of laissez-faire in social and economic matters. Thus,
in the three years 1897–99, in what proved to be an unsuccessful attempt to prevent
plague from reaching Calcutta, nearly four million railway passengers were examined
on entering Bengal. About 72,000 travelers were detained for further observation,
though very few of them died in detention from plague and other causes.13 In Bombay
from late 1896 onwards, thousands of houses were declared unfit for human habita-
tion. Buildings were lime-washed or doused with disinfectant, their earthen floors
were dug up, roofs broken open, and walls pierced to admit sunlight and fresh air.
Behind these measures lay the prevailing sanitary wisdom that saw damp, darkness,
and dirt as conducive to disease, if not its actual cause. It was almost incomprehen-
sible to the authorities that residents were unable “to understand the importance of
ventilation and light to the inside of their houses.”14 But these interventionist meas-
ures were also backed by an antagonistic attitude toward the Indian public by colonial
authorities who believed that Indian ignorance, prejudice, and hostility needed to
be confronted and overcome if progress in public health were ever to be achieved.
Pressure for such drastic moves had been growing for some time (as was evident from
mounting concern over recurrent smallpox and cholera epidemics). It was further
nurtured by the increasing animosity the colonial regime faced with the rise of mili-
tant Indian nationalism and by the vociferous criticism of its handling of famine and
other public health and public order issues. With the enforcement of far-reaching
anti-plague measures, many Indians inevitably felt that they, and not just the disease,
were under attack.
By the 1890s, Indian cities, especially the largest, Bombay and Calcutta, had
become troublesome sites of colonial control, with rapidly expanding populations
and escalating problems of poverty, overcrowding, and disease. Urban control
was further threatened, in colonial eyes, by the rise of an industrial working class,
based primarily on the jute and cotton textile industries, with mill-hands posing an

12. Ian J. Catanach, “Plague and the Tensions of Empire: India, 1896–1918,” in Imperial Medicine and
Indigenous Societies, ed. David Arnold (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 149–77.
On the Hong Kong connection, see Mary P. Sutphen, “Not What, but Where: Bubonic Plague and
the Reception of Germ Theories in Hong Kong and Calcutta, 1894–1897,” Journal of the History of
Medicine, vol. 52, no. 1, (1997): 81–113.
13. Calculated from: Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner for Bengal, 1897 (Calcutta: Bengal
Secretariat Press, 1898), 8; Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner for Bengal, 1898 (Calcutta:
Bengal Secretariat Press, 1899), 5; Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner for Bengal, 1899
(Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1899), 6.
14. T. S. Weir, Executive Health Office, Bombay, in Administration Report of the Municipal Commissioner
for the City of Bombay, 1896–97 (Bombay: “Times of India” Steam Press, 1897), 681.
Disease, Rumor, and Panic 115

“ever-present source of danger.”15 In this regard, the British administration and its
police and public health advisers were stoking a “moral panic,”16 using the outbreak of
plague as an opportunity to strike down all those they saw as a threat to their author-
ity and enlightened intentions. The panic over plague tapped into longstanding issues
of colonial governance and deep-seated fears.
The second source of panic came from the Indian population, from the Indian elite
and, more evidently, from the urban masses. The elite (which included the Western-
educated middle class, the commercial and business classes, as well as “traditional”
caste and community leaders) felt that its authority was being challenged or under-
mined by aggressive state intervention and the apparent determination to brush
aside Indian agency and opinion as obstructive and unresponsive to modern sanitary
needs. Their privileged status ignored, members of the elite found themselves sub-
jected to humiliating searches on railway stations (including women whose custom-
ary seclusion and privacy was thereby violated), to house searches that invaded and
polluted the innermost parts of their homes, and to the wholesale destruction of their
houses and other property. Similar fears and annoyances also inflamed the Indian
masses—at first the industrial and municipal workers of Bombay, but increasingly,
too, the poorer strata of other cities, towns, and villages. Social norms and caste or
religious conventions also appeared under attack, especially through compulsory
hospitalization of the sick and rapid disposal of the dead. The sanitary assault on
plague fuelled popular alarm and physical resistance, but it also provoked elite hostil-
ity at a time when middle-class nationalists were already seeking closer engagement
with the masses. The consequence was a powerful wave of protest and panic, directed
far more against state intervention than the disease itself, beginning in Bombay in
late 1896 and subsequently spreading to other parts of western and northern India.17
According to Bombay’s stressed and censorious health officer, T. S. Weir, it was
only after the disease had reached its first peak of intensity in the closing months of
1896, “and the cause for panic had really passed away” (a serious misreading of an
epidemic still growing in intensity), that “the panic became most intense. It seemed as
if the people had been frightened by a nightmare.”18 Weir revealed his intense irrita-
tion when he claimed that there were three stages to this upsurge of “popular feeling”:
first, “when people would not believe in [any] plague measures”; second, when they
“believed in all measures except the right ones”; and, third, when they “believed in
every rumor and would not believe in any measure.”19 This adverse reaction might

15. Snow, Report, 7.

16. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London:
MacGibbon and Kee, 1972).
17. For details, see David Arnold, “Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896–1900,” in
Subaltern Studies V, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 55–90.
18. Administration Report for Bombay, 1896–97, 705.
19. Ibid., 680.
116 David Arnold

have been anticipated. In 1877, at the height of one of India’s worst famines, more
than 10,000 hunger-struck people flooded into Bombay city in search of relief. The
city authorities were overwhelmed by this influx and the upsurge of disease that
accompanied it. They tried to segregate the famine poor, creating a special camp on
waste ground on the west of the island. Attempts to feed such vast numbers and to
cope with the swelling tide of sick and dying provoked fear and sparked rumors that
the authorities were trying to poison the poor (in order to be rid of their ever-growing
numbers), to break their caste (by giving them forbidden food or through the defiling
touch of foreigners), and, worst of all, were taking them to hospitals in order to kill
them and cut up their bodies (a reference to the loathed practice of medical dissec-
tion). Precisely the same response—dubbed “the unreasoning terror of hospital life”
by the city’s municipal commissioner—occurred in Bombay 20 years later.20 No one,
it seems, had heeded the lessons of the recent past.
The upshot in 1896–97 was a wave of “wild, unreasoning panic” in Bombay.21 One
response was flight, as thousands of working- and middle-class inhabitants fled the
city, including the street-cleaners and sweepers on whom the city’s crude sanitary
system relied. Nearly 400,000 people, almost half the total population, had deserted
Bombay by February 1897.22 Rumors abounded as to the authorities’ malevolent,
even homicidal, intentions. Among “the wildest and most improbable stories,”23 was
a recrudescence of momiai rumors—which claimed that Indians were being captured
and taken to hospital in order to extract a body fluid used to protect the lives of
Europeans.24 In all of this rumor-mongering the press played a vital role. Most rumor,
no doubt, was spread by word of mouth, but the press, which by the 1890s included
many vernacular as well as English-language papers, greatly facilitated the circula-
tion of rumors and seemed, by their repetition, to give them a degree of authority
even while often denouncing their improbability. This was done to help discredit
the colonial administration or to stoke popular, as well as middle-class, resentment.
Howard Phillips and David Killingray remark on the power of the press at the time
of the influenza pandemic in 1918, but in India newspapers were far more promi-
nent in public reactions to disease during the early plague years than they were 25
years later.25 Some officials even accused the “native” press of fomenting unrest by

20. Snow, Report, 16.

21. Ibid., 4.
22. Ibid., 19–20.
23. [J. Neild Cook], Report of the Epidemics of Plague in Calcutta during the Years 1898–99, 1899–1900 and
up to 30th June 1900 (Calcutta: Municipal Press, 1900), 25.
24. R. E. Enthoven, “Editor’s Introduction,” to William Crooke, Religion and Folklore of Northern India, 3rd
ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 2; and Crooke in ibid., 111–12; F. S. P. Lely, Suggestions
for the Better Government of India (London: Alston Rivers, 1906), 28–30. There are similarities (and
possible connections) here with stories recorded by Luise White in East Africa: see her Speaking with
Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
25. Phillips and Killingray, “Introduction,” 3.
Disease, Rumor, and Panic 117

publishing “without enquiry, any wild tale, or, as it is termed in India, any piece of
‘gup’ that seems likely to interest their readers and increase their circulation.”26
Rumor impelled action. Central to events in Bombay was the Arthur Road Hospital,
used to accommodate and treat patients with smallpox and other infectious diseases.
Twice in October 1896 it was stormed by irate workers from the Bombay textile mills
seeking the release of plague suspects. Elsewhere ambulances were attacked and
Europeans chased and assaulted in the belief that they were party to caste-breaking,
forced segregation, and compulsory hospitalization.27 Searches of Indian homes and
the inspection of travelers created intense opposition. Resentment at these intrusive
measures was one factor behind the assassination of Poona’s plague commissioner,
W. C. Rand, in June 1897, an action which made the infuriated government still more
determined on coercion and repression.28
In an attempt to halt the epidemic, the government turned to the Paris-trained
Russian bacteriologist Waldemar Haffkine, who was already in Calcutta studying
cholera, to prepare a plague prophylactic. The serum Haffkine developed in Bombay
ultimately proved of immense value in countering the spread of the disease, but in
the short term (coming in the wake of widespread resistance to smallpox vaccination)
inoculation only added fresh fuel to “absurd rumors” about the cruelty inflicted and
the sinister intentions involved.29 In Punjab, where inoculation was most systemati-
cally employed, it was reported that the needle used “was a yard long; you died imme-
diately after the operation; men lost their virility and women became sterile . . . and
other like nonsense.”30 To add to its woes, and as the epidemic continued to spread,
the government was finding its anti-plague measures extremely costly to implement
and a great drain on its administrative resources.

Recoiling from Panic

It did not take long for the colonial regime in India to realize the dangers of such a
deeply hostile public response. Anti-plague measures were proving counterproduc-
tive, failing to prevent the spread of plague but also causing panic and running the
risk of unleashing a second Mutiny. Already in Bombay in 1898–1900 the need for a
partial “liberalizing” of earlier extreme measures had been recognized, with some of
26. Arthur Crawford, Our Troubles in Poona and the Deccan (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1897), 78.
27. Snow, Report, 6–7.
28. Ian J. Catanach, “Poona Politicians and the Plague,” South Asia, vol. 7, no. 2 (1984): 1–18.
29. Between 1911 and 1930 more than 33 million doses of Haffkine’s serum were prepared in Bombay,
steadily outstripping the number of plague deaths. As the director of the Haffkine Institute reported in
1930, the reception of inoculation in India had undergone a “profound change.” “Where [at first] riots
were liable to occur when inoculation was pressed, recently a riot was threatened because the supply of
vaccine ran short”: “Report of the Haffkine Institute for the Year 1930,” IMG, 67, 476–77.
30. E. Wilkinson, Report on Plague in the Punjab from October 1st, 1901, to September 30th, 1902 (Lahore:
Punjab Government Gazette, 1904), 9, 28.
118 David Arnold

the more offensive provisions withdrawn or modified. Efforts were made to mollify
middle-class opinion by allowing well-to-do householders to segregate and treat their
sick at home rather than sending them to hospital. Indians were encouraged to create
their own caste and community hospitals. Previously shunned practitioners of “tra-
ditional” Indian medicine—vaidyas and hakims—were entrusted to notify and treat
plague cases, and “influential men” and “natural leaders” were co-opted to mediate
between health authorities and their own communities.31 Sanitary policy backed
away from outright coercion toward a far greater emphasis upon persuasion and
education, in the belief that even though this might take longer to produce results,
it would in the end be far more effective in winning over the masses as well as the
middle classes. Panic began to abate.
Plague reports and manuals were now issued stressing that persuasion, not coer-
cion, was the necessary policy. The Punjab Plague Manual of 1909 opened with the
statement that:

The cardinal principle of all plague administration must be that no pressure

or compulsion, in any shape or form, is to be brought to bear on the people.
Encouragement, persuasion and the provision of facilities for carrying out the
measures advocated are the only legitimate means of influencing and guiding
public opinion in the direction desired.32

To be effective all preventive measures relied on the cooperation of the people,

and every effort must be made to enlist their sympathies and bring home to them
through their natural leaders and in any other way that may be practicable, that
it rests mainly with themselves to bring about, by their own action, the cessation
of plague.33

All this suggested that the government had come to recognize that it—or its public
health establishment—had at first overreacted to the onset of plague, with generally
unhelpful results. But in consequence the struggle to contain the disease (let alone
eradicate it) became extraordinarily protracted. Even though the peak of mortality
was passed in 1907 (a year which saw 1.3 million deaths from plague across India),
localized outbreaks persisted into the 1920s. As aggressive measures were reined back
and the disease began to recede, panic gave way to resignation. Punjab’s sanitary com-
missioner remarked in 1909 that “general apathy and distrust” was now the great-
est obstacle to plague control.34 Apathy was also the term used by Bombay’s health
officer five years earlier in lamenting how familiarity with plague and lack of effective

31. [James MacNabb Campbell], Report of the Bombay Plague Committee on the Plague in Bombay, 1st July
1897 to the 30th April 1898 (Bombay: “Times of India” Steam Press, 1898), 24.
32. Punjab Plague Manual, 1909 (Lahore: Punjab Government Press, 1909), 1.
33. Ibid.
34. Report on the Sanitary Administration of the Punjab, 1909 (Lahore: “Civil and Military Gazette” Press,
1910), 11.
Disease, Rumor, and Panic 119

measures had “blunted the feelings of the people and rendered them apathetic.”35 By
the time influenza struck India in 1918, plague had entered a period of slow decline,
but it was still seen as a continuing threat to public health.

The Influenza Epidemic

The impact of influenza on India in 1918–19 was devastating. Upwards of 12 million

people (perhaps as many as 18 million) died either of influenza itself or, more com-
monly, from pneumonia and other respiratory complications. Young adults between
the ages of 20 and 40 were particularly susceptible, with more women than men dying
from the disease. Unlike plague, mortality from the epidemic was concentrated in a
few months. It began, allegedly, with the arrival of infected troops at Bombay and
Karachi in May and June 1918; this launched the first wave of disease that swept
across India in the middle months of the year, resulting in an estimated six million
deaths.36 A second, still more fatal, wave erupted in the autumn, between September
and November 1918. In one day, October 6, 1918, there were 768 deaths in Bombay
city alone, more than in the worst days of the city’s plague epidemic, while across the
Bombay Presidency more than a million deaths occurred in October and November
1918. But the disease rapidly lost its initial impetus and within a few years had sunk
to statistical insignificance.37
An unknown number of other people, tens of millions, fell seriously ill from the
disease and its complications, reports suggesting that in some areas half the popula-
tion were affected.38 Mortality was exceptionally great in rural areas and among tribal
populations in the Central Provinces, which, at 102.6 per thousand of the population,
experienced the highest death rate of any province in 1918. Plague began as an urban
phenomenon, with most resistance to anti-plague measures and the reporting of
rumors and resistance to them occurring in the cities: it then gradually infiltrated the
countryside. But the destruction wrought by influenza was most profound in rural
India, especially during the epidemic’s “second wave.” The Central Provinces’ sani-
tary commissioner noted how influenza had “spread with great rapidity, paralysing
towns and decimating villages.” In October and November “the ravages of the disease
were at their worst in the villages, where the complete helplessness of the people[,]

35. Administration Report of the Municipal Commissioner for the City of Bombay, 1903–04 (Bombay:
“Times of India” Press, 1904), 2, 179.
36. F. Norman White, A Preliminary Report on the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 in India (Simla: Government
Monotype Press, 1919), 1.
37. Mills, “Influenza Pandemic.”
38. T. G. N. Stokes, “Report on the Influenza Epidemic in the Central Provinces and Berar,” Annual
Sanitary Report of the Central Provinces and Berar, 1918 (Nagpur: Government Press, 1919), Appendix
2, p. 3.
120 David Arnold

combined with scarcity of food and clothing[,] produced a calamity which baffles
description.”39
Like plague, the geographical distribution of influenza was uneven. Western, north-
ern, and central India were hit hard while eastern and southern India were, as during
the plague epidemic, less affected. But, unlike plague, influenza, though extremely
destructive in 1918–19, rapidly faded out and by the early 1920s no longer appeared
a major health threat. Perhaps the greatest contrast with the plague epidemic is that
influenza did not occasion anything like the kind of panic that had characterized
plague at the outset in 1896–97 and intermittently for several years thereafter. One
reason for this surely lies in the different nature of the two diseases. Plague had an
impact—an aura one might say, following Walter Benjamin—that greatly exceeded
its initial occurrence.40 It was a disease well known to Europe from the Black Death
onwards and recalled with particular dread. It was a disease familiar, too, to Islamic
medicine and its Indian offshoot, Unani-tibb. An extensive literature existed on how
the disease arose and appropriate measures for its treatment and containment.41 Such
a culturally entrenched position—for Europeans and Indians alike—made plague a
particularly problematic site for sanitary negotiation. The hasty and draconian nature
of state measures accentuated Hindu and Muslim fears about colonialism and hence
about the way in which the sick and dead were treated. Influenza, by contrast, carried
very little cultural or political baggage. It had no anticipatory “aura.” It was not a
disease extensively discussed in Unani and Ayurvedic texts: indeed, it was said not
to exist in the original Ayurvedic corpus at all.42 Like other parts of Eurasia, India
had experienced an epidemic of influenza in 1890, and, as F. Norman White, the
Government of India’s sanitary commissioner, noted in October 1918, its symptoms
were “strikingly similar to the present epidemic.” Like the current epidemic, too, it
arrived from Europe via India’s western ports.43 But the 1890 epidemic caused far less
mortality than that of 1918–19, occasioning neither panic nor stimulating medical
research. With the benefit of hindsight, Punjab’s sanitary commissioner regretted
the “apathy and skepticism” with which the earlier influenza epidemic had been
greeted by doctors profession in India.44 The 1918–19 epidemic found India utterly
unprepared.

39. Annual Sanitary Report of the Central Provinces, 1918, 8.

40. Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” in Benjamin, One-Way Street and Other Writings,
trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1997 [1985]), 240–57 (247–48).
41. See Guy Attewell, Refiguring Unani Tibb: Plural Healing in Late Colonial India (New Delhi: Orient
Longman, 2007).
42. Koilas Chandra Bose, “Epidemic Influenza in and around the City of Calcutta,” IMG, vol. 55, 1920,
169–74 (169).
43. White, October 15, 1918, India, Education (Sanitary), no. 7, October 1918, India Office Records [here-
after IOR], British Library, London.
44. Appendix D: “The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 in the Punjab,” Report on the Sanitary Administration of
the Punjab, 1918 (Lahore: Superintendent, Government Printing, Punjab, 1919), xv.
Disease, Rumor, and Panic 121

Moreover, unlike plague, influenza spread with “lightning rapidity.”45 The earlier
disease essentially relied on rats and their fleas for transmission of the plague bacillus
(a connection only scientifically established in 1897). It progressed slowly from town
to town and village to village, though once established it was difficult to eradicate.
Hence, it was most often the anticipatory nature of government measures (as well as
their drastic nature) that provoked such a pronounced panic reaction, and it contin-
ued to do so as body searches at railway stations and road junctions were persisted
with, as entire villages were evacuated and their inhabitants removed to segregated
plague camps, and as determined attempts were made to promote inoculation.
Postmortems, despite their unpopularity, remained a crucial diagnostic tool. Nothing
of the kind attended the influenza epidemic. Characterized by “intense infectivity”
and a short incubation period of only six to 48 hours, the disease raced across India,
especially during the deadly second wave.46 Concentrations of people—in workplaces,
cinemas, markets, and schools, on public transport, in the home or crowded slums—
presented ideal conditions for rapid person-to-person transmission. Reports speak of
“the absolute helplessness of the people,” or liken the epidemic to “an avalanche” no
state agency could hope to arrest.47 Influenza incapacitated and immobilized entire
families, leaving them without medical assistance or even the care of relatives and
friends.
There were some incidents of localized panic and flight, especially during the early
days in Bombay, causing the Government of India’s sanitary commissioner to remark:
“During the panic caused by the epidemic the trains were filled with immigrants from
infected centres, many of them being ill.”48 Yet even in Bombay there was no repeti-
tion of the mass exodus that had paralyzed the city in 1896–98. Many people simply
died where they were. There was no time to protest, no energy to riot, no anticipatory
and coercive state measures to convert dread into action. Indeed, on this occasion,
the state was largely inactive. Its soldiers, policemen, postmen, and sanitary staff were
immobilized by sickness and death. The senior ranks of the medical services had been
depleted by the war and the state had, anyway, little to offer by way of preventive or
remedial measures, apart from advising people to stay indoors, and to keep warm and
well nourished. Bengal’s sanitary commissioner, Charles Bentley, aptly summarized
the situation:

Owing to the sudden onset and rapid spread of the epidemic little could be done
to check the ravages of the disease and in the face of such a widespread outbreak
the medical and sanitary organizations were powerless to attempt measures

45. Bhupal Singh, “Influenza,” IMG, vol. 55, 1920, 15–18 (15).
46. “Influenza Memorandum,” Bengal, Municipal (Sanitation), no. 15, 1920, IOR.
47. Stokes, “Report on the Influenza Epidemic,” 5.
48. Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner with the Government of India, 1918 (Calcutta:
Superintendent, Government Printing, India, 1920), 61.
122 David Arnold

adequate to the occasion. Moreover, the lack of any real specific against the
disease rendered efficient general treatment impossible; and although a list of
remedies have been recommended as of value, their number and variety suggests
that the majority of them are of little real use.49

Firsthand accounts of the epidemic repeatedly stress incapacity and paralysis, and
the fast moving and often fatal consequences of the disease. One of the most vivid
descriptions came from N. H. Choksy, assistant health officer at Bombay’s Arthur
Road hospital, the scene of violent clashes over the removal and treatment of plague
victims in 1896. In his long experience he had

never come across so many cases of physical deterioration, men with haggard
features, emaciated from semi-starvation and clothed literally in rags, as during
this epidemic. Their condition was greatly exaggerated by their continuing to
work for 2 or 3 days after the onset of the disease, so that they naturally fell easy
victims to it. The high prices and consequent dearness of food coupled with high
rents had knocked all stamina out of them.50

The Want of Panic

One explanation for the widespread panic in the late 1890s and early 1900s and its
virtual absence in 1918–19 thus lies in the very different character of the two diseases,
plague in the first instance, influenza in the second. But that is not the only reason
why this dog did not bark. No less significant was the lack of interventionist measures
against influenza by the government and local public health authorities as well as a
changed attitude on the part of the public, or at least of those who influenced public
attitudes, toward Western medical and sanitary measures. As already indicated, since
the early plague years the government and its public health experts had come to the
view that aggressive intervention was politically unwise and counterproductive in
India and that efforts instead had to be made to persuade and educate the public into
a more enlightened attitude. But it was not just a matter of state policy. By 1918, the
medical and sanitary services in India had been depleted by four years of war and the
loss to military service of senior medical personnel. The epidemic left the authorities
with no convincing strategy for combating influenza other than to recommend that
people keep away from work once they fell ill, avoid public places, and try to rest and
eat light but nourishing food. Some temporary hospitals were set up and travelling
dispensaries mobilized. A great number of leaflets were printed and distributed in
English and the vernaculars advising people what they should do, but the kinds of
drastic measures used against plague in 1896–97 seemed to have no relevance, and

49. Report on Sanitation in Bengal, 1918 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Book Depot, 1919), 24.
50. Choksy, “Influenza,” 78.
Disease, Rumor, and Panic 123

there were, anyway, no time or resources to deploy them even if they had seemed
advisable.51
It helped, too, that even though it followed the same route once it arrived in India,
spreading from Bombay outwards to the north and center of India, the 1918–19 influ-
enza epidemic, unlike plague, arrived in India from the West rather than the East.
Since Europe had singularly failed to do much to prevent or contain influenza what
could India possibly hope to do? By contrast, plague, in moving west from Hong
Kong to India, seemed to demand drastic and urgent measures to save the West from
an eastern epidemic invasion. Plague in India in the late 1890s attracted a host of
investigative commissions, including foreign delegations from Germany, Austria,
France, Russia, and Turkey. Intensive local research in Bombay especially was also
prompted by the appointment of a Plague Research Committee and the arrival of the
Plague Commission from London. The meteoric rise of bacteriology as a laboratory-
based medical specialty in India and the creation of a separate bacteriology section of
the state medical service owed much to the timing of the plague epidemic and its per-
ceived political and sanitary importance. Influenza, for all its catastrophic mortality,
produced a far smaller response. Only one medical officer (R. H. Malone of the Indian
Medical Service) was deputed by the Government of India and the Indian Research
Fund Association in December 1918 to investigating the bacteriology of influenza
and the possibility of developing an effective prophylactic.52 In fact, the cause of the
disease, a virus rather than a bacillus as previously thought, was not discovered until
1933. Articles appeared in the Indian medical press on influenza, recounting local
experience and discussing possible treatments and prophylactics, but in nothing like
the volume that had followed the plague epidemic.53 When a fresh epidemic did not
arrive after 1920, medical and sanitary interest rapidly waned and returned to more
enduring issues like the containment and treatment of malaria, tuberculosis, cholera,
and kala-azar. Punjab’s sanitary commissioner observed in 1919 that there had previ-
ously been a “panic” over plague, which had led to the setting up of a plague depart-
ment, and then a decade later over malaria, resulting in a department dedicated to
that disease. For a time the influenza epidemic, which cost Punjab almost one million
lives, seemed likely to produce a similar result—an influenza department—but this
time it did not happen.54

51. For illustrations of this, see Ramanna, “Coping” and the provincial reports already cited.
52. India, Education (Sanitary), nos. 15–17, December 1918, IOR; White, Preliminary Report, 12–14.
53. Further to articles already cited, see E. Selby Philson, “Influenza in Bombay,” IMG, vol. 53, 1918,
441–48; Debendra Nath Sen, “Influenza as Observed in the Sambhu Nath Pandit Hospital, Calcutta,”
IMG, vol. 55, 1920, 89–92; Editorial, “Influenza,” IMG, vol. 55, 1920, 381–82. India attracted some
(minimal) attention in the British medical press: H. G. Waters, “A Note on Influenza in India, 1918–20,”
British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 3120 (1920): 591–92.
54. Report on the Sanitary Administration of the Punjab, 1919 (Lahore: Superintendent, Government
Printing, Punjab, 1920), 17.
124 David Arnold

If plague had preeminently been India’s business, influenza was Europe’s or North
America’s. It was there that the main debate over causation took place and the hunt
for an influenza bacillus most actively pursued. It was there, too, that the main
investigation into a prophylactic vaccine took place, though bacteriologists in India
experimented with their own vaccines or versions of formulae pioneered in European
laboratories. However, with the bitter experience of popular opposition to anti-plague
inoculation in mind, many sanitary officials were skeptical about the social accept-
ability of an anti-influenza vaccine even if one could be developed. In the view of the
United Provinces’ sanitary commissioner it was simply “not a practical proposition.”55
The general view was that such a massive crisis was unlikely to recur and that the
root problem lay with India’s ignorance, poverty, and lack of basic medical services,
especially in the countryside. When in July 1924 the Indian Medical Gazette identified
the “seven scourges of India,” influenza was not among them (though plague was).56
There was no commission of enquiry into influenza as there had been into plague,
no foreign deputations. Most accounts of the epidemic appeared in provincial and
municipal annual reports (or as appendices to them) rather than as separate publica-
tions. Probably the most dramatic and enduring record of the epidemic was that given
in the Indian census report of 1921, in which the full extent of India’s demographic
loss was for the first time revealed along with its “tremendous importance from every
aspect of national life.”57
In such circumstances, with a more cautious (even nonexistent) state strategy, it
was easier for the leaders of society—the heads of castes and communities, urban
magnates, and social service organizations—to mobilize their own resources and
networks to assist the sick and poor or to set up temporary hospitals and dispen-
saries. Indian philanthropists and charity organizations, many of which had first
been goaded into action by the state’s culturally and politically insensitive measures
against plague, now took responsibility for tending the sick and for supplying food,
milk, blankets, and other essentials. “Never before,” wrote Norman White, “perhaps
in the history of India, have the educated and more fortunately placed members of
the community, come forward in such large numbers to help their poorer brethren
in times of distress.”58 The role of the state medical and public services seemed slight
by comparison. But, as people had little to fear from the state, they equally had little
reason to panic.

55. C. Mactaggart, “Report on the Epidemic of Influenza in the United Provinces during 1918,” Annual
Report of the Sanitary Commissioner of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, 1918 (Allahabad:
Superintendent, Government Press, United Provinces, 1919), Appendix D, 15A.
56. “On the Seven Scourges of India,” IMG, vol. 59, 1924, 351–55.
57. “R. K.” [R. Knowles], “The Medical Aspects of the Indian Census of 1921,” IMG, vol. 59, 1924, 466–69
(469).
58. White, Preliminary Report, 12.
Disease, Rumor, and Panic 125

This is not, however, to say that rumor made no appearance. On the contrary, in
his preliminary report on the influenza pandemic of 1918, White deplored the “wild
rumors” that had become “extremely prevalent” in India. Some of these were related
to influenza itself—whether it was an entirely new disease or a rare form of plague. But
other rumors circulating were of a more general nature. One attributed the pandemic
to “the extensive use of poison gas on the western front”; another blamed “the evil
machinations of our unscrupulous enemy” (Germany). White himself indicated that
these rumors “would scarcely have deserved mention had they not been so current in
India during the months of October and November [1918].”59
But across India as a whole, despite the phenomenal mortality, influenza appears
not to have generated the same sense of profound panic that characterized plague
scarcely 20 years earlier. This is not to deny that influenza had an enormous social as
well as demographic impact but rather to argue that the reaction to it was far more
muted than it had been to plague.60 Perhaps the very speed and scale of the catastrophe
helps explain this. Writing to his son Harilal in November 1918, Mohandas Gandhi
observed how his family, like many others, had suffered deaths from the disease.
“But,” he added, “such news is pouring in from everywhere so that now the mind is
barely affected.”61 In late 1918, Gandhi was fixated on the coming struggle over the
Rowlatt Bills: influenza seemed less perturbing than the anticipated intensification of
state repression. Similarly, one response to the plague epidemic had been the familiar
practice in Hindu India of representing disease as a female deity, with the power to
control as well as inflict disease.62 Thus, in the Worli district of Bombay city in 1903
a woman “posed as a goddess gifted with the power of curing plague.” When large
numbers of people crowded around her residence to seek her blessing, the munici-
pal health officer sought to have her prosecuted for endangering the public: she was
convicted and sentenced.63 By contrast, there is scant evidence, apart from a passing
reference by the sanitary commissioner in Madras, for influenza as the visitation of a
disease deity, and even he used that idea to argue for the decline of superstition and
the growing popularity among Indians of “modern methods of treatment.”64

59. Ibid., 1–2.

60. But, for a more detailed analysis, see David Hardiman, “The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 and the
Adivasis of Western India,” Social History of Medicine, vol. 25, no. 3 (2012): 644–64.
61. M. K. Gandhi, Gandhi to Harilal Gandhi, November 23, 1918, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi,
vol. 17 (Delhi: Government of India, Publications Division, 1965), 247. Gandhi’s apparent indifference
to influenza contrasts with the importance he attached to plague during his South African years; see
M. K. Gandhi, An Autobiography, or the Story of My Experiments with Truth (London: Penguin, 2001),
266–72.
62. Crooke, Religion and Folklore, 118.
63. Administration Report of the Municipal Commissioner for the City of Bombay, 1903–04 (Bombay:
“Times of India” Press, 1904), 163.
64. Annual Report of the Sanitary Commissioner, Madras, 1918 (Madras: Superintendent, Government
Press, 1919), 8.
126 David Arnold

Likewise, I have seen no evidence in connection with the influenza epidemic of

momiai rumors or similar tales of European malevolence. There was a mildly xeno-
phobic attempt to blame the military authorities for the importation of the epidemic
in the first place (a claim government sources vehemently denied). There were also
complaints about the slowness of the Bombay Corporation and other municipal
bodies to react to the unfolding crisis and the inadequate response of the state and
the Western medical system in general (to which the response was that governments
around the world had struggled to cope with such an unprecedented onslaught).65
There was a rumor that the governor of Bombay, Lord Willingdon, or his wife had
succumbed to the disease and that this explained their absence from public engage-
ments.66 But no one accused Willingdon and his government of poisoning the water
supply or of spreading the disease in order to cull a large and troublesome populace.
Only subsequently, following the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April 1919, was a sug-
gestion made in Gandhi’s Young India that the Government of India, by its indiffer-
ence to Indian lives, had allowed six million Indians to perish from influenza “like
rats without succour.”67
Poverty, the absence of state intervention, and the speed with which influenza
spread and incapacitated its victims are more likely explanations in this case for
the failure of rumor to translate into widespread panic. On the face of it, this might
still appear surprising. Not only was the mortality enormous and the advance of the
disease extraordinarily rapid, but the epidemic also occurred at a time of widespread
unrest in India. If the anti-plague agitation of the late 1890s was partly fuelled by
political discontent, why was not the same true in 1918? Severe wartime shortages had
driven the price of basic commodities—food, cloth, kerosene—to abnormal heights
and across large swaths of the country drought and poor harvests threatened famine.
A shortage of fodder made milk costly and blankets were in short supply—factors
that made it still more difficult for the mass of the population to survive the influenza.
Across India the impact of underlying malnutrition, poverty and debility was widely
recognized as intensifying the deadly impact of the disease. It was generally agreed
that “the poor and rural classes suffered most.”68 In the Madras Presidency, where the
epidemic was less destructive than in northern and western India, food prices shot
up to 50 percent above normal and crime rates soared to their highest levels since the

65. White, Preliminary Report, 1–2. This was not, of course, a purely Indian complaint: see, for example,
Sandra M. Tomkins, “The Failure of Expertise: Public Health Policy in Britain during the 1918–19
Influenza Epidemic,” Social History of Medicine, vol. 5, no. 3 (1992): 435–54.
66. Report on the Indian Papers Published in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay: Government Central Press,
1918), for October–November 1918.
67. “Public Health,” Young India, April 23, 1919, cited in Ramanna, “Coping,” 98.
68. White, Preliminary Report, 9; “The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 in the Punjab,” xvi; Report on Sanitation
in Bengal, 1918, 9–10, 21–23.
Disease, Rumor, and Panic 127

1876–78 famine.69 Popular unrest further took the form of food riots, in which pro-
testors tried to prevent the export of local grain or agitated for prices to be reduced
to affordable levels. In some places violent clashes followed.70 Transposing the lan-
guage of epidemic disorder to the current crisis of subsistence, The Hindu newspaper
reported that in Salem an old woman had looted chilies from a market stall. “The
epidemic soon spread to a few other domestic articles of necessity and the result was
a wholesale panic . . . ”71 But influenza, the real epidemic, elicited no such reaction.
The period was also marked by growing political unrest, as nationalist politi-
cians pressed for home rule and Gandhi began the campaign for Indian freedom
(swaraj) that would lead him on to the Rowlatt Satyagraha of April 1919 and the
Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920–22.72 Again, however, apart from the comment
in Young India previously cited, little connection was made between the menace
of influenza and the rising tide of anticolonial protest. If a correlation was posited
between disease and politics it lay elsewhere—in likening colonialism to the ravages
of tuberculosis, or the rumor that sanitary measures against hookworm disease were
part of “an insidious scheme connected with the Rowlatt Act.”73

Conclusion

Historically, the term “panic” was ascribed many different meanings, even within
the relatively limited context of two catastrophic epidemics—bubonic plague and
influenza—that occurred in India approximately 25 years apart. Panic could, at one
level, be merely descriptive—a means of recording and relaying, often with empathy,
the intensity of the catastrophe that had befallen the mass of the population during
a major epidemic and the suffering and bewilderment it had caused. But one func-
tion of the term’s use was clearly to distance observers and commentators—whether
the British civilian administration, colonial doctors and public health officers, or

69. Report on the Administration of the Police of the Madras Presidency, 1918 (Madras: Superintendent,
Government Press, 1919), 10, 13–15. By contrast, influenza received scant notice in the Madras gov-
ernment’s confidential report for the first half of October 1918, despite mortality doubling in some
areas: India, Home (Political), no. 23, November 1918, Tamil Nadu Archives, Chennai.
70. David Arnold, “Looting, Grain Riots and Government Policy in South India, 1918,” Past and Present,
no. 84 (1979): 111–45.
71. Hindu, September 5, 1918, 6.
72. Judith M. Brown, Gandhi’s Rise to Power: Indian Politics, 1915–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1972); R. Kumar, ed., Essays on Gandhi Politics: The Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Several contributors to the latter work refer to the influenza epi-
demic, but suggest no specific connection with the Rowlatt agitation; see, for example, Donald W.
Ferrell, “The Rowlatt Satyagraha in Delhi,” in Essays on Gandhi Politics: The Rowlatt Satyagraha of
1919, ed. R. Kumar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971): 189–235 (198). For influenza, popular unrest, and
“apocalyptic bazaar rumors” in 1918–20, see C. A. Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad,
1880–1920 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 246.
73. Resolution, May 31, 1920, Bengal, Municipal (Sanitation), no. 1, July 1920, IOR.
128 David Arnold

members of the Indian middle classes and the medical elite—from the actions and
beliefs of the supposedly uneducated, credulous, and superstitious masses. Panic con-
noted “wild” rumor and the circulation of “absurd” stories. It signified flight (when
such irresponsible action was bound to spread the disease), primitive belief in disease
deities, or physical assaults on the very individuals and institutions that were trying
to help the sick and dying. Although no class of society might be immune to panic
or indifferent to rumor, identifying popular responses as panic served discursively
as a means of “othering,” a representation of irrational behavior that reassured the
civilized observer of his or her superiority in education, common sense, and scientific
understanding. In this it ran counter, in spirit, to the attempts of later historians like
George Rudé and E. P. Thompson, to demonstrate the logical response and rational
conduct of the “crowd.”74 Panic was a reaction to be condemned by individuals or,
where possible, anticipated and contained—whether through coercion or by propa-
ganda and education—by the remedial action of the state.
But that was not all. Panic—even if it might only with hindsight be branded with
that clearly pejorative term—could be constituted by the overhasty action of the state,
compelled by what it saw to be the urgent political or economic necessity to act, or
driven by what seemed to be the irrefutable advice of its technical and scientific advis-
ers. In 1896–98, the Government of India and its provincial administrations, acting
on the best advice available, adopted a course of action that they later regretted and
from which they subsequently retreated. Panic had its uses—not just as a term of
condemnation but also a rhetorical device to redress previous excesses or reverse
earlier aberrant responses. Again, from a position of political opposition rather than
one of colonial control, panic could also be a form of leverage by which interested
groups, in the plague case the Indian middle class, could draw attention to actions
and beliefs which, while they did not share them or claimed not to share them,
highlighted the arrogance, impetuosity, and insensitivity of colonial state policy. In
such circumstances, popular rumor and panic were manifestations of discontent that
members of the Indian elite had an interest in publicizing, often by means of the
press. This ploy served as a means by which the authority of an indigenous elite could
be restated and, if successful, reinstated, as largely happened in the wake of the first
bout of anti-plague measures.
The conclusions to be drawn from this discussion are in one sense banal. Plague
and influenza epidemics were very different animals—one “barked,” the other did
not. But, methodologically, there is value in comparing one epidemic episode with
another, especially when they lay so close in time and tracked much the same physical
and social terrain, in order to establish what they shared as well as in what respects

74. George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730–1848
(New York: Wiley, 1964); E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth
Century,” Past and Present, no. 50 (1971): 76–136.
Disease, Rumor, and Panic 129

they differed. The responses to plague and influenza in India over a 25-year period
were significantly different and so provide clues as to how both state-directed public
health and Indian opinion had shifted, how a process of education (or “apathy”)
had informed attitudes and responses, away from the reciprocal panics of the late
1890s and early 1900s to the far more muted responses of 1918–19. At the same time,
looking at these parallel epidemic episodes highlights the very different nature of the
diseases themselves, the speed of their advance, the manner of their transmission
and their impact on victims. Comparison encourages us to reflect on why the scale
of mortality is not in itself a sufficient guide to the level and intensity of the social
reaction—measured through rumor and panic—that a given epidemic occasioned.
6
Panic Encabled: Epidemics and the Telegraphic
World

Robert Peckham

There is good reason why epidemics make compelling stories: they satisfy a basic
requirement for drama. The narrative arc of the “pandemic thriller” moves from dis-
covery of the deadly virus through panic to resolution. In so doing, the plotline traces
a recognizably “dramaturgic form.” As Charles Rosenberg has observed in the context
of the HIV/AIDS epidemic:

Epidemics start at a moment in time, proceed on a stage limited in space and

duration, following a plot line of increasing and revelatory tension, move to a
crisis of individual and collective character, then drift toward closure.1

Given the inherently dramaturgic quality of epidemic crises, it is perhaps not sur-
prising that they should feature prominently as a theme in modern fiction. Bram
Stoker’s Dracula, for example, published in 1897 (at the moment when laboratory
science was changing how infectious diseases were understood and managed),
follows a rhythm of intensifying tension and closure; it is “dramaturgic” precisely in
the way that Rosenberg defines the epidemic. Moreover, vampirism is imagined in
the narrative as a lethal infection, one caused by a “parasite” and contracted through
contaminated blood; a disease that calls for drastic containment measures to prevent
it from wreaking havoc in the “crowded streets” of London, a world city character-
ized by “the whirl and rush of humanity.”2 In June 1897, the capital had been the
scene of elaborate pageantry, marking the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee with a “Festival
of the British Empire.” Before leaving Buckingham Palace for a service held outside
St. Paul’s Cathedral, arrangements had been made for the monarch “to send a simul-
taneous message to her subjects throughout the world,” the words “transmitted over
the private wire from the Palace to the Central Telegraph Department in St. Martins-
le-Grand, then to be flashed to the farthest corner of the British Empire: — ‘From my

1. Charles E. Rosenberg, “What Is an Epidemic? AIDS in Historical Perspective,” in Explaining Epidemics

and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 278–92
(279). The historian Richard Evans has also reflected on “a common ‘dramaturgy’ for all epidemics”;
see Paul Slack, “Introduction,” in Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence,
ed. Terence Ranger and Paul Slack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–20 (3).
2. Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1897), 19.
132 Robert Peckham

heart I thank my beloved people. May God bless them. V.R. & I.’”3 In Stoker’s narra-
tive, the jubilation of empire and the dynamics of imperial expansion are reversed as
the protagonists struggle to halt the diffusion of infection back to the heart of Empire
from the borderlands of Europe in the East.
What measures are deployed in Dracula to contain this epidemic menace and the
panic it threatens to instigate? Above all, the application of modern technologies of
communication: trains, steamships, newspapers, phonographs, typewriters—and,
preeminently, the telegraph. In this “machine text,” the plot centers on circulation
and transmission.4 The media of modern technologies are integrated into the novel’s
structure, as the story is told through an assembly of newspaper clippings, telegrams,
and shorthand journals. The search to track down the parasite requires an elaborate
network of intelligence, the relaying of exhaustive flows of data through instruments
of long-distance communication (railway, telegraphy, newsprint), and the collation of
facts in a typewritten report.5 In the face of the chaos engendered by the parasite and
the burgeoning information produced by technology itself, the characters strive to
impose an order: “a whole connected narrative,” as one character puts it.6
The telegraph network plays a critical role in Stoker’s “epidemic” plot. While the
characters receive information by telegram, the telegraph system enables them to
respond at a distance, assembling dispersed information to preempt the parasite’s
actions. The defeat of the invasive alien, in other words, is a consequence of exploiting
the divergence between material forms of transportation and the communication of
dematerialized news.7 Or, put somewhat differently, the novel suggests that an infec-
tious disease is preventable when forms of technological communication surpass the
speed of its transmission. Dracula is, in effect, a race to communicate.
This chapter is concerned with telegraphy and infectious disease in the 1890s, at
the very moment that Stoker was writing his novel and when telegraphy and “the
discovery of steam as a motive power” were bringing a new “contactiveness,” in the

3. Sir Walter Besant, The Queen’s Reign and its Commemoration: A Literary and Pictorial Review of the
Period; the Story of the Victorian Transformation, 1837–1897 (London: Werner Company, 1897), 92.
4. Judith Halberstam, “Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” in Cultural Politics at the
Fin de Siècle, ed. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
248–66 (251).
5. Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 194–219 (195); see also Christopher Keep, “Technology
and Information: Accelerating Developments,” in A Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Patrick
Brantlinger and William B. Thesing (Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 137–54; Jennifer Wicke, “Vampiric
Typewriting: Dracula and Its media,” ELH: English Literary History, vol. 59, no. 2 (1992): 467–93.
6. Stoker, Dracula, 210.
7. Before the advent of telegraphy, communication and transport were inextricably linked; see James W.
Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York and London: Routledge,
1992 [1989]), 213–14. In the Oxford English Dictionary the term “communications” refers to the trans-
mission of information, while “transport” refers to the conveyance of people and things.
Panic Encabled 133

words of Sir Francis de Winton (1889), to international relations (Figure 6.1).8 The
aim is to consider how the telegraph was deployed to manage public anxieties and,
conversely, to explore the extent to which telegraphy in fact helped to produce the
panic it strove to manage. The world was understood to be contracting, leading to
speculation about what the ultimate result of this “shrinkage” would be.9 As the inter-
continental telegraph pushed the global economy onto “real time,” what uses were
made of the telegraph for tracking communicable disease threats?10 To what extent
did telegraphic technology shape the representation of those threats? In the face
of accelerating flows of information and given the fragmented data amassed from
different sources, how could “a whole, connected narrative” be produced to make
sense of apparently random unfolding events and to forestall panic? And in what
ways did epidemic crises impact upon the evolving rationalities and techniques of
imperial governance? In addressing these interrelated questions, the chapter seeks
to shed light on the operations of a modern telegraphic culture in relation to disease
crises: to explore how telegraphy shaped habits and practices, producing a new form
of literacy—a new way of “reading” crisis and containing panic.
In the 1890s, in the face of global disease threats and as competing conceptual-
izations of “disease” vied for dominance, the telegraph came to be envisaged as a
technology that might help to “pin down” an epidemic’s meanings, fixing its identity,
and in so doing neutralizing the menace it posed. Telegraphic pinpointing took place
on a number of fronts. While it was a matter of disciplining language (communicat-
ing events in a standardized but compressed telegraphic prose), it was also a matter
of agglomerating apparently disconnected data in order to map infection, plotting its
movement over time and in space. To borrow Paula Treichler’s phrase, disease events
were not only epidemics of “real” communicable infections: they were also “epidemics
of signification.”11 “Panic” might be understood, in this context, as the result of mul-
tiplying and often conflicting interpretations of disease: what it was, where it came
from, and how it might be detected. The role of public health was increasingly to
manage information, in part by constraining the proliferating meanings of disease, in
order to influence public behavior. The emphasis was on the cultivation of “anti-panic”

8. Colonel Sir Francis de Winton, “Address,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly
Record of Geography, vol. XI (London: Edward Stanford, 1889), 613–22 (621); see also the discussion in
Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2007), 88.
9. “The Effects of the Shrinkage of the World,” Spectator, September 15, 1900, 9.
10. On the shift to “real time,” see Jorma Ahvenainen, “Telegraphs, Trade and Policy: The Role of the
International Telegraphs in the Years 1870–1914,” in The Emergence of a World Economy, 1500–1914, 2
vols., ed. Wolfram Fischer, R. Marvin McInnis, and Jürgen Schneider (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag
Wiesbaden GmbH, 1986), II, 505–18 (514).
11. Paula A. Treichler, How To Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles of AIDS (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1999), 11.
Figure 6.1
“The Eastern Telegraphic System and Its General Connections, 1894.” © Cable & Wireless
Communications, by kind permission of the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum.
Panic Encabled 135

as a corrective to irrational mass behavior.12 Panic was differentiated from the primal
fears of premodern society and viewed as a distinctly modern phenomenon. As The
Spectator observed in January 1890 when the influenza was sweeping across Britain,
inciting widespread anxiety: the “panic” occasioned by the dangers of contemporary
infections was fundamentally dissimilar to the “acute terror” manifested in the face of
earlier catastrophic events in history.13
The two episodes examined here are, firstly, the so-called “Russian Influenza”
which threatened the metropole directly (coming, like Stoker’s parasite, from the
“East End of Europe”) and arrived in Britain in three waves: from December 1889
through January 1890, April to June 1891, and the final wave in late 1891 and early
1892.14 Telegraphic newspaper reports were crucial in mapping the influenza and
conceptualizing the threat as a “contagion.” State agencies, too, played a key role in
this conceptualization: the Local Government Board—a government supervisory
body, created in 1871 to oversee local administration in England and Wales—sought
to track the epidemic in order to elucidate the disease’s etiology and its mode of
transmission.15 Like the race to thwart the parasite in Stoker’s novel, such efforts to
follow influenza’s baffling diffusion were predicated on a presumption that the rapid
transmission of near “real time” information could overtake and defuse the disease
threat itself.
Secondly, the chapter considers an epidemic at the “edge” of empire, much further
to the East, in Hong Kong. The 1894 outbreak of bubonic plague in the British crown
colony is often considered to mark the beginning of the “Third Plague Pandemic,”
which may have killed as many as 15 million people globally (see Chapter 5).
Specifically, the chapter examines the exchange of information between London and
Hong Kong to suggest how the compressed form of the telegraphic message inter-
acted with the more prolix dispatch. The focus is on the tension between immediate,
“real time” information and the need to process that information through its contex-
tualization with other data in a “connected narrative.” In this sense, the plague could
be said to function as a “sampling device,” in Rosenberg’s words: at once a found

12. “Anti-Panic,” Spectator, December 16, 1893, 13.

13. “The Decrease of Certain Fears,” Spectator, January 4, 1890, 19.
14. There were, however, subsequent recurrences of influenza, including an outbreak in 1893–94. I borrow
the term “East End of Europe” from Allen Upward’s account of his travels through the European prov-
inces of the Ottoman Empire, The East End of Europe (London: John Murray, 1908).
15. Mark Honigsbaum has written on the role of the Local Government Board in the influenza, and done
much to refocus attention on the importance of the epidemic in relation to the evolving technologies
of public health; see, for example: “The ‘Russian’ Influenza in the UK: Lessons Learned, Opportunities
Missed,” Vaccine, vol. 29, suppl. 2 (2011): B11–B15; “The Great Dread: Cultural and Psychological
Impacts and Responses to the ‘Russian’ Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889–1893,” Social History
of Medicine, vol. 23, no. 2 (2010): 299–319. An overview of the influenza in Britain and the attendant
panic it produced is provided in his book A History of the Great Influenza Pandemics: Death, Panic and
Hysteria, 1830–1920 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014).
136 Robert Peckham

object and a natural experiment “capable of illuminating fundamental patterns of

social value and institutional practice.”16
The arguments presented in this chapter are therefore fourfold: firstly, by the final
decade of the nineteenth century, telegraphy had begun to function as a vital means
of mapping disease. The 1889–92 influenza pandemic stimulated renewed interest in
visualizing the global spread of disease through its representation in maps.17 As Tom
Koch has observed, while bacteriology made visible hitherto invisible disease agents,
maps of disease transformed “individual pathology . . . into a public health event affect-
ing communities and nations.”18 Here, the chapter considers the role that telegraphy
played in the production of disease maps, anticipating Nicholas King’s discussion in
Chapter 8 on how technologies of visualization have shaped a contemporary iconog-
raphy of “new” infectious disease and in so doing produced novel forms of collective
panic. Secondly, the compressed form and efficiency of the telegram influenced the
nature of imperial governance in significant ways, particularly in the context of global
crises.19 Thirdly, natural disasters and disease crises acted as spurs to the development
of telegraphic communication. Fourthly, panic was not only induced by the specter of
mass infection but, ironically, by the very medium of mass communication that held
out the key to preventing mass infection: the telegraph. Hong Kong, noted Isabella
Bird in 1883, “has telegraphic communication with the whole civilized world, and its
trade is kept thereby in a continual fever.”20 This inducement to “fever,” from which
the colony clearly profited, could also jeopardize its stability. At the height of the
plague epidemic in the summer of 1894, articles in the Hongkong Telegraph advo-
cated a thorough cleansing of the colony with powerful “germicides”: from bodies
and the interior of homes to the streets outside. Telegraph cables were no exception.
Imagining the “cataclysm of fatal misfortunes” that might lie ahead for a plague-
ridden Hong Kong, the newspaper envisioned panicky port cities across Asia—from
Saigon to Manila—laying “the telegraph cables with bisulphated India-rubber casing”
and quarantining telegraph clerks as potential super-spreaders of disease.21

16. Rosenberg, “What Is an Epidemic?” 279. However, for a critique of the notion that cholera epidemics
provide “exacting tests of societal strength,” see Christopher Hamlin, Cholera: The Biography (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 1–13 (11).
17. Frank G. Clemow, The Geography of Disease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), v.
Medical cartography, which originated in eighteenth-century “spot maps” of specific diseases, had
become global in scope by the mid-nineteenth century; see Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical
Nature (London: Reaktion, 2001), 159.
18. Tom Koch, Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 2.
19. As Simon Winchester has noted, the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 played an important role in the
consolidation of telegraphy; see Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 (London:
Penguin 2004 [2003]), 179–98.
20. Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop), The Golden Chersonese And The Way Thither (London: John Murray,
1883), 40.
21. “The Duty of the Hour” and “Hongkong Six Months Hence,” Hongkong Telegraph, June 15, 1894,
2. The idea of the telegraph or, for that matter, the telephone, as an instrument of infection was a
Panic Encabled 137

Telegraphs could be dangerously infective. As Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury has

argued, while a telegraph network was introduced in India from the early 1850s, in
part, as a strategic technology for integrating and controlling imperial space, the
telegraph also exposed the Empire’s vulnerability to subversion and sabotage, func-
tioning as a conduit for anti-imperial sentiment and action.22 In other words, the
telegraph could work backwards, fueling “epidemics of signification” even as it strove
to curtail them by disciplining communication and fixing meaning.
Surprisingly little has been written about the development of telegraphy in rela-
tion to disease threats. In contrast, some attention has been paid to the role of tel-
egraphic technology in military planning and imperial rivalries, in the rise of global
markets, as well as in meteorology and weather forecasting.23 In each of these cases,
the telegraph is conceived as a “sentinel,” imparting information from advanced out-
posts, monitoring news, and helping to shape preparedness plans.24 Sometimes the
telegraph stations took on the operational modalities of the military camp or the
makeshift colonial laboratory. At the turn of the century, arguments were being made
for telegraphic stations in remoter parts of the Empire to double up for use as strategic
field hospitals serving scattered rural populations.25
However, even as the plague was spreading through southern China in the early
1890s, in the wake of the influenza pandemic, the shortcomings of a global surveil-
lance system were being noted. As one author remarked in January 1894 in the pages
of the Lancet, underlining the inadequate responses to the influenza pandemic a few
years before:

commonplace; see, for example, the note on “The Telephone as a Source of Infection,” British Medical
Journal, vol. 1, no. 1360 (January 22, 1887) which reported concerns that “the promiscuous use of the
mouth-pieces of public telephones” could lead to infection, requiring their regular sanitizing, 166.
22. Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury, “The Sinews of Panic and the Nerves of Empire: The Imagined State’s
Entanglement with Information Panic, India, c. 1880–1912,” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 38, no. 4
(2004): 965–1002; Telegraphic Imperialism: Crisis and Panic in the Indian Empire, c.1830 (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). This was an internal telegraphic system. It was not until 1870 that the
British-Indian Submarine Telegraph Company linked Bombay to Aden and Suez by cable.
23. See, for example, Javier Márquez Quevedo, “Telecommunications and Colonial Rivalry: European
Telegraph Cables to the Canary Islands and Northwest Africa, 1883–1914,” Historical Social Research,
vol. 35, no. 1 (2010): 108–24; Byron Lew and Bruce Cater, “The Telegraph, Co-ordination of Tramp
Shipping, and Growth in World Trade, 1870–1910,” European Review of Economic History, vol. 10,
no. 2 (2006): 147–73; Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of
Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); for an account of the importance of the tel-
egraph for meteorology in inter-port China, see Marlon Zhu, “Typhoons, Meteorological Intelligence,
and the Inter-Port Mercantile Community in Nineteenth-Century China” (unpublished PhD thesis,
Binghamton University, 2012).
24. As Frédéric Keck and Andrew Lakoff note: “The term sentinel has come to describe living beings or
technical devices that provide the first signs of an impending catastrophe”; see “Preface,” Limn (Sentinel
Devices), no. 3 (2013): 2–3.
25. See, for example, the article in Adelaide’s Advertiser, “The Overland Telegraphic Line: The Medicine-
Chest Question,” March 31, 1904, 9.
138 Robert Peckham

In October, 1889, no one in Western Siberia was anticipating an outbreak of influ-

enza; no one was anxiously watching a frontier in order to prevent the entrance of
infection into the country, and ready to telegraph the occurrence of the first case
to the uttermost parts of the world.26

In its absence, the telegraph is imagined, here, as a “frontier” technology, a sentinel

and herald of crisis, relaying critical information back to prepare for the disease’s
advance. By the mid-1890s, there was widespread appreciation of the telegraph’s value
as a key technology in the global surveillance of infectious disease.

Telegraphic Surveillance and the Influenza Outbreak of 1889–92

In Britain, the advent of the telegraph from the middle of the nineteenth century
sparked debate about the benefits, dangers, and significance of telegraphic communi-
cation. Was the ability to communicate invisibly and at speed with persons in distant
places healthy? What were the consequences of this attenuated intercourse? Many
forewarned of the hazards it posed: the telegraph would lead to a “perpetual dissipa-
tion of the mind,” encouraging a perilous diminishing of the intellect.27
However, while the telegraph was being exploited practically by the railways at
least from the 1850s, there was increasing awareness of the role that the telegraph
could play in medical services, for example in hospital communications or in relation
to ambulances that could be dispatched in response to telegraphic messages.28 By the
early 1880s, the cable had begun to transform medical intelligence and practice with
physicians making use of the telephone and telegraph in emergencies.29 “The free use
of the cable for obtaining medical information of public importance is by no means
new to us,” declared an editorial in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) entitled “The
Telegraph in Medical Journalism.” The telegraphed accounts of the cholera epidemic
in Egypt in 1883 had been impressively “prompt, accurate, and conclusive” and

information which they [telegrams] furnished from the earliest moment as to

the nature, extent, symptoms, and causation of the malady, proved . . . to be not
only of interest and value to the medical profession here, but were of great weight

26. Frank G. Clemow, “The Recent Pandemic of Influenza: Its Place of Origin and Mode of Spread,” Lancet,
vol. 143, no. 3673 (January 20, 1894): 139–43 (142).
27. “The Intellectual Effects of Electricity,” Spectator, November 9, 1889, 632.
28. On the development of the “telegraphic railways,” see William Fothergill Cooke, Telegraphic Railways;
Or, The Single Way Recommended by Safety, Economy, and Efficiency, Under the Safeguard and Control
of the Electric Telegraph (London: Simkin, Marshall, & Co., 1842). Cooke gave up a career in medicine
to advocate for telegraphy’s integration into the railway systems.
29. Stanley Joel Reiser, Medicine and the Reign of Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1978), 198–99. On the telephone, see Sidney H. Aronson, “The Lancet on the Telephone, 1876–1975,”
Medical History, vol. 21, no. 1 (1977): 69–87.
Panic Encabled 139

in recording the steps taken by the Government here to arrest and check the
epidemic . . . which so greatly stirred the fears and panics of Europe.30

The BMJ emphasized the role played by on-the-ground reportage and telegraphy in
disease surveillance in contrast to the oft-delayed and perfunctory response of the
government to crises.
The influenza pandemic in 1889 struck at a moment of transition in medical
thinking when different etiological explanations competed for acceptance, causing
confusion about the nature of the disease threat: was the influenza contagious, bacte-
riological, or environmental?31 As one commentator observed:

Thus it was stated that the epidemic travelled from place to place with a speed
far outstripping that of human communications; that it commenced abruptly by
the simultaneous attack of a large proportion of the inhabitants of an invaded
place; and that it attacked persons so situated—for example, on board ship at sea
far from land—that its transmission by personal communication was out of the
question.32

Although the contagious nature of influenza was evident to most commentators,

its etiology remained obscure. Infection was attributed to numerous causes. Some
were convinced that it was the result of a “colossal earth-commotion” in China,
similar to the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, which had disgorged a cloud of noxious
and contaminating “dust particles” into the atmosphere.33 In 1892, the physician and
bacteriologist Richard Pfeiffer isolated what he presumed to be the causative agent
of influenza (known as “Pfeiffer’s bacillus”).34 The elusiveness of influenza seemed to
call into question the nature of “disease” itself. As an editorial in the Lancet observed,
although the influenza was familiar, there was a “singular lack of precise knowledge”
about its identity. The disease spread with “remarkable rapidity” and appeared to
have “no geographical limitation,” while the movements of the virus “were so baffling
and contradictory to the ordinary conceptions of the transmission of infection as to
render any simple explanation of its nature almost impossible.”35

30. “The Telegraph in Medical Journalism,” British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 1187 (September 29, 1883),
645.
31. F. B. Smith, “The Russian Influenza in the United Kingdom, 1889–1894,” Social History of Medicine,
vol. 8, no. 1 (1995): 55–73; see also Michael Worboys, Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical
Practice in Britain, 1865–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
32. H. Franklin Parsons, “The Influenza Epidemics of 1889–90 and 1891 and Their Distribution in England
and Wales,” British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 1597 (August 8, 1891): 303–08 (304).
33. See Clemow, The Geography of Disease, 189.
34. It was not until the 1930s that Richard Shope isolated the influenza virus from infected pigs; see
Heather L. Van Epps, “Influenza: Exposing the True Killer,” Journal of Experimental Medicine, vol. 203,
no. 4 (April, 17, 2006): 803.
35. Lancet, vol. 134, no. 3460 (December 21, 1889): 1293–96 (1293); see the commentary on this article
in Michael Bresalier, “‘A Most Protean Disease’: Aligning Medical Knowledge of Modern Influenza,
1890–1914,” Medical History, vol. 56, no. 4 (2012): 481–510 (490).
140 Robert Peckham

Given the uncertainty about the origins of the disease and its apparently “protean”
character, there was a preoccupation with defining and mapping the epidemic.36
Telegraphic reports in newspapers played a critical role in tracking down the disease.
As Mark Honigsbaum has argued “the rapid progress of the influenza across Europe
via the railways and the near instantaneous reporting of the outbreaks via the world-
wide telegraphic network made the Russian flu something of a ‘media sensation.’”37
Commentators were struck by the speed of transmission: the infection spread across
Europe and the United States in some four months.38 Julius Reuters had established
a news agency in London in 1851, the year that an undersea cable was laid between
Dover and Calais. “Reuters” exploited the city’s nodal position to become a leading
purveyor of world news in the 1860s, functioning “increasingly as a semi-official
institution of the British Empire.”39 During the influenza pandemic, regular reports
were filed from affected European capitals. Correspondents for The Times mapped
the disease’s inexorable progress westwards.40 On November 25, 1889, for example,
The Times announced a “most unusual increase in sickness” in St. Petersburg, which
it “supposed to be the influenza.” A few days later, on December 3, the paper reported
that its own correspondent, as well as the British ambassador, had succumbed to
the flu. And on the December 12, in “The Latest Intelligence,” the paper published
simultaneous telegraphic reports from St. Petersburg, Berlin, Vienna, and Paris. In
the days, weeks, and months thereafter, the press printed daily reports from affected
cities across Europe and the globe, monitoring the disease’s spread, commentating on
its relative virulence, on mortality and morbidity rates, and on medical opinions as to
its cause and likely transmission routes.
While the telegraph produced intelligence, the dissemination of this informa-
tion fueled panic. The Lancet led the medical press in calling for newspapers to stop
provoking “dread” by publishing “sensational telegrams.” Daily newspaper accounts
provoked alarm by dramatizing the ominous “approach of a strange and apparently
somewhat unknown disease” to British shores.41 Newspapers themselves wrote of
the irrational nature of this panic (“the panic about influenza is, like most panic,
irrational”). Even as they sensationalized the “epidemic,” they cautioned about
36. Bresalier, “‘A Most Protean Disease.’”
37. Honigsbaum, A History of the Great Influenza Pandemics, 33–81 (33).
38. See Alain-Jacques Valleron, Anne Cori, Sofia Meurisse, et al., “Transmissibility and Geographic Spread
of the 1889 Influenza Pandemic,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America, vol. 107, no. 19 (2010): 8778–81; on the panic in Vienna and Paris, see, for example, “Vienna
Is Quite in a Panic about the Influenza,” Spectator, December 28, 1889, 2.
39. On Reuters’ development as an imperial institution and its role in the creation of “world news” between
1865 and the First World War, see Donald Read, The Power of News: The History of Reuters, 2nd ed.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 [1992]), 49–117 (49).
40. As Honigsbaum notes, there was also rivalry between the London dailies and the regional papers; A
History of the Great Influenza Pandemics, 33.
41. “All about Influenza,” Pall Mall Gazette, December 10, 1889, 7.
Panic Encabled 141

overstating its danger.42 Thus, the Daily News declared in January 1892 that panic was
“likely to be even more injurious than the disease itself ”:

It is surely time that some vigorous protest was raised against persistent attempts
that are being made to get up a scare on the subject of the influenza. Day by day,
the public are alarmed by grossly exaggerated statements as to its prevalence and
spread, and the wildest rumours are set abroad as to supposed changes in the
nature of the disease.43

A journalist for the Pall Mall Gazette, who visited the outpatients of major London
Hospitals (including Guy’s, University College Hospital, the Royal Free, and St.
Mary’s) to track down the “phantom” disease, concluded that “the influenza is largely
a product of the imagination.”44 However, in presenting an accumulation of localized
snapshots of infection and integrating specific cases and sites into a unified narrative,
the press gave the epidemic a “dramaturgic form,” building up the composite picture
of a nation in the grip of disaster.
The indiscriminate (“mysterious”) nature of the influenza, which seemed to pick
off its victims at random, added to the panic. The wealthy and powerful were suscep-
tible, along with the poor. In 1890, the Queen withdrew to the Isle of Wight in a self-
imposed quarantine. As one news notice asserted, “all boxes and documents which
are daily forwarded to Osborne from the Foreign Office are most carefully disin-
fected, and any personal intercourse with individuals from London is avoided.”45 The
prime minister, Lord Salisbury, fell ill, while the poets Robert Browning and Alfred
Lord Tennyson succumbed to infection, as did the Queen’s grandson, the Duke of
Clarence, who died of pneumonia at Sandringham in January 1892, weeks before his
wedding.46
The epidemic threw into relief increasingly interconnected mass networks: rail-
ways, steamships, and the postal service were identified as major pathways of trans­
mission. As the Lancet declared: “[T]here does appear to be an abundance of evidence
to show that it [the epidemic] travelled mainly along the lines of human intercourse,
attacking large towns and centres of population first . . . and that the disease travelled
only just as fast as any humanly conveyed infection . . . might have been expected to
travel.”47 Employees stayed away from the General Post Office’s telegraphic department.

42. “The Influenza Epidemic,” Daily News, December 11, 1889, 5; “Lord Salisbury and the Epidemic,” Daily
News, January 4, 1890, 4.
43. “The Influenza Panic,” Daily News, January 29, 1892, 5.
44. “The Phantom influenza,” Pall Mall Gazette, January 11, 1890, 3.
45. Truth, vol. 27, no. 681 (January 6, 1890), 93.
46. Aside from Lord Salibsury, the Duke of Richmond, Lord Derby, and the Archbishop of York were
amongst those who fell victim to the flu; see Honigsbaum, A History of the Great Influenza Pandemics,
39–40, 58.
47. Lancet, vol. 138, no. 3541 (July 11, 1891): 78–79 (78).
142 Robert Peckham

Workers at the London Stock Exchange appeared disproportionately affected.

Evidence suggested that the infection was transmissible through the post, as recipi-
ents of “contaminated” letters got sick. The railway system, in particular, was singled
out as a conduit for the flu. Because the epidemic occurred as it did at Christmas,
commentators noted the importance of travel in spreading the disease: commuting
city workers, tradesmen, and children returning from school were singled out. As in
Stoker’s novel, the motif of rapid, long-distance communication became central to
the plotline of the outbreak.
Medical and public health experts sought to distance themselves from the news-
papers. As one eminent physician (Dr. Robson Roose, Randolph Churchill’s doctor)
was reported as saying in the Pall Mall Gazette: “This influenza is becoming such a
panic; everybody fancies that they will be the next afflicted. I am run nearly off my
legs with influenza patients. I am attending sixty at present—from Cabinet Ministers
downwards . . . I have been trying to impress on the newspapers . . . the necessity of
keeping down the panic.”48 Another publication declared in January 1890:

The newspaper literature in relation to the invasion is colossal, but not much new
comes forth day by day. No one can doubt that to these articles in the daily papers
almost as much of the epidemic in this country is due as to poisonous germs.
Many of the cases, indeed, might be more correctly described as daily-telegraphia
than influenza.49

Panic is suggestively diagnosed as the symptom of a new infection (“telegraphia”)

brought on by contact with the mass media. The medium, which purports to inform
and forewarn the public about a genuine epidemic, ends up producing another form
of pathogenic hazard: panic.50 There was, then, increasing awareness that while
the telegraph served as a public health tool, it could also function as an amplifier
of risk—a conduit for other forms of economic and social “contagion”: speculation,
financial turbulence, and social unrest.51 The telegraph was both a force of unification
and “declension.”52
During the crisis, the telegraph and the post provided a “mass of material” which
appeared contradictory and often bewildering.53 Public health officials endeavored to
give shape to this information, “fixing” the epidemic’s commencement, delineating

48. “Influenza,” Pall Mall Gazette, January 9, 1890, 1–2 (2).

49. “The Influenza Epidemic,” Monthly Homeopathic Review, vol. 24, no. 2 (1890): 113–17 (113–14).
50. James Mussell, “Pandemic in Print: The Spread of Influenza in the Fin de Siècle,” Endeavour, vol. 31, no.
1 (2007): 12–17.
51. Robert Peckham, “Infective Economies: Empire, Panic and the Business of Disease,” Journal of Imperial
and Commonwealth History, vol. 41, no. 2 (2013): 211–37.
52. Carey, Communication as Culture, 8.
53. Richard Sisley, Epidemic Influenza: Notes on Its Origin and Method of Spread (London: Longmans,
Green, and Co., 1891), x; on the varying quantity and quality of information received, see Henry
Parsons, Report on the Influenza Epidemic of 1889–1890 (London: H.M.S.O., 1891), 121.
Panic Encabled 143

its contours with statistical evidence, and comparing it with earlier epidemics.54 The
physician Edmund Symes Thompson noted in 1890 that the influenza epidemic
was exemplary, demonstrating the “causes which affect human life in the aggre-
gate.” “Unlike cholera,” he noted, “it often outstrips in its course the speed of human
intercourse.”55
Significantly, the epidemic took place precisely at the moment that attempts were
being made to reform and “fix” or standardize international telegraphy itself with the
imposition of uniform transnational tariffs and the regulation of international ser-
vices. Organized by the Telegraphic Union (which had been established in 1865), the
International Telegraph Conference in Paris in the summer of 1890 was held during
the height of the influenza epidemic, and sought to continue the work of preced-
ing conferences in technological standardization. Sir John Pender, the British cable
pioneer who presided over the meeting, extoled the benefits of the “great network of
communications” for “the teeming millions of the world.”56
While the Russian army’s medical department had put together a voluminous
report on the influenza by means of a telegraphic circular, in Britain there were
concerted efforts to leverage London’s “position at the center of the telegraphic and
railroad networks to ensure that the department’s epidemiological gaze moved with
the epidemic.”57 The experience of the influenza in 1890, as Honigsbaum has noted,
established a precedent for similar collective-style investigations for other epidem-
ics (cholera and plague) in 1893 and 1898–1901, although preventive measures were
wholly inadequate and would have devastating consequences during the influenza
pandemic of 1918.58
The influenza outbreaks in 1889–92 were extensively reported and marked
a turning point in what might be called the “mediatization of crises.”59 While the
Medical Department of the Local Government Board sought to track the infection,
medical practitioners across the country were also coopted into the effort. In January
1890, under the direction of George Buchanan, medical officer of health of the Board,

54. Parsons, “The Influenza Epidemics of 1889–1890 and 1891,” 305.

55. E. Symes Thompson, Influenza, or Epidemic Catarrhal Fever: An Historical Survey of Past Epidemics in
Great Britain from 1510 to 1890 (London: Percival and Co., 1890), vii.
56. “The International Telegraph Conference,” Times [London], June 18, 1890, 5.
57. Honigsbaum, “The ‘Russian’ Influenza in the UK,” B11; see also “The Great Dread: Cultural and
Psychological Impacts and Responses to the ‘Russian’ Influenza”; Honigsbaum, A History of the Great
Influenza Pandemics, 37.
58. Honigsbaum, “The ‘Russian’ Influenza in the UK,” B14; Honigsbaum, A History of the Great Influenza
Pandemics, 47–54. On the LGB, see Anne Hardy, “On the Cusp: Epidemiology and Bacteriology at the
Local Government Board, 1890–1905,” Medical History, vol. 42, no. 3 (1998): 328–46 (331).
59. See K. D. Patterson, Pandemic Influenza, 1700–1900: A Study in Historical Epidemiology (Totowa, NJ:
Rowan and Littlefield, 1986), 49–82; Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1985). For an overview, see Further Report and Papers on Epidemic Influenza, 1889–1892
(London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1893).
144 Robert Peckham

a request was published in the BMJ entitled “The Influenza Epidemic: Requests for
Information.” Readers were solicited to assist in mapping the epidemic, which was
threatening the heartland of Britain’s industry. The aim was to gather information
on influenza as part of a “uniform plan,” and the local Government Board circulated
a questionnaire about the influenza to the medical officers of health in the sanitary
districts across England and Wales.60 As Honigsbaum has observed, this collective
endeavor represented “one of the most comprehensive surveys ever conducted into
an influenza pandemic,” and an early example of a concerted public health effort to
“pin down” disease employing a “life course” epidemiological approach.61

Hong Kong and the Telegraphic World

Even as the influenza epidemic was abating in Europe, attention was turning to
another epidemic in the East, where many commentators were convinced the influ-
enza had, in fact, originated. In early 1894, bubonic plague spread to Hong Kong
from the Guangdong province of southern China.62 News of the disease was conveyed
globally by telegraph, which played a key role in the unfolding “drama” of the “Third
Plague Pandemic.” Not only was information transmitted through the wires, appris-
ing the public of unfolding events in Asia and globally, but scientific research was also
rushed to press, and telegraphic communications between London and the colonies
during the crisis impacted upon local governmental decision-making processes.
Late nineteenth-century British commentators tended to conceptualize Hong
Kong as a strategic hub, with networks radiating out across the globe. As The Times
noted in 1890, reporting a lecture on “Hongkong and its Trade” delivered by William
Keswick at a meeting of the Royal Colonial Institute, the crown colony was “a great
distribution centre” and it had become “the terminus of many mail lines, and the
juncture from which new departures were taken.” The Qing Empire was evidently
decaying, however even there, “the intercourse brought about between distant parts

60. Parsons, Report on the Influenza Epidemic of 1889–1890, 120.

61. Honigsbaum, “The ‘Russian’ influenza in the UK,” B15. The collective investigation was undertaken
by Dr. Henry Franklin Parsons, Buchanan’s assistant. On Parsons’s career, see his obituaries: “Henry
Franklin Parsons,” British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 1253 (November 8, 1913), 1263–64; “Henry
Franklin Parsons,” Lancet, vol. 182, no. 4706 (November 8, 1913), 1354–56.
62. See Carol Benedict, Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1996), 131–49. In fact, the influenza of 1889–92, was called the “Chinese” or “Asian” flu in Russia,
and was thought to have diffused through the Russian Empire from China, following the flooding, in
1888, of the Yellow River, in which up to two million humans and animals were drowned. Hong Kong
itself was conjectured to have been a likely source; on the global diffusion of the plague, see Myron
Echenberg, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901 (New York: New York
University Press, 2007).
Panic Encabled 145

of the Empire by steam communication had broken down barriers,” and “[t]elegraph
lines were now pretty general throughout the country.”63
Descriptions of Hong Kong as a networked hub were echoed in the enthusiastic
tones of turn-of-the-century commentators such as Charles Bright (the namesake
son of the famous electrical engineer who had managed the laying of the first transat-
lantic telegraph cable), an advocate of telegraphy’s further promotion:

It may be safely averred that railways, steamships, and telegraphs are combin-
edly our most powerful weapon in the cause of Inter-Imperial Commerce. It has,
however, yet to be realised how much can be done towards Imperial unity and
fostering trade betwixt the scattered units of the Empire by direct, efficient and
cheap telegraphic communication.64

In the words of the journalist and postal reformer Sir John Henniker Heaton, the
telegraph offered “the means of intensifying and perpetuating the sympathy that is
the basis of union.”65 In the mid-1860s, it was possible for the governor of Hong Kong
to send a telegram to London but this entailed a mail steamer calling at Singapore,
Penang, and Galle in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from whence the message was transmitted
by cable, taking two weeks in all to reach London.66 In March 1869, the China Mail
had dismissed as “bunkum” the American telegraph talk that claimed the ports of
China would soon be connected and that the British were “vigorously pushing their
telegraph lines” to monopolize the China trade.67 However, the following year Hong
Kong was connected to the world telegraphically when the Danish Great Northern,
China, and Japan Extension Company began laying a cable joining Hong Kong
to Shanghai. The first message was cabled to Shanghai from Hong Kong on April
18, 1871. In June, Sir John Pender’s China Submarine Telegraph Company linked
Hong Kong to Singapore via Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and from thence to India
and London. On the completion of the link, Pender (whose daughter was married
to George William Des Voeux, appointed governor of Hong Kong in 1887), sent a
telegram from London to Hong Kong, which took 53 minutes: “Completion of the
submarine telegraphic system between Singapore, Saigon, and Hong Kong, brings the
Chinese Empire into immediate connection with India and Europe.”68
63. “Hongkong and its Trade,” Times [London], January 15, 1890, 11.
64. Charles Bright, Imperial Telegraphic Communication (London: P. S. King & Son, 1911), xiii.
65. Quoted in Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 88. On the telegraph and “globalization,” see Roland
Wenzlhuemer, Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012).
66. Although this had been reduced to five days by 1870, when Singapore was linked by cable, see Austin
Coates, Quick Tidings of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1990), 3–4, 33.
67. “The Talked-of Telegraph,” China Mail [Hong Kong], March 28, 1869, 3.
68. London and China Telegraph, vol. 13, no. 406 (June 12, 1871): 431. For histories of the telegraph in China,
see Jorma Ahvenainen, The Far Eastern Telegraphs: The History of Telegraphic Communications between
the Far East, Europe and America before the First World War (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia,
1981); Erik Baark, Lightning Wires: The Telegraph and China’s Technological Modernization, 1860–1890
146 Robert Peckham

In a lengthy article on Hong Kong in The Times a few years earlier, the role of
“telegraphic communication” was considered in some depth. The telegraph had
brought the colony into “intimate connexion with all quarters of the globe.” Aside
from “the advantages offered in facilitating business,” ongoing Sino-French conflicts
had further underlined the “great value of telegraphs in case of emergency.” The jour-
nalist Wingrove Cooke was quoted with approval when he averred that “in matters
of Government nothing was so expensive as ignorance, and that telegraphic commu-
nication is one of those essentials wherein money is no measure of value.”69 In China
itself, commentators noted the widespread prejudice toward foreign technologies.
Many, like the American missionary Gilbert Reid, pointed to local misconceptions
about how telegraphic lines communicated. The Chinese, Reid observed in 1892,
“imagine that the line is used to actually carry the letter rather than the message.”70
Despite the magnitude of the occasion, the advent of the cable in the crown colony
was something of an anticlimax. As the Hongkong Daily Press noted: “So gradual has
been the approach of the telegraph to Hongkong, that now that it has at last become
a fait accompli, people almost think of it as quite in the ordinary course of events.”71
Yet, as the newspaper conceded, the telegraph had transformed the nature of news
and the exchange of information not only between Hong Kong and the metropole,
but between colonies, as well. Whereas around 1870, news from Europe took 25 to
30 days to reach the Hong Kong press, the opening of the telegraph meant that news
items could be read even in the East only a couple of days after the event. In 1872,
Reuters—the “key information brokers of the British Empire”—established an office
in Hong Kong.72

Communicating Crisis: Telegraphic Prose

Many commentators extoled the telegraph’s practical value as a tool for managing the
expansive dominions of empire, exalting the technology as “one of the greatest factors

(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997). The first telegraph system in Hong Kong was a private one
set up in 1863 by Jardine, Matheson & Company—running from their headquarters in East Point
(Causeway Bay) to the firm’s town offices in Victoria, one-and-a-half miles away. In 1869, a police
telegraph system was installed linking the Central Police Station beside the Victoria jail with the other
town stations, and with the police posts on the south side of the island; on the development of telegra-
phy in Hong Kong, see Coates, Quick Tidings of Hong Kong.
69. “Hongkong,” Times [London], October 9, 1883, 8.
70. Gilbert Reid, Peeps into China (London: Religious Tract Society, 1892), 183. Similar misconceptions,
however, characterized metropolitan attitudes to the telegraph.
71. Hongkong Daily Press, Tuesday, June 6, 1871, 2. By 1894, telephonic communication had replaced the
telegraph between police stations and government buildings on Hong Kong; see the brief report issued
on the progress of public works by the Public Work Office (July 31, 1894), Hongkong Government
Gazette, September 1, 1894, 745–48 (745).
72. Simon J. Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 88.
Panic Encabled 147

in the realization of the Imperial idea” that “defies time and annihilates space.”73 The
speed of communication, it could be argued, fundamentally changed the relationship
between the Colonial Office and “the man on the spot.”74 The success of the British
Empire was attributed to the absence of bureaucratic red tape, although, as Archibald
Colquhoun noted in 1902, “this halcyon time is over, and with improved commu-
nications the work of the man on the spot who knows is to be continually spoilt by
the men at home who don’t.”75 The arrival of the telegraph meant that London could
exert its control in a more immediate way over specific matters, giving the secre-
tary of state a say in the routine affairs of the colonial administration. William Des
Voeux, colonial secretary in St. Lucia before his appointment as governor of Hong
Kong in 1887, acknowledged that he “dreaded the telegraph as likely to curtail [his]
freedom of action.”76 The controversy of the Kwok A-Sing case in 1871 (an alleged
murderer detained in custody in Hong Kong who was wanted for extradition by the
Chinese), had underscored the way in which telegrams could be used by the executive
authorities in Hong Kong to pressurize the colony’s chief justice.77 Telegraphy also
encouraged the colonial government to seek the authority of London for its decisions,
even as it “provided the governor with the capacity to . . . enquire and question the
Secretary of State.”78 As David Paull Nickles has observed, in eroding the autonomy
of diplomats, the telegraph acted as a spur to the centralization of foreign ministries,
while increasing the importance of signals intelligence.79

73. Quoted in Potter, News and the British World, 28.

74. For the “man on the spot,” see J. S. Galbraith, “The ‘Turbulent Frontier’ as a Factor in British Expansion,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 2, no. 2 (1960): 150–68; on the telegraph and the
diminishing autonomy of the “man on the spot” in China, see Ariane Knuesel, “British Diplomacy and
the Telegraph in Nineteenth-Century China,” Diplomacy & Statecraft, vol. 18, no. 3 (2007): 517–37. As
Knuesel notes, the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 demonstrated the importance of the telegraph in diplo-
matic and strategic communications.
75. Archibald R. Colquhoun, The Mastery of the Pacific (New York and London: Macmillan, 1902), 247.
76. William Des Voeux, My Colonial Service in British Guiana, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Fiji, Australia,
Newfoundland, and Hong Kong, with Interludes, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1903), I, 180. Although
Des Voeux observed that his fears of the telegraph “proved groundless, while the daily arrival of news,
however scanty, tended to lessen the isolation. And the cable proved to be in many ways useful both to
the Government and people”; Des Voeux first used the telephone (“then only beginning to come into
general use”) in 1880 in San Francisco on his way to Fiji; see Des Voeux, My Colonial Service, 180, 328.
Telephones were in use in Hong Kong by 1881, see Historical and Statistical Abstract of the Colony of
Hongkong (Hong Kong: Noronha, 1911), 14.
77. For details of the case, see Peter Wesley-Smith, “Kwok A-Sing, Sir John Smale, and the Macao Coolie
Trade,” Law Lectures for Practitioners (1993): 124–34 (130). My thanks to Christopher Munn for
drawing my attention to the use of the telegram in this case.
78. Paul Fletcher, “The Uses and Limitations of Telegrams in Official Correspondence between Ceylon’s
Governor General and the Secretary of State for the Colonies, circa 1870–1900,” Historical Social
Research / Historische Sozialforschung, vol. 35, no. 1 (2010): 90–107 (97).
79. David Paull Nickles, Under the Wire: How the Telegraph Changed Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2003).
148 Robert Peckham

Telegrams were social equalizers to a degree, since their brevity (usually up to 20

words) meant that etiquette was unavoidably dispensed with: “Your lordship” was
rendered simply as “you” or omitted altogether. In contrast to the dispatches, tel-
egrams required a compressed, abbreviated style often identical to the Reuters news
reports published in the newspapers. News and official state correspondence, dif-
fused along the same pathways, began to sound much the same. Indeed, outbound
and inbound information was filtered through the international news agencies, with
Reuters, Wolff, and Havas serving as “‘gatekeepers’ of nearly all cable intelligence,
whether headline political news, market data, palace gossip, or cricket scores.” The
agencies “served as important magnifiers of distant crises, multiplicators of imperial-
ist sentiment, and weapons of imperialist rivalries.”80 The style and content of the
first report of the plague (66 words) in The Times on June 13, 1894, for example, is
indistinguishable from a government telegram.81 Converging flows of official, media,
and public message traffic led to a host of concerns about confidentiality, authenticity,
and secrecy—and the role of the human signaler in the process—prompting legisla-
tion aimed at extending the role of the state in controlling information. Thus, the
Telegraphic Messages Copyright Ordinance, 1894, in Hong Kong aimed “to secure,
in certain cases, the rights of property in telegraphic messages, and to prevent the
forgery and improper disclosure of telegrams.”82
For Rudyard Kipling, who had trained as a journalist, the condensed telegraphic
idiom was to be celebrated as an antidote to the “vice of verbosity” which had
“infected” communication. Modern journalism, underpinned by telegraphic tech-
nology, constituted “an essential part of the new imperialism.”83 This was a novel,
terse, and “muscular” idiom that reflected both self-restraint and authority.84 Yet, the
very terseness of telegraphic communication gave rise to constellations of challenges.
Compression (to increase speed and reduce transmission cost) and coding led to
issues of comprehension and the possibility of misreadings and mistakes. In 1869,

80. Alex Nalbach, “‘The Software of Empire’: Telegraphic News Agencies and Imperial Publicity, 1865–
1914,” in Imperial Co-histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press, ed. Julie F. Codel
(Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 68–94 (68–9).
81. “The Plague in Hongkong,” Times [London], June 13, 1894, 5.
82. Hong Kong Hansard, December 12, 1894, 13. Issues of confidentiality and accuracy foregrounded
the role of the telegraph signaler as a translator and transmitter of information within the telegraph
network; see Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury, “Of Codes and Coda: Meaning in Telegraph Messages,
circa 1850–1920,” Historical Social Research, vol. 35, no. 1 (2010): 127–39; see also Gregory J. Downey,
Telegraph Messenger Boys: Labor, Technology and Geography, 1850–1950 (New York: Routledge, 2002).
The issue of copyright and telegrams was increasingly an issue—and one discussed in Hong Kong; see
“Copyright Telegrams,” Hongkong Daily Press, September 28, 1900, 3.
83. Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2008), 217–18.
84. The “masculine” telegraphic idiom existed in tension with the role of women in the telegraph, on which,
see Thomas C. Jepsen, My Sisters Telegraphic: Women in the Telegraph Office, 1846–1950 (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2000).
Panic Encabled 149

Reuters’ agent in Galle defended himself in a letter to the China Mail against the
charge of slapdash reporting. The blunder, he argued, was due entirely to the “singal-
lers of the Government Telegraph Offices en route, who must have omitted to wire an
entire line, not at all an uncommon occurrence.”85 Institutions and offices were estab-
lished to overview departmental functions and root out the sources of telegraphic
errors. 86 Although the Colonial Office, perennially conscious of cost, encouraged
brevity, terseness could lead to obfuscation. As one Colonial Office administrator
noted of an elliptical telegram received by Sir Frederick Lugard, governor of Hong
Kong: “The telegram is so economically worded as to be difficult to understand.”87
While the object was economy and the elimination of superfluous detail, the lack of
context that this entailed was also an issue. The Spectator admonished its readers in
1898 “against the growing habit of believing the telegrams of each day as if they stood
alone, or could contain anything but accounts of momentary incidents in dramas
which may take years to display themselves fully.” 88
On May 10, 1894, the government of Hong Kong, on the advice of the colony’s
Sanitary Board, issued a proclamation that the crown colony was an infected port.
As cases of the plague rose amongst the Chinese population, the colonial state
embarked on draconian sanitary interventions, including the forced eviction and
demolition of plague homes—measures that induced “panic” in the local population.
Telegraphic correspondence determined, to a large degree, the shape of the crisis. The
Times received its first cable through the Eastern Extension, Australasia and China
Telegraphy Company on June 13. Reports followed on June 18, 21, and 30 with later
coverage appearing from the newspaper’s correspondent that gave readers “careful
observations taken on the spot” (August 28).89 The latest “on the ground” scientific
research was likewise sent by telegram to the medical press. The Japanese bacteriolo-
gist Shibasaburō Kitasato and his team had begun their investigative work in Hong
Kong on June 14. On June 23, the latest findings on the plague microbe were trans-
mitted “by telegraphic communication … direct from the infected area.” 90
The telegraph was central to the handling of the crisis, specifically in terms of the
exchanges between the Colonial Office in London and the government in Hong Kong.
On May 16, the Foreign Office received a telegram from the British Ambassador
in Lisbon, with information that Hong Kong had been declared an infected port.91
85. “A Telegraphic Blunder,” China Mail, June 16, 1869, 3.
86. Lahiri Choudhury, “Of Codes and Coda,” 132.
87. Quoted in Bernard Mellor, Lugard in Hong Kong: Empires, Education and a Governor at Work, 1907–
1912 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006), 22.
88. “Topics of the Day,” Spectator, January 29, 1898, 20.
89. “The Plague in Hongkong,” Times [London], August 28, 1894, 6.
90. “The Plague at Hongkong,” Lancet, vol. 143, no. 3695 (June 23, 1894): 1581. Kitasato’s research paper
appeared a few weeks later, “The Bacillus of Bubonic Plague,” Lancet, vol. 144, no. 3704 (August 25,
1894): 428–30.
91. “Foreign Office to Colonial Office” (received May 17, 1894) in British Parliamentary Papers: China,
150 Robert Peckham

The Foreign Office contacted the Colonial Office with the news and Lord Ripon
immediately cabled the governor of Hong Kong, Sir William Robinson, for urgent
confirmation.92 Dispatches and telegraphic messages crossed, creating some con-
fusion. Robinson had in fact already sent an unsolicited dispatch notifying Ripon
of the plague outbreak. A medical report by James A. Lowson of the Government
Civil Hospital was appended as an enclosure. The dispatch reached London approxi-
mately six weeks later, on June 25. Having received Ripon’s cable, however, Robinson
responded promptly by telegram, as well as sending through a further follow-up
dispatch.93 Such time lags could cause misunderstandings: the dispatch stated that
130 cases of plague had been reported up to May 15, while the telegram asserted that
there were “nearly two hundred.”94
Even though the language of telegraphic messaging could sometimes be miscon-
strued as impatience—even rudeness—there was a discernible brusqueness in the
Colonial Office’s tone of questioning:

Is it true that Hong Kong infected with bubonic plague, also other ports in
neighbourhood?95

Governor Robinson responded by return:

Hong Kong; nearly two hundred cases of bubonic plague to date; confined to
lower classes of Chinese; great mortality. Rainy season commenced after pro-
longed drought; cases of sickness considerably diminishing. Canton, Pakhoi
affected. Dispatch follows by mail.96

An attitude of mild irritation and frustration at the delayed information is evident in

telegrams from London with injunctions for Robinson to keep the Colonial Office
fully apprised of the situation. On June 15, following three days of silence, Ripon
wired the governor with a series of requests for further information, much of which
had already been provided:

Keep me informed as to the progress of bubonic plague and names of any

Europeans dying or attacked. Report numbers of departures, and what arrange-
ments you contemplate as to Chinese quarter. Did plague originate in China, and
if so, did you take any preventive measures against its introduction? Telegraph
reply.97

vol. 26; Correspondence, Annual Reports, Conventions, and Other Papers Relating to the Affairs of Hong
Kong, 1882–99 (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1971), 387.
92. “The Marquess of Ripon to Sir William Robinson” [telegraphic] (sent May 17, 1894), ibid.
93. “Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon” [dispatch] (sent May 18, 1894), ibid., 394.
94. “Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon” [dispatch] (sent May 17, 1894), ibid., 390; “Sir
William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon” [telegraphic] (received May 18, 1894), ibid., 388.
95. “The Marquess of Ripon to Sir William Robinson” [telegraphic] (sent May 17, 1894), ibid., 387.
96. “Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon” [telegraphic] (received May 18, 1894), ibid., 388.
97. “The Marquess of Ripon to Sir William Robinson” [telegraphic] (sent June 15, 1894), ibid., 389.
Panic Encabled 151

Robinson responded directly with an expansive telegraph that was reminiscent, in

fact, of a dispatch.98 In his next cable, dated June 27, Ripon’s tone was more insistent:

Telegraph at once as to progress of bubonic plague since your telegram 16th June.
Keep me informed bi-weekly.99

This called forth a flurry of responsive telegraphs from Hong Kong.

The dispatch was explicitly conceived as a genre of “meta” narrative, in contrast
to the laconic telegram. Robinson expressly used the term “narrative” in a dispatch
dated June 20:

At the risk of repeating some of the statements I have made in those communica-
tions, it may be convenient to your Lordship that I should forward to you a nar-
rative, disjointed though it may be, of the principal incidents that have occurred
in connexion [sic] with the plague during the last month.100

A dispatch would pick up the “story” where another dispatch stopped, creating
a sense of overarching continuity and in so doing implying an order to unfolding
events on the ground, in contrast to the disjointed telegraphic articulations. Selected
details were presented in well-structured, numbered, and paragraphed compositions.
Six days after the dispatch of May 17, Robinson sent another dispatch with enclo-
sures, including the proclamation declaring Hong Kong an infected port, an article
on the plague from the Daily Press, medical remarks on the disease, and a report from
the Education Department on the nature of the panic in the Chinese schools.101 Other
dispatches contained copies of telegraphic exchanges, for example, with Canton. The
dispatch proper, read in conjunction with the enclosures, contextualized events in
a “bigger picture,” multi-perspectival narrative, underpinned by the authority of
experts (journalists, scientists, colonial officials).
Dispatches offered the governor a way of “covering his back” through the enu-
meration of previous telegraphic correspondence with London that emphasized
decisive action and justified policy. They provided an opportunity for the governor
to dramatize the situation and, particularly, his role in imposing order. By the same
token, telegrams could give the governor an opportunity of delegating responsibility
(and shifting liability) onto the Colonial Office. On June 1, for example, Robinson
wired Ripon asking whether he might be permitted to employ 100 short-sentence
convicts in cleansing and disinfecting (the answer was not without the Colonial
Office’s consent).102

98. “Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon” [telegraphic] (received June 16, 1894), ibid., 389.
99. “The Marquess of Ripon to Sir William Robinson” [telegraphic] (sent June 27, 1894), ibid., 399.
100. “Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon” [dispatch] (received June 23, 1894), ibid., 411.
101. “Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon” [dispatch] (sent May 23, 1894), ibid., 394.
102. “Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon” [telegraphic] (received June 1, 1894), ibid., 388.
152 Robert Peckham

If telegraphic messages could influence the language of dispatches, reciprocally,

telegrams sometimes echoed the tone of the formal dispatch. The crossover of dis-
patches and telegraphic communications often created awkward time-lapses. Thus,
in a dispatch dated May 18, Robinson sought to add to his dispatch of the previous
day in the light of a telegram he had just received.103 It led to repetition and elabora-
tion between formal dispatches and telegraphic communications, creating a tension
between immediacy and considered action. Indeed, the immediacy of telegrams
could result in mistakes, prompting the resending of a further telegram that cancelled
the content of the preceding message.

Conclusion: Beyond Dramaturgy

Many historians have argued that telegraphy significantly reduced the autonomy of
“the man on the spot” and initiated a “revolution” in communication. Others have
argued the opposite. Given the practical issues of cost and reliability, as well as resist-
ance from colonial officials, telegraphy did not substantially intensify government
control across the Empire. “It is tempting to believe,” Daniel Headrick has written,
“that putting colonies into rapid contact with London,” the telegraph enabled Colonial
Office administrators to tighten the grip on “their distant subordinates, thus substitut-
ing centralized control for the little subimperialisms of the periphery. The evidence,
however, points the other way.”104 Yrjö Kaukiainen has further suggested—based on
his analysis of the Lloyd’s List—that global dispatch times had already shrunk before
the advent of telegraphic technology as the impact of steamships from the 1820s and
of railways from the 1840s and 1850s speeded up communications.105
To be sure, notions of a technological revolution in the late nineteenth century, as
James Carey has noted, may be misleading. Rather than considering the telegraph as a
radical break with older forms of communication, it may be more useful to conceptu-
alize the history of communication as a complex layering; to view communication, as
Carey articulates it, as “scar tissue.” Old forms transmigrated into new forms, shaping
the use of language, the ordering knowledge, and the “structure of awareness.”106 By
the same token, technology did not simply impact upon society, but rather social
conditions (themselves shaped by earlier technologies) determined what technology
was created and how it was used.107 Finally, although the “global media system” may

103. “Sir William Robinson to the Marquess of Ripon” [dispatch] (sent May 18, 1894), ibid., 394.
104. Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 107.
105. Yrjö Kaukiainen, “Shrinking the World: Improvements in the Speed of Information Transmission,
c.1820–1870,” European Review of Economic History, vol. 5, no. 1 (2001): 1–28.
106. Carey, Communication as Culture, 202.
107. See, Lynne Hamill, “The Social Shaping of British Communications Networks prior to the First World
War,” Historical Social Research, vol. 35, no. 1 (2010): 260–86.
Panic Encabled 153

have been interwoven with globalization as a process in the late nineteenth century,
globalization and new forms of communication were not synonymous with the new
imperialism.108
Nonetheless, telegraphy certainly changed the way in which disease threats were
conceptualized, even as it drew on inherited assumptions about disease identity. As
responses to the influenza pandemic from 1889 to 1892 demonstrate, the “real time”
mapping of epidemic episodes suggested new ways of collating proliferating and dis-
parate information in order to “fight” epidemic threats and the panics they induced.
An analysis of the official correspondence between London and Hong Kong in rela-
tion to the plague pandemic, similarly underscores the critical role that telegraphy
played in producing what might be called a new language of “panic.” The telegram
functioned as a means both of asserting order, at the same time as it created, through
its very immediacy, a sense of the unmediated “now.” Although the telegraph marked
“an imaginative revolution” in a way of thinking about the globe and “the new imagi-
native possibilities engendered” by technology,109 it also drew attention to the dangers
of those possibilities: in particular, it accentuated the double jeopardy of producing
panic in the very effort of controlling it.
Reversing the directionality of Rosenberg’s argument that an epidemic is con-
structed, like a drama, in responses to an epidemic crisis, the anthropologist Charles
Briggs has suggested that epidemics are responses to processes of representation.
That is, epidemic narratives often develop not in response to but before any humans
become infected. Briggs’s interest is in disease events as “mediatized objects”—the
way in which “people who experience [plagues] bodily have generally come to
know them previously through the media.” 110 A study of the role of the telegraph in
constructing epidemic crises in the late nineteenth century (as the foundations of a
rapid global communication network were being consolidated), may provide a useful
historical perspective on the role of communication technologies in the making of
pandemics. It may also shed light on the “protean” nature of the compounded panics
produced by disease and their representations across the expanding networks of
global media.

108. See the argument developed Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike, Communication and Empire:
Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 2.
109. Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 76.
110. Charles L. Briggs, “Pressing Plagues: On the Mediated Communicability of Virtual Epidemics,” in
Plagues and Epidemics: Infected Spaces Past and Present, ed. D. Ann Herring and Alan C. Swedlung
(Oxford: Berg, 2010), 39–59 (39, 56).
154 Robert Peckham

Acknowledgements

The research for this chapter was supported by a GRF grant from the RGC (Grant
Code HKU 752011H; Project Title: “Infective Economies: Plague and the Crisis of
Empire”). My thanks to Charlotte Dando at the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum.
7
Don’t Panic! The “Excited and Terrified” Public
Mind from Yellow Fever to Bioterrorism

Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns

As the wind whips around the reporter and the flash of emergency vehicle lights
colors the surrounding darkness, the scene looks at first like classic disaster television
from the Weather Channel: a tornado has struck Kansas, or a hurricane threatens
the Gulf Coast. It quickly becomes clear from the video footage, however, that a far
different kind of emergency is afoot. “Oklahomans by the carload can be seen leaving
the state in every direction trying to escape this deadly smallpox outbreak,” reports
a newsman stationed on the Texas border. He glances nervously over his shoulder at
the sound of gunfire. Vigilantes are vying for control of the border with the National
Guard and Oklahoma state troopers. “It’s starting to sound like a war zone,” he says
grimly. The drama unfolds like a Hollywood thriller—perhaps Contagion (2011),
with its brain-eating viral plague, or the zombie apocalypse depicted in the movie
World War Z (2013).
But the video is not a product of Tinseltown; it is a different kind of fiction: a
tabletop emergency-preparedness simulation exercise called Dark Winter, born in
the imaginations of public health planners in and around Washington, DC. This fake
news clip was meant to make Day 6 of a terrorist attack with weaponized smallpox
feel as real as possible. Dark Winter was conducted at Andrews Air Force Base on
June 21–22, 2001, just three months prior to the September 11 attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon. The anthrax mailings followed three weeks there-
after. A product of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, the
Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Analytic Services Inc., a not-for-
profit institute based in Arlington, Virginia, the drill was, in the words of Ronald
Barrett, “one of the most influential of simulated models for a deliberately engineered
infectious disease pandemic.”1 Major public figures participated, including former
directors of the FBI and CIA, current FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg, and
former senator Sam Nunn in the role of president.
Although the creators of Dark Winter assigned no responsibility for the simulated
attack, the exercise played on emerging concerns about terrorism and involved both

1. Ronald Barrett, “Dark Winter and the Spring of 1972: Deflecting the Social Lessons of Smallpox,”
Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, vol. 25, no. 2 (2006): 171–91 (176).
156 Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns

the movement of Iraqi troops to the Kuwaiti border and an Al Qaeda agent believed to
have acquired nuclear material in Russia.2 The scenario blended Cold War concerns
about the USSR, once thought to be capable of producing 80 to 100 tons of smallpox
a year,3 with mounting concerns regarding the Middle East and the possibility that
biological weapons might fall into the wrong hands.4 In a remarkable foreshadowing
of fevered nightmares yet to come, the simulated newscast shown during the Dark
Winter meetings reported that, “Iraq may have provided the technology behind the
attack to terrorist groups based in Afghanistan.”5 Not only were participants facing a
domestic smallpox outbreak of incredible magnitude, they were simultaneously led
to consider a possible military response to the event.6
Dark Winter played upon deeply held beliefs that, in the face of epidemic disease,
mass panic was a likely outcome. There exists a long sociological literature, extending
from the end of the nineteenth century through the end of the Great Depression,
which provided a theoretical basis for such imaginations. One of the earliest popular
theorists, Gustave Le Bon, a French social psychologist and sociologist, put forth an
influential idea in his 1895 book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.7 The kernel
of what would be labeled “contagion theory” was that emotions could be transmitted
from person to person in a crowd, which could develop a kind of “collective mind”
capable of irrational action. But during the cold sweat of the Cold War, a new strand
of scholarly thinking on panic took root. This new view held that panic was, in fact, a
rare behavior and not necessarily irrational.8 Yet despite this growing academic con-
sensus, the older belief that unbridled social chaos was a likely outcome in the case

2. Christian W. Erickson and Bethany A. Barratt, “Prudence or Panic? Preparedness Exercises,

Counterterror Moblization, and Media Coverage—Dark Winter, TOPOFF 1 and 2,” Journal of
Homeland Security and Emergency Management, vol. 1, no. 4 (2004):1–21 (6).
3. Tara O’Toole, Michael Mair, and Thomas V. Inglesby, “Shining Light on ‘Dark Winter,’” Clinical
Infectious Disease, vol. 34, no. 7 (2002): 972–83 (972).
4. William J. Bicknell, “The Case for Voluntary Smallpox Vaccination,” New England Journal of Medicine,
vol. 346, no. 17 (2002): 1323–25 (1323).
5. Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies, Center for Strategic and International Studies,
ANSER Institute for Homeland Security, Oklahoma City National Memorial Institute for the
Prevention of Terrorism, Dark Winter, Newsclip, Day 6.
http://www.upmchealthsecurity.org/website/events/2001_darkwinter/ (accessed June 1, 2014).
6. Barrett, “Dark Winter and the Spring of 1972,” 177.
7. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1896). See also
William McDougall, The Group Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 24; Robert E.
Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1924), 867–69.
8. The literature here is extensive and has roots in the late 1930s in Richard Tracy LaPiere, Collective
Behavior (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1938). See, for example, Duane P. Schultz, “Panic in Organized
Collectivities,” Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 63, no. 2 (1964): 353–59; Alexander Mintz, “Nonadaptive
Group Behavior,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 46, no. 2 (1951): 150–59; Enrico L.
Quarantelli, “The Nature and Conditions of Panic,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 60, no. 3 (1954):
267–75; Neil J. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1962), 131–69.
The “Excited and Terrified” Public Mind 157

of a disaster still held sway in both Washington and in the public imagination. The
eminent psychologist Hadley Cantril had forcefully propounded this position, based
on his analysis of the panic that supposedly gripped the nation as listeners tuned in
to Orson Welles’s 1938 radio depiction of The War of the Worlds. “Of course [mass
panic] could happen again today and even on a much more extensive scale,” asserted
Cantril.9
As Robert Peckham notes in the introduction to this volume, a substantial lit-
erature now takes arguments about panic a step further and openly challenges the
myth of the raving mob; the existing empirical evidence suggests populations do not
actually tend to panic during mass disasters, and, if they do, it is exceedingly rare.
Moreover, behaviors that are casually labelled as “panic” are not necessarily unpro-
ductive or antisocial. Social attachments often drive people to help others get out
of danger, which may involve rushing into harm’s way.10 However, while it is now
popular to talk about the “myth of panic,” such arguments do not deny the force of
panic as a concept or reaction, but simply remove it from a hyperbolic and distorted
realm: the things we so often call panic are normal behaviors, and may even be pro-
ductive reactions to desperate situations.11
But if mass panic is more phantom than objectively diagnosable social response,
like any good myth it has many believers—and therefore shapes real-world social
and political responses.12 Key sociological theories have sought to map the condi-
tions required for panic to take hold.13 But this approach, which embraces a rather
static “analytic order of determinants which eventuates in panic,”14 overlooks not only
the actors who generate, respond to, worry about, and manipulate panic, but also
the political framing process that occurs when policymakers (or their critics) make
determinations about panic. It stops short of helping to tell a history of panic where

9. Hadley Cantril, The Invasion from Mars (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982 [1940 and 1966]),
vi.
10. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior; Norris R. Johnson, “Panic and the Breakdown of Social Order:
Popular Myth, Social Theory, Empirical Evidence,” Sociological Focus, vol. 20, no. 3 (1987): 171–83
(172); Lee Clarke, “Panic: Myth or Reality?” Contexts, vol. 1, no. 3 (2002): 21–26; Anthony R. Mawson,
“Understanding Mass Panic and Other Collective Responses to Threat and Disorder,” Psychiatry, vol.
68, no. 2 (2005): 95–113.
11. Alan Blum, “Panic and Fear: On the Phenomenology of Desperation,” Sociological Quarterly, vol. 37,
no. 4 (1996): 673–98 (675–78).
12. Marshall Sahlins, “The Return of the Event, Again: With Reflections on the Beginnings of the Great
Fijian War of 1843 to 1855 between the Kingdoms of Bau and Rewa,” in Clio in Oceania: Toward a
Historical Anthropology, ed. Aletta Biersack (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991),
37–99 (43).
13. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior, 131–69; Johnson, “Panic and the Breakdown of Social Order,”
172.
14. Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior, 169. There are, of course, other theories. See, for example, Blum,
“Panic and Fear,” 675–78; P. B. Foreman, “Panic Theory,” Sociology and Social Research, vol. 37 (1953):
295–304.
158 Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns

the ordering might change or the determinants may vary. Likewise, the very few his-
torical works that explicitly explore collective panic tend to focus on the biology and
epidemiology of disease itself.15
There is, of course, a well-developed literature on moral panic, which emphasizes
the process of stigmatization and hence the social aspects of panics associated with
deviant behaviors or marginalized groups. At the heart of collective panic is the
idea, whether true or not, that it is not just social. Severe acute respiratory syndrome
(SARS) provides an example. There may be a threat from outside our borders, specific
populations within our borders may be targeted (hence the avoidance of places like
Chinatown and efforts to exclude some Asian visitor groups), but moral panic is only
a small part of a more generalized or collective panic. The virus is in the air. Not only
do we lack the socially stigmatized group of behaviors, the “folk devil”—to use the
term that Stanley Cohen made famous in his analysis of moral panic—to blame for an
outbreak, but we also assume that panic is in the air and will spread. The devil tends
to be everywhere.16 We have to begin to unpack the social conditions that make us
believe in, fear, and even manipulate collective panic.
The cultural anthropologist Victor Turner coined the term “social drama” to
capture what he believed were the “regular series of phases” that characterized “crisis
situations,” or “moments of danger and suspense.”17 Social actors engaged in such sit-
uations might deliberately “put past and present together” in order to manage a crisis,
whether impending, unfolding, or imagined.18 Turner was particularly concerned
with social conflicts involving a public breach of established rules or norms, or a clash
of factions contesting for authority. The subsequent crisis of unity demanded redressive
action. These attempts at some sort of melioration produce either irreparable schism,
a widening of the fissure, or restoration—a return to order. Although Turner was
careful to note that a clear resolution to social drama isn’t always achieved, this final
climactic phase provided “an opportunity for taking stock.”19 Whether agreement had
been reached about the conflict or not, something likely had changed. Institutions

15. Margaret Humphreys, “No Safe Place: Disease and Panic in American History,” American Literary
History, vol. 14, no. 4 (2002): 845–57 (847). Standing out in the historical literature is the work of Nancy
Tomes; see “The Making of a Germ Panic, Then and Now,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 90,
no. 2 (2000): 191–98 (193) and “‘Destroyer and Teacher’: Managing the Masses During the 1918–1919
Influenza Pandemic,” Public Health Reports, vol. 125, no. 3 (2010): 48–62.
16. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and the Rockers (London:
MacGibbon and Kee, 1972); David Marsland, “Sociological Analyses of Youth and Community
Services,” Paedagogica Europaea, vol. 10, no. 2 (1975): 93–106.
17. Victor Turner, “An Anthropological Approach to the Icelandic Saga,” in On the Edge of the Bush, ed.
Edith Turner (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 71–93 (74); Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields,
and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974), 39.
18. Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 13, 33–43; Jerry D. Moore, Visions of Culture: An Introduction
to Anthropological Theories and Theorists (Walnut Creek, CA, London, and New Delhi: Altamira Press,
1997), 231.
19. Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 33–43.
The “Excited and Terrified” Public Mind 159

were reconceived or realigned, relations between stakeholders had shifted, power and
authority were rechanneled.20
Drawing upon Turner’s blueprint, in this chapter we propose a related concept
called the “panic drama” that will allow us to construct a historically contingent
analysis of panic that maintains a recognizable and intact narrative profile over time.
We consider three episodes—yellow fever in the nineteenth century, influenza in the
early twentieth century, and the threat of biowarfare (later called bioterrorism) in
the years of the Cold War through the War on Terror—through the lens of Turner’s
framework. The notion of a “panic drama,” we argue, can help us understand col-
lective panics as social and political events and reveal how and under what circum-
stances the panic “script” varies.

Yellow Fever

In September of 1873, Senator J. R. West of Louisiana received a telegram from his

home district whose terse lines spoke of abject desperation:

The people are panic-stricken. All that could have left. The poor are nearly all on
our hands; no money in the city treasury. All pecuniary aid will be thankfully
received. Fever increasing.
(Signed) Samuel Levy, Mayor

A wave of yellow fever had swept through Shreveport, Louisiana, leaving in its wake
a gash of death and disorder. It was one of many unwanted visits from Yellow Jack
in the years after the Civil War—a plague whose cause was unknown but popularly
connected to the exchange of infected bedding and clothing.
What was certain was that death from yellow fever arrived in a horrible fashion,
transforming the human body, whether dead or still clinging to life, into something
almost unrecognizable. Yellow fever caused internal hemorrhages brought on by
organ failure. This gave rise to projectile vomiting of a dark mix of mucus and blood
that looked to many observers like black coffee grounds. Any building that served as
a hospital became little more than “a great human slaughter house,” where “the ordure
and other excavations of the sick were allowed to remain in the most offensive state
imaginable,” while “the dying and dead were indiscriminately mingled together.”21
Victims sometimes wandered from their homes as the last stages of delirium set in,
and, in the worst of cases, it was not uncommon to find dead bodies putrefying in the

20. Ibid.
21. Mathew Carey, A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia: With
a Statement of the Proceedings that Took Place on the Subject in Different Parts of the United States
(Philadelphia: Printed by the Author, November 23, 1793), 61.
160 Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns

streets, “crawling with maggots, and in such a state as to be ready to fall in pieces.”22
Discoveries of the dead and dying generated a daily, “dreadful spectacle.”23
Margaret Humphries argues that such grotesque death was a primary cause of
panic, fright, and flight. But while an exodus was one of the few means that citi-
zens had to take redressive action, it was that very action, ironically, that marked the
panic. It typically left a locale in economic ruin. In Jacksonville, Florida, yellow fever
in 1888 inspired a run on the banks, leaving business at a standstill.24 The situation
in Memphis in 1879 was similar. Even after the fever abated, many of those who
remained were determined to leave the town, which had been “injured to the amount
of hundreds of thousands of dollars.” Communities as far removed as Galveston
declared a quarantine against all peoples and products from Memphis, which found
that “Many firms have received telegrams countermanding heavy orders for goods,
and all the surrounding towns, villages, and hamlets have declared their intention of
enforcing a rigid quarantine against persons and goods from Memphis.”25
Reacting as much to panic as to the disease that triggered it, places not yet touched
by disease often went into lockdown. Social isolation—at all costs—was embraced as
the means of defense. Citizens living in uninfected areas sometimes took up arms to
impose “shot gun” quarantines to fend off outsiders. In Jackson, Mississippi, residents
ripped up railroad tracks leading into the city.26 “Indignation is at fever heat here,”
stated a news account, “and the people say that if necessary to compel observation
of their reasonable quarantine regulations they will burn every bridge between here
and Vicksburg.”27 Terror radiated from the Deep South. An 1888 telegram received
by the Post Office Department in Washington DC, from the Postmaster in Cairo,
Illinois, warned that the “country below is in the hands of a howling mob.”28 Notably,
the targets of such reactionary “shot gun” quarantines were middle- and upper-class
citizens with the resources to attempt to flee, not the immigrant or racial other. In
Jackson, Mississippi, even the governor was barred from entering “his own capital,”
as “the public officers had no respect of persons in enforcing the rule.”29
For Turner, the starting point for analysis was the breach in the social order. It
may seem obvious that panic requires a precipitating event, a powerful threat. But
in a context in which the response to disease was primarily reactive—there were
almost no permanent health structures empowered to control outbreaks before the
1870s—panic and disease become hard to disentangle. Disease flared in one locale,

22. Ibid., 25.

23. Ibid., 32–33.
24. “The Scourge in Florida,” New York Times, August 14, 1888, 2.
25. “The Memphis Fever Panic,” New York Times, July 12, 1879, 1.
26. “Railroad Track Destroyed,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 19, 1897, 3.
27. Ibid.
28. “The Mail Service is Demoralized,” Atlanta Constitution, September 25, 1888, 1.
29. “Gov. M’Laurin Barred Out,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 19, 1897, 3.
The “Excited and Terrified” Public Mind 161

citizens took flight as a way to protect themselves, and surrounding areas reacted as
strongly to the spreading social panic as to the epidemic itself. Disease may represent
the “breach” in the first instance; panic appears when the community takes action by
escaping in the second. Thus, even as panic was construed as something contagious
and universal, in the nineteenth-century United States it manifested with a specific
American character. Where political riots in the midst of epidemics fueled the imagi-
nations of early European theorists of panic—riots that US observers watched with
anxious eyes—the narrative in a far less urban America was different. As the nation
expanded westward, the seemingly boundless frontier seemed to offer the prospect
of a safe place for retreat. Panic in America was threatening, but it was not construed
as either irrational or politically charged: the flight itself may have been chaotic and
disruptive but the social imagery of panic in which the nation was inexorably expand-
ing its North American empire was never tarred as a kind of class-based uprising
(indeed, the poorest were almost always passive actors without agency in these early
accounts) or an act of illogic on the part of those with the wealth to retreat.
This early history helps bind the idea of panic into the very construction of epi-
demics. The word “panic” carries, as Sander Gilman has argued, ideas about the
unfettered, catastrophic spread of deadly disease that sparks an emotional reaction,
which shapes both the personal and social experiences of illness.30 Once panic and
epidemics were intertwined in memory, the conditions for panic to actually precipi-
tate an event (a rumor of disease, a concern about an approaching flu season based on
the prior year that might trigger panic or the perceived need to anticipate it) were set.
The nineteenth century set the stage for future dramas. Created was a desire for
a structure to manage disease and disorder.31 From the colonial era to the Second
World War, a period which historians have denoted as the age of tropical medicine,32
enormous energy was put toward managing disease and disease panics abroad in
the name of new imperial orders.33 Disease panics served as routine and recurrent,
perhaps even necessary, catalysts for public health institution-building at home and
imperial development and consolidation abroad.34 New colonial structures assumed

30. Sander Gilman, “Moral Panics and Pandemics,” Lancet, vol. 375, no. 9729 (2010): 1866–67.
31. Humphries, “No Safe Place”; Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849,
and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987 [1962]).
32. T. M. Brown, M. Cueto, and E. Fee, “The World Health Organization and the Transition From
‘International’ to ‘Global’ Public Health,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 96, no. 1 (2006):
62–72; A. E. Birn, “The Stages of International (Global) Health: Histories of Success or Successes of
History?” Global Public Health, vol. 4, no. 1 (2009): 50–68.
33. See, for example, Marisola Espinosa, Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban
Independence, 1878–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
34. Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2009); Thomas A. Birkland, After Disaster: Agenda Setting, Public Policy,
and Focusing Events (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1997); Daniel Nohrstedt and
Christopher M. Weible, “The Logic of Policy Change after Crisis: Proximity and Subsystem Interaction,”
162 Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns

the mantle of an imperial biopolitics of disease control at the same time that nascent
public health institutions at home provided panicky publics with a place to appeal,
someone to call on, endowed with scientific authority and the capacity to move
toward restoration. Restoration ultimately involved making the case for new state
structures that could alter, prevent, or even eradicate the dreaded panic dramas alto-
gether. These new institutions would be staffed by influential actors who would give
schisms following social disruptions added complexity.

Influenza, Smallpox, and Swine Flu

If yellow fever helped to establish the idea of collective panic as both expected and
dreaded, that narrative would begin to change in important ways by the end of the
twentieth century. Thus, one of the other striking features of the yellow fever panic
drama is that while panic was viewed as a threat to the social order, in the absence
of actors endowed with the power to prevent disaster, it appeared almost natural and
could even be seen as protective—helping to ensure the removal of kindling that
might fuel an epidemic fire.35 As noted above, even if flight generated chaos, it was the
chief option in the face of epidemic disease. But even in the years before 1900, when
Walter Reed identified the mosquito as the vector through which yellow fever spread,
broad quarantines, particularly of the shotgun variety, and panic, in general, began
to get a bad name. Panic was to be expected of the “frenzied” Italians of New Orleans
or the “illiterate” immigrants in places like New York’s Lower East Side, but not of
“respectable and cultivated citizens” who ought to know better.36 Disease came to be
viewed as something that could be controlled by bacteriology, the new science that
identified germs, which could be transmitted from person to person, as the source of
infectious epidemics. To the elite, proud and content in their new microbial expertise,
it seemed that groups of people who lacked education, or English language reading
skills, simply did not know enough not to panic in the face of an outbreak.
And it was no coincidence that that shift was marked by a collective sense, given
the imprimatur of the Census Bureau in 1893, that the western frontier was now
“closed”—the American Empire had expanded across the continent.
In Progressive Era America there thus emerged a great faith in “modern scien-
tific methods.”37 It was, in part, justified: there was real progress against the threat of
contagious diseases. William Sedgwick, one of the nation’s leading bacteriologists,
who helped to professionalize public health education in the early twentieth century,

Risks, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy, vol. 1, no. 2 (2010): 1–32.
35. Carey, A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, 54–55, 58, 95–96.
36. “Threat to Burn a Fever Hospital,” New York Times, September 3, 1905, 1; “A Senseless Protest,” New
York Tribune, August 30, 1916, 8. See also “Paralysis Hysteria,” New York Times, July 16, 1916, E2.
37. “They Died of Smallpox; The Mauri Family Mystery Cleared Up. Malignant Nature of the Disease—
Panic and Flight of People from the Neighborhood,” New York Times, January 7, 1887, 8.
The “Excited and Terrified” Public Mind 163

summed up the scientific triumph of the bacteriological age: “Before 1880 we knew
nothing; after 1890 we knew it all; it was a glorious ten years.”38 Noting the declining
toll of infectious disease, not only did health officials argue in 1912 that “it may be
truly said that within certain limits public health is purchasable,”39 but the public
believed them.40 By the turn of the century, “the freedom from fear” was viewed as
another of the “triumphs” of modern medical and sanitary science. “So many things
have been done for the protection of the health of mankind that fear is being driven
further and further into the background,”41 asserted one satisfied newspaper writer.
Within the borders of the United States, panic began to be framed as a kind of “state
of exception,” a departure from the “normal,” quotidian confrontations with disease,
debility, and death. Yet the new paradigm and new structures did not fundamentally
disrupt or undermine public belief and adherence to the panic drama. Rather, they
suggested that the drama could be managed; that panic could be contained. Indeed,
trying to keep panic out of the picture became part of the script.
Just as the laboratory was the key to combating disease, openness and transpar-
ency emerged as key tools in preventing widespread panic. Sociologist Robert E.
Park, writing in 1904, made the case for a “new method of communication” relying
on the “power of facts,” which, when disseminated, transformed the chaotic crowd
into a pondering public.42 Publishing “honest and complete records” was touted as
a means of fighting both pestilence and panic during the 1907 outbreak of bubonic
plague in San Francisco.43
The greatest test of the state’s ability to control not only disease but panic came
with the 1918 flu pandemic, which claimed the lives of some 40 million worldwide
and 550,000 in the United States.44 In the face of the “tidal wave” of morbidity and
mortality that the flu visited upon cities,45 health officials instituted a wide range of
new tactics for limiting the spread of disease.

38. Quoted in Elizabeth Fee, “History and Development of Public Health,” in Principles of Public Health
Practice, 2nd ed., ed. F. Douglas Scutchfield and C. William Keck (Clifton Park, NY: Thomson Delmar
Learning, 2003), 10–30 (17).
39. Annual Report of the Department of Health of the City of New York for the Years 1910–1911 (New York,
1912), 12.
40. Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999).
41. “Bubonic Plague Invades England Once More, But Causes No Panic,” New York Tribune, November 20,
1910.
42. Quoted in Jackie Orr, Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2006), 44.
43. “The Bubonic Plague—and Others,” Outlook, October 12, 1907.
44. Alexandra Minna Stern and Howard Markel, “Influenza Pandemic,” in From Birth to Death and Bench
to Clinic: The Hastings Center Bioethics Briefing Book for Journalists, Policymakers, and Campaigns, ed.
Mary Crowley (Garrison, NY: The Hastings Center, 2002), 89–92 (89).
45. Annual Report of the Health Department of the City of Richmond, Va. for the Year Ending December 31,
1918 (Richmond, VA: Clyde Saunders, 1919).
164 Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns

What is striking is that in the context of a pandemic outbreak in a period in which

threats from outside US borders had, for several decades, been the subject of a kind
of paranoid national debate and a tightening of the borders,46 containment efforts in
this instance were focused within rather than at the US borders. Sweeping “social dis-
tancing” measures did not trigger outbreak anxieties stirred by disease from abroad
but rather a new level of protest against the US state. Mask ordinances were consid-
ered particularly burdensome.47 Likewise, efforts to close churches could also spark
complaints that public health measures violated “freedom of worship.”48 Yet the more
typical response was acceptance, testifying to both the power of and the popular faith
in government, particularly in matters of disease control. When the so-called Spanish
flu arrived in 1918, intersecting as it did with the First World War and “heightened
patriotism” which had followed the intense public debates over getting involved in
the war and becoming entangled in foreign affairs, public officials found Americans
“particularly inclined to heed government mandates.”49 A kind of ascending legiti-
macy of the state for dealing with both threats to public health and threats to inter-
national interests allowed the government to engage in panic prevention and social
disorder control on both the global conflict stage and at home in the face of pandemic
flu. As the health officer in the District of Columbia reported in 1919, “the people
were panic-stricken and appeared willing to cooperate to any extent with the health
authorities in the efforts being made to suppress the disease.”50 Thus, even when citi-
zens disagreed with public health interventions, it was not uncommon to find that
“patriotic citizens” agreed to “obey the order” even as they expressed their “solemn
protest.”51 It is admittedly difficult to discern how much of this description of faithful
citizen-subjects, willing to do their collective duties, was the newspaper reporter’s

46. Amy L. Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern
Industrial Labor Force (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
47. Journal of Proceedings Board of Supervisor, City and County of San Francisco, 1919, 50. On meeting
attendance see “New Cases of Influenza at Low Record,” San Francisco Examiner, January 26, 1919.
http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014).
48. “The Closing of the Churches,” Evening Star [Washington, DC], October 26, 1918. See also Bulletin of
the State Board of Health of Kentucky, 1919, RG 155, October 1919, 18. As it was continued the argu-
ment was limited to rights, see “Opposes Further Church Closing,” Evening Star [Washington, DC],
October 28, 1918. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014).
49. Stern and Markel, “Influenza Pandemic,” 90.
50. Annual Report of the Commissioners of the District of Columbia Year Ended June 30, 1919, Vol. III,
Report of the Health Officer. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014).
51. “Pastors Protest Church Closings,” Evening Star [Washington, DC], October 15, 1918. http://www.
influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014). In St. Louis, the Chamber of Commerce likewise railed
against that forced closures yet still “assure[d] the city authorities that its members are in full support
of all wise efforts of the public health officers to prevent an increase on the influenza” in St. Louis.
“Quarantine Order is Modified to Extend List of Exemptions,” St. Louis Globe Democrat, November 19,
1918. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014).
The “Excited and Terrified” Public Mind 165

own editorializing in an effort to promote the party line. But such rhetoric would also
indicate the broad power of centralized authorities to organize the behavior of others.
What is so important about this transformation is that people began to turn to
government for protection from disease and the disorder of panic. This change would
lay the groundwork for later theoretical models that suggested that people would not
panic so long as there was not a void in leadership. In a moment of crisis, social
theorists posited, people temporarily turn inward and touch base with deeply rooted,
atavistic self-interests, but could be quickly drawn back to the collective by the influ-
ence of “regimental leadership.”52 In other words, when provided with a canopy of
respected and credible structures of authority, the group would ultimately respond by
falling in line rather than falling apart. This made it all the more critical to seek redres-
sive and preventive action for both outbreaks and panic itself; flight would no longer
do. But as panic became a part of what required management, the new paradigm gave
those who challenged aggressive state action more targets, and created new alliances
and fissures.
Charges that preventive health measures aroused panic—that “primal cause of
disease”53—abounded. Indeed, even when citizens protested that disease control
measures (such as ordinances requiring everyone to wear a mask) violated their civil
rights, they often relied on instrumental arguments that claimed any measure that
limited liberty introduced panic, “the most powerful ally of disease.”54 “The authori-
ties seem to be going daft,” charged the Philadelphia Inquirer. “What are they trying
to do, scare everybody to death?”55 Some critics explicitly accused health officials of
panicking themselves, chastising those who “lose their heads” and “talk excitedly and
propose all sorts of extravagant conditions as the only possible means of preventing
the decimation of the city’s population.”56 The health commissioner in Baltimore took

52. Notably, it would not be until the late 1930s that Richard Tracy LaPiere set forth the most extended
treatment of panic. With roots in Freud’s work from the 1920s, LaPiere’s ideas would be elaborated
on into the 1960s. LaPiere, Collective Behavior, 441. See also Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology
and Analysis of the Ego (London: Hogarth Press, 1922), 46 and D. P. Schultz, “Panic in Organized
Collectivities,” Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 63, no. 2 (1964): 353–59 for theories that elaborate a
similar idea but in military settings as a way to make the distinction between panic in organized, where
leadership and social cohesion are more determinative, versus unorganized groups.
53. “Aver That Influenza Is Spread by Fear and Panic,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 13, 1918. http://
www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014).
54. “The Closing of the Churches,” Evening Star [Washington, DC], October 26, 1918. See also Bulletin of
the State Board of Health of Kentucky, 1919, RG 155, October 1919, 18. As it was continued the argu-
ment was limited to rights, see “Opposes Further Church Closing,” Evening Star [Washington, DC],
October 28, 1918. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014).
55. “Spanish Influenza and the Fear of It,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 4, 1918. See, also, “Calls for
Opening of Local Churches,” Charleston News and Courier, October 30, 1918. http://www.influen-
zaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014).
56. “Be Sane,” New Orleans States, October 17, 1918. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1,
2014).
166 Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns

this position. Dr. John D. Blake hewed fast to his decision not to close theaters and
other public places to avoid “causing shock,” which he and leading physicians in the
city surmised “would have an alarming effect upon the people, and probably make
them more susceptible to the disease.”57 At the same time, the failure to act quickly
and hence forestall panic also drew fire. Thus, James E. Cassidy wrote in the Fall River
Evening Herald in 1918 that had health officials closed more public gathering places
early in the epidemic, “We might have had panic . . . but now we have panic stalked
by widely-devastating death.” Why, demanded the author, do officials not take those
steps now and close the saloons?58
Historians have argued that while there was a surge of panic that accompanied
the devastating and swiftly moving 1918 influenza outbreak, it prevailed only for “a
brief period.”59 In fact, though, there was widespread talk of panic throughout the
epidemic. What made it seem fleeting was that panic appeared in different forms than
it had in the nineteenth century. To be sure, there were some reports of overt chaos
that recalled the old fright and flight response. In Colorado, for example, 100 miners
were reported to be “stampeding” toward a town free from disease. A “battle between
armed guards” and the “panic stricken miners [seemed] imminent.” Yet, contin-
ued the account, this incident was “the nearest approach to panic that has yet been
reported.”60 Far more frequent were descriptions of panic manifesting as the worried
well descending upon doctors and drug stores.61 Institutional structures designed to

57. “Blake Will Not Close Theaters,” Baltimore America, October 7, 1919. See, also, Minutes, Special
Meeting of the San Francisco Board of Health, MS 1818, October 17, 1919; “Flu and Theater,” New
Orleans States, January 6, 1919; “No Fear of Flu Here,” Oakland Enquirer, December 10, 1918. http://
www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014). Some officials took measures to counter rumors
that they were acting precipitously. The Mayor of Cincinnati ran an ad to assure other locales that there
was no quarantine in effect that prevented entry into his city: “All are free to come and go as they wish.
Let there be no misunderstanding about this.” “No Quarantine!” Cincinnati Enquirer, October 7, 1918.
http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014).
58. James E. Cassidy, “Shut the Saloons,” Fall River Evening Herald, September 28, 1918. http://www.influ-
enzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014). Polio provided a similar story; “A Senseless Protest,” New York
Tribune, August 30, 1916, 8. See, also, “Paralysis Hysteria,” New York Times, July 16, 1916, E2.
59. Alexandra Minna Stern, Martin S. Cetron, and Howard Markel, “The 1918–1919 Influenza Pandemic
in the United States: Lessons Learned and Challenges Exposed,” Public Health Reports, vol. 125; suppl.
3 (2010): 6–8.
60. “100 Miners Flee from Influenza,” Rocky Mountain News, October 22, 1918. http://www.influen-
zaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014).
61. “Stop the Senseless Influenza Panic,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 1918; “Flu Folk Rush to Drug Stores,”
Spokesman-Review, October 26, 1918. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014). See
also Tomes, “‘Destroyer and Teacher,’” 53. The experience of the worried well turning to medicine is
also a function of the rising cultural status of medicine. David J. Rothman, Strangers at the Bedside:
A History of How Law and Bioethics Transformed Medical Decision Making (New York: Basic Books,
1991); David Rosner, A Once Charitable Enterprise: Hospitals and Health Care in Brooklyn and New
York, 1885–1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
The “Excited and Terrified” Public Mind 167

manage disease and disease-related social disorder had fundamentally transformed

the nature of the panic response.
Panic, particularly during the flu pandemic of 1918, consequently began to be
described less as a mass phenomenon and more as an individual event: “every little
ache or pain that may be harmless in itself ” might cause a person to “give himself
over to dismal imaginations,” thus “providing a fertile field for attack.” Concluded
one clinician, the “mind fears [disease], becomes receptive to it, invites it.” In contrast,
“the mind that stolidly refuses to entertain the thought of disease, that rejects it, that
repels panicky conditions, is far better prepared to ward off disease.” Such emphasis
on a “refusal to worry” was a new feature of epidemic responses: again and again
physicians (and salesmen) advised the public to “keep the mind clear of superfluous
apprehension.”62 Health officials joined in the chorus, cheerfully coaching the public
to believe that one of the best preventives was maintaining “a fearless and hopeful
attitude of mind.”63 This effort to take panic out of the public realm and make it an
internal experience reflected an increasingly narrow professional focus on individu-
als and their bad habits as the cause of disease.64
With the dawn of the Great Depression, talk of panic—and judgments about who
or what was responsible for its eruption—shifted decidedly to the financial crisis.
Within the realm of public health, polio, an infectious disease that eluded control,
seemed to be panic’s last stronghold and could set communities into flight.65 By the
1940s, health officials began to claim a mastery over disease-related panics. No doubt,
this was because infectious disease continued to decline: there was increasingly
less reason to panic over epidemics because they were fewer and farther between.
Likewise, as outbreaks grew less frequent and less deadly, editorialists inevitably had
less cause to criticize the disease-management skills of presiding health authorities.
And, in general, epidemics were less deadly. On the one hand, this epidemiologic
transition revealed that for the panic drama, the size of the threat mattered. Spanish
flu was an enormous epidemic and killed millions worldwide. The public was bound
to be more concerned about what governments were doing, and whether they were

62. “Stop the Senseless Influenza Panic,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 8, 1918; “No Need of an Influenza
Panic,” Providence Daily Journal, October 10, 1918; “Sunshine and Influenza,” New Orleans States,
October 23, 1918; “Keep Cool and Smash the ‘Flu,’” Baltimore Sun, October 10, 1918; “The Flu
Situation,” New Orleans States, January 20, 1919; “Let Recoveries Too Be Reported,” Albany Evening
Journal, October 10, 1918. http://www.influenzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014).
63. Dr. W. T. Howard, Assistant Commissioner of Health, “The Truth about Influenza,” Municipal Journal,
October 18, 1918; “Deplores Epidemic Fear,” St. Paul Pioneer Press, October 9, 1918. http://www.influ-
enzaarchive.org (accessed June 1, 2014).
64. Amy L. Fairchild, David Rosner, James Colgrove, Ron Bayer, and Linda Fried, “The Exodus of Public
Health: What History Can Tell Us about Its Future,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 100, no. 1
(2010): 54–63.
65. Naomi Rogers, Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1992).
168 Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns

doing too much or too little, in a disaster of such grand scale. On the other hand, the
element of surprise began to figure into the panic drama. Even epidemiologically
minor events that deviated from the idea that infectious disease had been conquered
might now register on the panic meter.66
For example, the New York City Department of Health proclaimed victory over
both disease and panic in the wake of the 1947 smallpox outbreak. Interestingly,
though, even while the health commissioner stressed that there was no cause for
“undue alarm” in a number of radio addresses, he used panic to push an agenda.
Without vaccination, Dr. Israel Weinstein warned millions of listeners, smallpox
would spread like wildfire.67 He set up this doomsday scenario by describing the clini-
cal experience of smallpox in grizzly detail. With this not so subtle warning he gained
the “intelligent cooperation of the public” in the administration of more than six
million vaccines in the space of just a month.68 Yet the campaign stirred little hysteria.
Smallpox was limited to 12 individuals; two died. “There has been no panic,” reported
the New York Times. “At no time was there any cause to fear an epidemic—such is the
vigilance of the Department of Health.”69
But in the 1947 smallpox outbreak it was easy to declare victory and claim that
disease (and panic) had been prevented when so few people died or were affected.
Half a million deaths, as the nation had experienced in the Spanish flu, did not make
for propitious political chest thumping. A handful of deaths (including the few unfor-
tunate victims of the massive vaccination campaign) in a battle with a fearsome enemy
such as smallpox, by contrast, could be presented as a stunning victory. After all, New
York’s subjugation of smallpox was not only a triumph over a dreaded pestilence;
it also showed how state actors could protect citizens from diffuse “foreign threats”
emerging from peripheral regions of the globe.70 In this case, the danger had come
from a single “man from Mexico” who imported smallpox on a bus that had traveled
across America’s insecure southern border.71 The saga fit with the emerging narrative
in a period of what historians have described as “international health,” the period of
international institution-building in the name of health. Vigilant surveillance of the
borders, not only on the part of new international institutions like the World Health
Organization (WHO), but also organizations with international disease-control

66. Amy L. Fairchild, “The Polio Narratives: Dialogues with FDR,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol.
75, no. 3 (2001): 488–534.
67. Emphasis in original. http://www.nyhistory.org/node/63842 (accessed June 1, 2014).
68. Israel Weinstein, “An Outbreak of Smallpox in New York City,” American Journal of Public Health, vol.
37. no. 11 (1947): 1376–84.
69. “Control of Smallpox,” New York Times, April 16, 1947, 24.
70. Raymond B. Fosdick, “Public Health as an International Problem,” American Journal of Public
Health, vol. 34, no. 11 (1944): 1133–38; Thomas Parran and Frank G. Boudreau, “The World Health
Organization: Cornerstone of Peace,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 36, no. 11 (1946): 1267–72.
71. Berton Roueché, “The Case of the Man from Mexico,” New Yorker, June 11, 1947, 70.
The “Excited and Terrified” Public Mind 169

aspirations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), offered a
solution to increasingly porous borders.72
But if the smallpox episode hinted at what Bashford, in her epilogue, calls the
“global dynamics of power” that involved the eclipse of East-West tensions with the
rise of the global North and South, very different was the swine flu debacle in 1976,
which threatened to undermine the legitimacy of the CDC. In response to an out-
break at Fort Dix that resulted in the death of one army recruit, the CDC launched
a sweeping federal immunization campaign—the first of its kind—that would result
in some 40 million vaccinations. Convinced that the nation was facing a strain of the
flu virus that might well reprise the 1918 pandemic, President Gerald Ford, as part of
a $135 million effort, made a personal plea on national television “to inoculate every
man, woman, and child in the United States.”73
In the face of questions about who would bear the liability for vaccination, a lack
of credible epidemiological evidence on the magnitude of the swine flu threat, and
only a single verified death, the Ford administration’s “grandiose universal immu-
nization program” began to be framed as a “panic measure.”74 Three articles in the
Lancet called those spearheading the program “panic mongers.”75 But it was the New
York Times that used the concept of panic to make a pointed accusation. The paper
asserted that the public health panic over swine flu had been a political ploy. “The
Centers for Disease Control in particular has long wanted to increase the size of its
empire and multiply its budget.”76 Ford, who was losing ground to Ronald Reagan
as the republican primary approached, also found himself the target of attack as the
vaccination scheme was derided as a political decision meant to sway an election.77
Here, panic was framed as a tool for advancing agendas that had nothing to
do with the immediate need to address a crisis. Postmortems on the controversy,
however, have often concluded that health officials had indeed lost their heads; one
writer called the aggressive swine flu campaign a “panicky overreaction to a minimal
threat.”78 The swine flu story reveals that timing matters in addition to scale in the
panic narrative. Responding to the unfolding smallpox epidemic in 1947 had allowed
health officials to be seen as restoring order; swine flu, in contrast, set into bold relief
the risks of anticipating an epidemic (and the political panic that might ensue). From
a policy standpoint, the lesson of these panic dramas may be that at least some deaths
72. Kirsten Ostherr, Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 121–54.
73. Quoted in Richard E. Neustadt and Harvey Fineberg, The Epidemic that Never Was: Policy-Making and
the Swine Flu Affair (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 46.
74. Editorial, “Light on Swine Flu,” New York Times, July 20, 1976, 30.
75. See, also, “Swine Flu Threat,” Times of India, July 9, 1976.
76. Harry Schwartz, “Swine Flu Fiasco,” New York Times, December 21, 1976, 33.
77. Editorial, “Light on Swine Flu,” New York Times, July 20, 1976, 30; Editorial, “Doubts About Swine Flu,”
New York Times, August 9, 1976, 16.
78. “Soft Evidence and Hard Sell,” New York Times, September 5, 1976, 137.
170 Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns

are required as a warrant for aggressive public health action (particularly action that
could, itself, cause some loss of life) to avert mass disease and mass panic.
But perhaps, too, such a muscular policy response simply seemed anachronistic
or out of place at a time when infectious diseases, at least within the confines of the
United States, were seemingly conquered. As the era of international health gave way
to the era of global health, with the increasing pace of global travel, migration, trade,
and concerns about new kinds of contagious threats that Nicholas King describes in
this volume (Chapter 8), policy entrepreneurs would cast into bold relief the costs
of complacency.79 Above all, though, the genealogy of panic and the costs of panic
prevention had subtly shifted in ways that, by the 1970s, worked against the CDC.

From Cold War to the War on Terror

We have to take a step back to understand the roots of the judgment against the
CDC. From the early 1950s onward, panic has been framed more neutrally within
scholarly circles. Panic, the literature argued, should be thought of as nonsocial rather
than antisocial, nonrational rather than either irrational or rational.80 It was simply
maladaptive behavior. 81 But most critically, it was viewed as exceedingly rare—the
reaction of nuclear survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki served as a prime example.
Yet the entire civil defense apparatus that was erected in the United States during the
Cold War years was driven by fears of a Soviet nuclear attack and sustained by older
panic theories that led to the conclusion that nuclear and, in particular, biological war
would send the nation spinning into chaos.82
In the popular media there was enormous speculation about what life would be
like in the last days of post-nuclear holocaust Earth.83 Philip Wylie, a science fiction
writer whose novels included Tomorrow, an account of post-apocalypse America,
and consultant for the newly created Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA),
argued that the American people already had a bad case of the “atomic jitters” and
would almost certainly panic in the aftermath of nuclear war. If the fact of war did not
do it, then certainly the sight of charred survivors, “hideous and ambulatory,” would
send those who remained over the edge.84

79. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Anthony Giddens,
Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1991).
80. Quarantelli, “The Nature and Conditions of Panic,” 270, 272.
81. Mintz, “Nonadaptive Group Behavior.”
82. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age
(Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1985]).
83. Duane P. Schultz, “Theories of Panic Behavior: A Review,” Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 66, no. 1
(1965): 31–40.
84. Philip Wylie, “Panic, Psychology, and the Bomb,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, vol. 10, no. 2 (1954):
37–40, 63.
The “Excited and Terrified” Public Mind 171

Val Peterson, Eisenhower’s first FCDA administrator, was concerned that mass
panic might “produce a chain reaction more deeply destructive than any explosive
known . . . Mass panic—not the A bomb—may be the easiest way to win a battle, the
cheapest way to win a war.”85 Peterson, in a widely circulated 1952 article in Collier’s,
described a scenario in which bombs decimated Manhattan: “Those who did succeed
in fleeing the island would pour into adjacent areas to become a hungry pillaging
mob—disrupting disaster relief, overwhelming local police and spreading panic in a
widening arc.”86
Matching the certainty that the nation would panic, however, was the confidence
that panic could be overcome. Those who sought to manage panic seized on the per-
spective that planning for chaos could maintain order. But while much of the work of
the FDCA focused on preventing the panics they believed would attend a seemingly
inevitable nuclear holocaust,87 the specter of biowarfare, argued some emergency
planners, would be more terrifying to the public than any other. Participants at a
meeting called by the Secretary of Defense on April 7, 1949, explained why the pros-
pect of biological warfare, often referred to simply as BW, was so scary: it was the
covert nature of the ordi nance—a “clandestine weapon par excellence”—that made
it particularly panic-provoking. Attackers could deny having used BW. Just as easily
they could pretend to have used such weapons, inspiring widespread chaos. And of
course, they could accuse the United States of having used biological warfare “with
relative impunity.” These features made BW “an exceedingly strong weapon of politi-
cal manipulation.” Only chemical weapons had a similar capacity to cause “fear and
anxiety without necessary foundation in fact.” But perhaps most critically, the com-
mittee concluded, “people are afraid of disease in peace and war, whereas they have
to fear conventional weapons only in time of war. Therefore BW is a weapon which
has the potentiality of eradicating psychologically the difference between peace and
war.”88
Dr. Alexander Langmuir would emerge as the most influential of the federal offi-
cials concerned with biowarfare. Before coming to the CDC, Langmuir consulted
with the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board and served on the Commission
on Respiratory Diseases at Fort Bragg. As a faculty member in epidemiology at

85. Val Peterson, “Panic: The Ultimate Weapon?” Colliers Weekly, August 21, 1953, 99–109.
86. Ibid., 101.
87. Schultz, “Theories of Panic Behavior,” 31.
88. Minutes of the First Meeting of the Sub-Committee on the Public Relations Aspects of Biological
Warfare of the Secretary of Defense’s Ad Hoc Committee on Biological Warfare, Held at 4:30 P.M.
April 7, 1949, Room 5159, New State Department Building, Washington, DC, 3–4. RB 59 General
Records of the Department of State, Office of the Secretary, Special Assist. to Sec. of State for Atomic
Energy & Outer Space, General Records Relating to Atomic Energy matters, 1948–1963; Box 60, ARC
ID 2517138, A1 Entry 3008-A; Folder: 9B Secretary of Defense’s Ad Hoc Committee on Biological
Warfare, 1949, Minutes of Subcommittee Meeting. Declassified NND 50551.
172 Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns

Johns Hopkins University, he became involved in biological warfare through the

Department of Defense’s Committee on Biological Warfare, first as a member and
later as the committee’s chair.89 When Langmuir arrived at the CDC in 1949 as chief
epidemiologist, he recognized that the seemingly remote threat of biowarfare was
dwarfed by the day-to-day concerns of “natural” epidemics. Yet he saw an unparal-
leled opportunity for funding and expansion of the functions of the CDC.
By the spring of 1951, Langmuir later recalled in handwritten notes on yellow lined
paper, the Korean War “was six months old and had been going badly.” The Chinese
were mounting “a massive propaganda campaign claiming with no justification what
so ever that the USA had used biological warfare as indeed the Japanese had 15 years
earlier.” The “emotional tension”90—indeed, “emotional hysteria”91—about biological
warfare “was unbelievable and worse the higher one reached into the establishment.”92
In an effort to capitalize off these mounting anxieties, Langmuir noted that he had
“submitted a detailed plan and a budget and published a plain unvarnished statement
of the potentialities of BW and sneaked it through military intelligence.”93 The CDC’s
famed Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) was created using military funds.
Langmuir proceeded to make the case both in the public health literature and in
the popular media that pathogens could be aerosolized over cities, that water or food
could be contaminated, and that strategic buildings could be sabotaged in order “to
incapacitate key individuals and industries or create hysteria and undermine public
morale.”94 In a television episode entitled “What You Should Know about Biological
Warfare” that aired on April 3, 1951, as part of the Johns Hopkins Science Review,
Langmuir vividly demonstrated the ease with which a rogue actor might successfully
aerosolize a pathogen with dry ice using a simple household blender, as well as the
simplicity of contaminating public drinking water with a simple pipette filled with
dye.95
But if Langmuir presented himself as a scientist bent on showing mechanically
how the enemy could attack and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands, he again

89. Elizabeth Fee and Theodore M. Brown, “Preemptive Biopreparedness: Can We Learn Anything from
History?” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 91, no. 5 (2001): 721–26.
90. Handwritten talk c. 1978, Alexander D. Langmuir Papers, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of
The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Box no. 1, Folder “JHV Honorary Degree 1978.”
91. Handwritten lecture notes, March 12, 1971, Alexander D. Langmuir Papers, Alan Mason Chesney
Medical Archives of The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Box no. 5, Folder “Lecture Notes,
Miscellaneous History CDC.”
92. Handwritten talk c. 1978, Alexander D. Langmuir Papers, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of
The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Box no.1, Folder “JHV Honorary Degree 1978.”
93. Ibid.
94. Alexander D. Langmuir, “The Potentialities of Biological Warfare Against Man—An Epidemiological
Appraisal,” Public Health Reports, vol. 66, no. 13 (1951): 387–99 (388).
95. “What You Should Know about Biological Warfare,” Johns Hopkins Science Review, WAAM, Baltimore,
MD, April 3, 1951.
The “Excited and Terrified” Public Mind 173

reinforced the broader federal message that it was imperative to address the “psycho-
logical problem” stemming from BW. As Langmuir explained, his goal was to “empha-
size understanding of the known rather than fear of the unknown.”96 He blurred the
line between deliberate events and natural events, stressing that we were already well
prepared for either: “Actually, nature has directed biological warfare against man for
thousands of years, but health workers have devised and applied constantly improv-
ing preventive methods.”97 Thus, like countless other civil defense films, Langmuir’s
Johns Hopkins Science Review episode sought to drum up fear—to launch the panic
drama—while simultaneously resolving the problem of panic in one stroke.
At the height of nuclear anxiety, Langmuir himself was likely terrified, much like the
scientists who helped launch the atomic age. Many, including J. Robert Oppenheimer,
were scared to death of the weapons they had built and felt that widespread fear was
not only appropriate, but absolutely essential if populations were going to be con-
vinced that nuclear war must be avoided at all costs.98 If, on the one hand, mass panic
was certain to be the consequence of the annihilation that would accompany nuclear
war, ironically, the chief problem for officials involved in the Cold War panic drama
was, as Langmuir described it, the “the level of ‘disbelief.’”99
The worst that US emergency planners could imagine was brought into public
view in a series of national rehearsals called Operation Alert. The exercise required
everyone in 16 cities across the United States and Canada to take cover for 15 minutes
as part of a simulated nuclear attack. Participation was compulsory and refusal carried
fines of up to $500 and one year in jail.100 Only if people were prepared to move calmly
into shelters could panic be prevented. Behind the scenes, Operation Alert involved
elaborate scenarios where bombs fell on many cities across the nation. City officials
involved in the drill would receive a sealed envelope telling them how many of their
citizens were dead and injured, how much infrastructure was destroyed, and what
percentage of their land had been rendered uninhabitable. For example, in 1958,
Operation Alert envisioned an attack that annihilated one-third of the US population,
with a tenth of the survivors expected to develop radiation sickness and die within
two-and-a-half months. Decimated cities battled “raging fires” that left only a third
of the nation’s housing stock intact; medical facilities and manpower were seriously

96. Ibid.
97. Executive Office of the President, Federal Civil Defense United States, Civil Defense: Health Services
and Special Weapons Defense (GPO, December 1950): 25.
98. Boyer, Bomb’s Early Light, 72.
99. Memorandum from Langmuir to Robert Smith, January 31, 1961. Alexander D. Langmuir Papers,
Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Box 2, Folder
“1951 BW.” Langmuir would lament the public apathy over the possibility of biowarfare till the end of
his days.
100. Dee Garrison, “‘Our Skirts Gave Them Courage’: The Civil Defense Protest Movement in New York
City, 1955–1961,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Post-War America, 1945–1960, ed.
Joanne Meyerowitz (Phildalphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1994), 205–7.
174 Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns

compromised. Fuel shortages compromised the ability to transport food, and “indus-
trial production prospects look gloomy.”101
If it is surprising that despite the growing anxiety over biological weapons, the
scenario did not involve biological attacks, it is stunning that in neither the scenarios
presented to state and municipal officials nor in the write-ups produced by the par-
ticipating locales was word of mass panic even breathed.
The absence of BW is perhaps most easily explained. Even though BW inspired
more dread, it remained mere specter. A nuclear event was far more likely.
Nonetheless, the challenge of dealing with actual chaos and misinformation was not
integrated into the Operation Alert rehearsals themselves. It may have represented the
growing influence of empirical and theoretical evidence regarding the improbability
of panic. Or it may have reflected a growing sense of the futility of preparation. In
1957, the self-defense director in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, one of 162 cities hit hard
by nuclear bombs, simply reported to headquarters: “I am dead. So is everybody else.
Goodbye.”102 Perhaps this was a wry joke, or maybe it was assumed that the popula-
tion was so well trained that they complied in military fashion, having embraced
Eisenhower’s insistence that “vigilance and preparedness under all circumstances all
of the time is essential to the civil defense of our country.”103
But there were broader social, cultural, and political shifts that made panic less
salient. There was mounting skepticism, for example, that the prospect of the bomb,
biological warfare, or even panic would “scare us all into being good.”104 A powerful
social movement that sought to bring Operation Alert to an end would gain steam and
ultimately undermine such public preparedness exercises early in the administration
of John F. Kennedy.105 But perhaps above all the “politicization of terror” was increas-
ingly viewed as political ploy.106 Even Langmuir, who had worked the system to his
own ends, later admitted that a pattern took hold in the Cold War that would continue
to shape the politics of public health thereafter: “each emergency led to increased
budgets, increased recruiting, & absorbed career officials.”107 Social activists, students,

101. D+14 Situation Summary for Phase II, Operation Alert 1958 (Executive Office of the President, Office
of Defense and Civilian Mobilization). Marked Secret and Declassified NND 50531. RG 40, Records of
the Department of Commerce, Entry P-6, Box no. 1, Folder: Documents Implementing Pan D-Minus
(Copy No. 4) (Draft–11/1/55).
102. News roundups for Government Employees, RG 64, Records of the National Archive and Records
Administration, Records Relating to Operation Alert, 1950–1957, Code Case 057–129, Parts 7b Alerts
to Parts 7d Alerts (2), Box no. 1, Entry P-4.
103. Dwight D. Eisenhower, letter to the Heads of All Departments and Agencies, May 16, 1955. RG 64
Records of the National Archives and Records Administration, Records Relating to Operation Alert,
1950–1957, Code Case 055–129a, Part 7a to Part 7b (2 of 2); Box no. 2, Entry P-4; Folder: OSS-129,
Part 7b (1 of 2).
104. Columnist Eduard C. Lindeman, quoted in Boyer, Bomb’s Early Light, 72.
105. Garrison, “‘Our Skirts Gave Them Courage.’”
106. Boyer, Bomb’s Early Light, 66.
107. Handwritten notes, Box no. 5, Folder “Lecture Notes. Miscellaneous EIS History CDC.”
The “Excited and Terrified” Public Mind 175

and scholars demonstrated a new willingness to challenge and critique authority. As

the United States became embroiled in Vietnam, a new social science focus on social
movement theory (which viewed collectivities as interested actors rather than as
nameless faces in the crowd or a panicking mob)108 eclipsed concern over mass panic,
which had emphasized “containment” (both in terms of the containment of commu-
nist expansion and the containment of American dread about nuclear annihilation).
Likewise, containment strategy for panic made increasingly little sense as the other
prong of US foreign policy—which had aimed since before the First World War to
“expand an American imperium” grounded in free enterprise, democratic capitalism,
and the empire-making power of science and technology—became ascendant.109
But while the Cold War panic drama fizzled and the geographically boundless
“Market Empire” of the United States extended its reach,110 preparedness exercises
did not come to an end even if they no longer involved either the public or garnered
much publicity.111 Following the partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in
Pennsylvania in 1972, which became public only in 1978, the newly organized Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which merged federal disaster-related
authority under one roof, focused its efforts on homegrown radiological incidents.112
The full-blown panic drama would be taken up by public health in the 1990s.113
The US government had grown increasingly concerned, not about accidents, but
about the threat of chemical and biological terrorism following a series of alarming
events.114 In 1995, the Japanese terrorist organization Aum Shinrikyo released sarin
gas in the Tokyo subway system, killing 13 and seriously injuring more than 50.115 The

108. See Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, eds.
Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and
Cultural Framings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
109. See Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Sheila Jasanoff, “Biotechnology and Empire: The
Global Power of Seeds and Science,” Osiris, vol. 21, no. 1 (2006): 273–92; Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible
Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006).
110. de Grazia, Irresistible Empire.
111. Erickson and Barratt, “Prudence or Panic?” 2.
112. Ibid.
113. The context was one in which the field was experiencing funding cutbacks that affected the infrastruc-
ture for basic public health activities. President Reagan ushered in a new era of personal responsibility,
as opposed to state obligation, when it came to public health. By the 1990s, after a decade of cutbacks
and the resurgence of TB and the AIDS epidemic, there was genuine alarm over the state of the public
health infrastructure. Further, Americans were quivering with panic over “emerging infections” like
Ebola, the so-called flesh-eating virus, among many other infectious terrors. Tomes, “Making of a
Germ Panic,” 193, 196.
114. Erickson and Barratt, “Prudence or Panic?” 3.
115. Paul Keim, Kimothy L. Smith, Christine Keys, Hiroshi Takahashi, Takeshi Kurata, and Arnold
Kaufmann, “Molecular Investigation of the Aum Shinrikyo Anthrax Release in Kameido, Japan,”
Journal of Clinical Microbiology, vol. 39, no. 12 (2001): 4566–67.
176 Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns

group reportedly had plans to release chemicals in New York and Washington DC, as
well. In 1998, a number of health clinics in Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee received
letters and telephone calls claiming that anthrax had been released into building
ventilation systems. All were determined to be hoaxes,116 but the 1995 bombing of a
federal building in Oklahoma City sealed the perception that a new age of terrorism
was dawning and that such tactics were taking root in American soil. The Oklahoma
City attack also arrived at a moment when the breakup of the USSR seemed to have
potentially opened up a cache of poorly secured biological weapons that might be
obtained by groups hostile to the United States. These anxieties sparked an interest
in planning for scenarios of large-scale unconventional attacks.117 While the threat
of intercontinental ballistic missiles seemed to have receded, civil defense planners
found it easy to imagine the destructive capacity of a dirty bomb or anthrax attack
and the uncontrolled panic that might ensue. “Terrorism is now a growth industry.
The possibility of a chemical or bioterrorism attack is increasingly defined as ‘not if
but when,’” observed one 1999 newspaper report.118
Preparations for the possibility of unconventional attacks on the United States
began in 1996 when Congress passed the Defense Against Weapons of Mass
Destruction Act following the subway nerve gas killings in Japan.119 Notably, there
was recognition that it was not just the public that needed to be protected from
panic.120 First responders needed to be insulated as well. The Act established a frame-
work for domestic terrorism defense against nuclear, chemical, and biological attack
and created a preparedness program, run by the Pentagon, designed to teach officials
in 120 cities how to respond to biological or chemical attack and to create special vac-
cination and decontamination teams.121 Two years later, not long before the incoming
Secretary of the Navy, Richard Danzig, in a reprisal of sorts of Val Peterson’s Collier’s

116. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Bioterrorism Alleging Use of Anthrax and Interim
Guidelines for Management—United States, 1998,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, vol. 48,
no. 4 (1999): 69–74.
117. J. Barbera, A. Macintyre, L. Gostin, et al., “Large-Scale Quarantine Following Biological Terrorism
in the United States: Scientific Examination, Logistic and Legal Limits, and Possible Consequences,”
Journal of American Medical Association, vol. 286, no. 21 (2001): 2711–17. See also Representative
Spratt introducing a preparedness bill in the House of Representatives. http://www.fas.org/spp/star-
wars/congress/1996/h9606271.htm (accessed June 1, 2014).
118. Steve Goldstein, “Clouded by a Fear of Bioterrorism, Experts Say a Chemical Attack in the U.S. Is a
Matter of ‘Not If But When.’ After a Series of Hoaxes, Some Ask: How Real is the Threat?” Philadelphia
Inquirer, November 14, 1999. Available at: http://articles.philly.com/1999–11-14/news/25495432_1_
wmd-weapons-chemical (accessed June 1, 2014).
119. Thomas V. Inglesby, Rita Grossman, and Tara O’Toole, “A Plague on Your City: Observations from
TOPOFF,” Clinical Infectious Diseases, vol. 32, no. 3 (2001): 436–45.
120. Erickson and Barratt, “Prudence or Panic?” 3.
121. Joshua Green, “Weapons of Mass Confusion: There’s Anthrax in the Subway. Who You Gonna
Call?” Washington Monthly, January 5, 2001. Available at: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/fea-
tures/2001/0105.green.html (accessed June 1, 2014).
The “Excited and Terrified” Public Mind 177

article, declared panic to be the next “superweapon” in the Op-Ed section of the New
York Times,122 Republican Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire inserted a provision
into a 1998 spending bill calling for “practice operations” for a terror attack.123 And it
was hardly just the federal government that placed a new emphasis on preparedness.
Practically every public health school in the country created disaster preparedness
centers and programs. This emphasis on public health preparedness seemed designed
to counteract the panic that is associated with terrorist attacks (real, imagined, and
anticipated), though terrorism was hardly a sole focus.
September 11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks became an occasion for both
genuine alarm and deep skepticism about the potential abuses of panic.124 An
America that now saw itself as vulnerable and on a war footing responded with a
range of aggressive surveillance and preparedness measures.125 Critics stopped short
of using the word “panic” to describe the Bush administration’s plan to inoculate
millions for smallpox, but many health experts felt it was “premature” to distribute
the vaccine so widely, as one pox researcher told Science in 2002. A committee of the
prestigious Institute of Medicine that was asked to evaluate the smallpox campaign
originally titled its report “Betrayal of Trust.” An ethicist who served on the com-
mittee explained that the original title was meant to “indicate the extent to which
members believed the smallpox threat had been exaggerated for political ends.”126
While the report itself hardly amounted to a political accusation, it conveyed the
clear message that the vaccination program had been concocted in haste, without
appropriate forethought or safeguards.127
Indeed, the smallpox campaign was but a piece of what many on the left saw as a
broader effort to enact emergency public health and national security legislation in
a moment of national panic. “Constructive public health legislation, which must be
federal, cannot be carefully drafted under panic conditions,” wrote health law scholar
George Annas in 2002. “When it is,” he concluded, “it will predictably rely on broad,
arbitrary state authority exercised without public accountability.”128

122. Richard Danzig, “The Next Superweapon: Panic,” New York Times, November 15, 1998, 15.
123. Patrick Connole, “U.S. Conducts Mock Biological and Chemical Attacks,” Reuters, May 24, 2000;
Erickson and Barratt, “Prudence or Panic?” 4.
124. John A. Jernigan, David S. Stephens, David A. Ashford, et al., “Bioterrorism-Related Inhalation
Anthrax: The First Ten Cases Reported in the United States,” Emerging Infectious Diseases, vol. 7, no. 6
(2001): 933–44.
125. Amy L. Fairchild, Ronald Bayer, and James Colgrove, with Daniel Wolfe, Searching Eyes: Privacy, the
State, and Disease Surveillance in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
126. Ronald Bayer, personal communication, December 6, 2012. Those higher up at the Institute of
Medicine, however, changed it to something far more bureaucratic: The Smallpox Vaccination Program:
Public Health in an Age of Terrorism (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2005).
127. Denise Grady, “Officials Press Ahead with Smallpox Shots,” New York Times, January 18, 2003, A10.
128. George J. Annas, “Bioterrorism, Public Health, and Human Rights,” Health Affairs, vol. 21, no. 6
(2002): 94–97 (94).
178 Amy L. Fairchild and David Merritt Johns

Conclusion: Judging Panic

Invoking the specter of panic is an extremely effective means of riveting public atten-
tion at a moment of risk and uncertainty, securing resources, and establishing or chal-
lenging policies aimed at either control or amelioration of the diseases or other threats
we associate with social disorder. Panic stirs attention because it implies conflict,
confusion, controversy, and either error or triumph over terrifying circumstances.
Panic also represents an additional element that can be threaded through each state
of Turner’s social drama, making the panic drama a distinct variety of narrative that
informs the social response to situations charged with fear.
Over time, we begin to expect that there are things that can be done, despite una-
voidable uncertainties, to avert disease and prevent panic. They generally fall into
two broad classes: measures that respond to an outbreak in progress (quarantines,
mask ordinances, hoarding of medications or food, flight) and those that anticipate
or attempt to manage disease and panic in advance (convincing the public that the
threat of disease, terrorist attack, and subsequent disorder and panic represent a clear
and present danger, mandating participation in sheltering drills, creating teams of
first responders, vaccinating in advance to head off a bioterrorism threat). Reactive
measures, although often criticized for coming too late or having overlooked or
played down a patent threat, have been judged to carry a more solid warrant and have
proved less susceptible to criticism. Efforts that have sought to head off emerging
threats, especially those that have been mounted on the basis of scarce, ambiguous,
or inflated evidence (the swine flu episode, the smallpox inoculation campaign), have
threatened the public’s trust in the prudence and foresight of officials charged with
spending public money to protect the public’s health. Importantly, a broad historical
pattern to panic prevention activities can be perceived: the war on terror has mir-
rored the panic drama so carefully laid out during the Cold War era; the still unfold-
ing drama involving the computer scientist and former CIA and National Security
Agency (NSA) employee Edward Snowden has revealed how panic provides a unique
opportunity for the covert expansion of governmental powers.
The prospect of panic creates a need to provide a warrant for action that goes
beyond a simple calculation of the risks and benefits of action or inaction at moments
of profound uncertainty in terms of health and safety. In the past, when questions
regarding mass vaccination have been raised, it was not enough to ask whether it
was wiser to wait and risk an unknown but potentially large number of deaths from
an epidemic or take preventive measures that would guarantee a certain but smaller
number of fatalities. Knowing that panic represents a critique in the midst of inter-
vention as well as a final judgment, those engaged in the panic drama have also been
forced to weigh an additional set of questions.
The “Excited and Terrified” Public Mind 179

Will intervention stem disease and ameliorate panic, or will it induce fear and
panic? Is a threat exaggerated, leaving citizens susceptible to disease-inducing panics?
Who is responsible for calming hysteria, public servants or individuals themselves?
Do the risks of sowing fear and panic to motivate people to act outweigh the risks of
paralyzing citizens with fear? Can using fear and panic to achieve public health ends
backfire by generating disruptive behavior?
Panic will remain a term that is used haphazardly. There is no formula for deter-
mining when fear rises to the level of panic, no reliable or objective definition, and
history only underscores panic’s multiple meanings and uses. Yet it is always a wedge
or lever that, when employed, triggers a need for swift action. When panic is in the
air so is the feeling that something ought to be done, and fast. The only moment that
we can hope to pin it down is as a retrospective judgment or critique of the way things
turned out, which implies that things might have gone differently.
Ongoing sociological efforts to describe and account for what happens in certain
circumstances of mass fear or disaster have largely concluded that the “panic” of our
nightmares, or of Hollywood’s imagining, mostly does not occur. But the fact that
most people still believe in the possibility of panic does not simply represent a failing
of these scholars to publicize their work, for collective belief in panic is not simply a
misreading or even ignorance of empirical data. Our persistence in worrying about,
trying to anticipate, and ultimately seeking to avert panic is a result of a script we have
rehearsed again and again when faced with a threat of a sufficient order of magnitude.
While with each panic we also alter the drama, along with institutions and authority,
the script coheres with the past. The most central lesson that we should take from
this high altitude look at panic over the course of two centuries is that if we hope to
change the script, we have to follow the drama all the way to the end and judge the
uses and abuses of panic.
8
Mediating Panic: The Iconography of “New”
Infectious Threats, 1936–2009

Nicholas B. King

This chapter explores the role that visual culture has played in producing infectious
disease “panics” during the past 80 years, from concerns over cholera and yellow
fever in the 1930s and 1940s, through the influenza H1N1 pandemic in 2009. A
key concern in this collection is how “modern” technologies have been deployed
historically to make infectious diseases visible with a view to their effective preven-
tion, management, or eradication. As other contributors have suggested, “panic” may
be understood not as the antithesis of modern strategies of disease prevention and
crisis containment, but rather as one of their consequences. For example, Robert
Peckham notes in his discussion of telegraphy in the 1890s (Chapter 6) that by the
turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the plotting of infectious disease
threats was understood to be a key public health tool linked to the emergence of
a new subfield, “disease geography.”1 From a somewhat different perspective, Amy
Fairchild and David Merritt Johns (Chapter 7) underscore the role of representa-
tions in their account of what they term—borrowing from the cultural anthropologist
Victor Turner—“panic dramas,” from yellow fever to bioterrorism. The emphasis in
both these discussions is on how visualizations of disease threats across a range of
media served to define epidemics as discrete and hence “knowable,” predictable, and
preventable events. However, as both chapters intimate, in giving a new visibility to
the agents of disease, these technologies often produced the panic they purported to
control.
In this chapter, I argue that Western, predominantly American, visual depic-
tions of infectious disease threats during the past century have drawn on a common
visual and discursive repertoire that emphasizes visibility and novelty. To emphasize
the persistence of common elements amidst pervasive claims of newness, I adopt a
reverse chronological approach. The first section moves backwards in time from 2009
to the 1990s to explore underlying continuities in the ways that emerging infectious
diseases have been imagined as a “new” phenomenon that is linked to deepening
and accelerating globalizing processes. Amidst this discourse of “newness,” however,

1. On the history and contemporary applications of epidemic mapping, see Tom Koch, Disease Maps:
Epidemics on the Ground (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
182 Nicholas B. King

common visual motifs are discernible in accounts of infectious diseases—a repeti-

tion of particular characters, images, and narratives that together form an “outbreak
narrative.”2
In the second section, my focus shifts backward 50 years to two public health
documentaries, The Work of the Public Health Service (1936) and The Eternal Fight
(1948), produced by the US Public Health Service (USPHS) and the World Health
Organization (WHO), respectively. Juxtaposing these promotional films with the
materials presented in the first section, in the third section I identify an “iconogra-
phy of new infectious threats”—five clusters of images that accompany narratives of
ostensibly “new” disease threats throughout the period under review.
In the final sections, I suggest that this iconography plays a critical role in making
otherwise invisible diseases visible, connecting these threats to narratives about glo-
balization and social change, and providing the visual raw materials for the creation
of “germ panics.”3 I argue that this iconography is powerful and persistent in part
because it draws heavily upon the narrative tropes and visual repertoire of con-
sumer culture and its attendant preoccupations with novelty. I conclude with some
reflections on the relationship between this iconography and Western, particularly
American, ambivalence toward modernity and the apparent dissolution of imperial
order in the face of globalization.
This chapter thus emphasizes the continuities and discontinuities in how infec-
tious threats have been visualized, tracking the tension between persistent motifs and
novel responses in order to show how the past and the present are intertwined. While
past ways of seeing continue to shape how we apprehend and experience infectious
diseases today, changing technologies of visualization have also generated new forms
of panic that are inseparable from new ways of seeing the world.

Back to the Future: Snapshots of “New” Disease Emergence

H1N1, 2009

In April 2009, researchers first described the H1N1 influenza virus, a novel reassort-
ment of bird, swine, and human influenza viruses.4 By that time, dozens of cases and
several deaths had been reported in Mexico and the United States, prompting govern-
ments worldwide to adopt urgent containment measures. Under the headline “World
Moves to Contain Flu Spread,” the BBC News website showed pictures of Mexico

2. Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2008).
3. Nancy Tomes, “The Making of a Germ Panic, Then and Now,” American Journal of Public Health, vol.
90, no. 2 (2000): 191–98.
4. See Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, H1N1 Flu. http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/cdcresponse.
htm (accessed June 1, 2014).
Mediating Panic 183

City residents wearing surgical masks, and a map of the world with North America
highlighted in red to indicate confirmed cases of influenza.5 The Korea Times web-
site’s story, “Airlines Take Preventive Measures Against the Flu,” featured a picture
of Korean Air staff members clad in protective body suits and gas masks spraying
insecticide inside an airplane.6
The graphic map and the forensic image of the suited body became pervasive
images in 2009, signifying two axes of infection: horizontally across geographic space
and vertically into atmospheric space. As outbreaks increased throughout the spring,
fears of a global pandemic grew. Newsweek’s May 25th cover featured a photo of a
pig’s nose peeking out of a dark cage. The accompanying article by journalist Laurie
Garrett, “Fear & the Flu,” declared a “new age of pandemics” in its subtitle. On June
11, with over 50,000 reported cases worldwide, World Health Organization (WHO)
Director-General Margaret Chan issued a phase 6 pandemic alert. Websites and
newspapers reproduced WHO maps depicting the global spread of influenza, with all
of North America, Australia, and China colored a deep crimson to denote more than
500 cumulative cases.7 Governments instituted travel restrictions, enforced quaran-
tines and school closures, and stockpiled antivirals and vaccines.
In August 2010, with more than a million confirmed cases and approximately
14,000 confirmed dead, Chan declared the pandemic over. In the time since, research-
ers have debated the effectiveness of various public health responses. Recent research
using network analysis techniques has suggested that travel restrictions were widely
ineffective, while school closings and quarantines may have somewhat limited the
spread.8 Researchers also agree that the H1N1 pandemic heralded a new era of infec-
tious disease. In the “Globalization” section of its web-based primer, “What You Need
to Know About Infectious Disease,” the US National Academy of Sciences notes:

Today’s world is a global village, with growing concentrations of people in huge

cities, mass migrations forced by social or economic pressures, and accelerat-
ing commerce and travel . . . In this rapidly shifting and interconnected world,
infectious agents continually find new niches. The 2009 “swine flu” pandemic
starkly illustrated the impact of globalization and air travel on the movement of
infectious diseases.9

5. “World Moves to Contain Flu Spread,” BBC News, April 27, 2009: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8019882.
stm (accessed June 1, 2014).
6. “Airlines Take Preventive Measures Against Flu,” Korea Times, May 7, 2009: http://www.koreatimes.
co.kr/www/news/nation/2013/07/119_44522.html (accessed June 1, 2014).
7. World Health Organization, “Disease Outbreak News” (status as of June 26, 2009): http://www.who.
int/csr/don/Map_20090626_0600.png (accessed June 1, 2014).
8. P. Bajardi, C. Poletto, J. J. Ramasco, M. Tizzoni, V. Colizza, and A. Vespignani, “Human Mobility
Networks, Travel Restrictions, and the Global Spread of 2009 H1N1 Pandemic,” PLoS One, vol. 6, no. 1
(2011): e16591.
9. National Academy of Sciences, “Infectious Disease: Global Challenges”: http://needtoknow.nas.edu/id/
challenges/globalization/ (accessed June 1, 2014).
184 Nicholas B. King

The appearance of new variants of viruses, along with the visual imagery of mask-clad
travelers and the disinfection of planes, appeared to herald a “new,” peculiarly twenty-
first-century epidemic, borne on the wings of global transportation networks.
The images and descriptions of the 2009 pandemic emphasized the novelty of the
threat. Yet, in so doing, commentators drew upon a discourse of “new” emerging dis-
eases that had developed from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Indeed, when Garrett
proclaimed a “new age of pandemics” in Newsweek, she essentially reiterated the
central argument articulated in her 1994 bestseller The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging
Diseases in a World Out of Balance, which, in the wake of HIV/AIDS, had raised the
alarm about human vulnerability to “new” infections. In the book, the emphasis is on
the need for novel ways of seeing that were able to overcome “shortsighted political
action/inaction” to counter the “new” threat posed by emerging infections. The motif
of “seeing” as a form of empowerment recurred. The challenge, Garrett asserts, is to
develop “a view that sees humanity’s relationship to the microbes” not as linear, but as
dynamic and nonlinear. The biomathematician and ecologist Dick Levins is quoted
with approval: “We must embrace complexity, seek ways to describe and comprehend
an ever-changing ecology we cannot see, but, nonetheless, by which we are constantly
affected.” The challenge, in other words, is to make visible that which is invisible but
traceable only through its destructive impact.10

SARS, 2002

In late November 2002, Canada’s Global Public Health Intelligence Network

(GPHIN), an internet-based surveillance system that monitors global media in
Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish, identified an outbreak of
influenza in Guangdong province, China.11 Three months later, a flight from China
to Singapore was diverted to Hanoi to offload an American suffering pneumonia-like
symptoms. Over the next few months, he and several medical staff died, and cases of
what came to be called Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) emerged in Hong
Kong, Canada, and the United States. By April 2003, the cause of SARS had been
identified as a novel coronavirus.
As cases mounted through April and May, fears of a pandemic grew. Time mag-
azine’s May 5th cover featured a young woman clad in a surgical mask and asked
“How Scared Should You Be?” Inside, a two-page spread displayed the “global reach”
of SARS on a map illustrating cases in North America, China, and Southeast Asia.
Newsweek’s May 5th cover, also featuring a mask-clad young woman, promised to tell

10. Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (New York:
Penguin, 1995), 11.
11. Public Health Agency of Canada, “SARS in Canada: Anatomy of an Outbreak,” Chapter 2: http://www.
phac–aspc.gc.ca/publicat/sars–sras/naylor/2–eng.php (accessed June 1, 2014).
Mediating Panic 185

you “what you need to know” about a “new age of epidemics.” As governments scram-
bled to contain its spread, a May 4th USA Today article about US and Asian airlines’
containment efforts showed a photograph of health officials spraying insecticide in
the cabin of a Thai Airways plane.12
The SARS epidemic eventually resulted in 8,000 cases and 774 deaths worldwide.
In the time since, it has served as a useful case study for predictive mathematical
modeling of the spread of infectious disease in social networks.13 Researchers also
agreed that the SARS epidemic heralded a new era of infectious disease. As one view-
point posted on the website of the International Development Research Center, a
public corporation created by the Canadian Parliament, noted:

SARS has brought home how completely we rely on the uninterrupted rhythm of
our interdependent society . . . Germs are blissfully indifferent to geopolitical and
social boundaries. We ignore at our peril the medical and public health conse-
quences of globalization, climate change, and the reality that desperate people do
desperate things . . . [SARS] spread rapidly thanks to modern transport systems
that are so vital to the global economy.14

Anthrax, 2001

In September and October 2001, five letters containing weaponized anthrax spores
were mailed to American media organizations and members of congress. Newsweek’s
October 8th cover, which featured two eyes peering from behind a gas mask, queried
“How Scared Should You Be?”—the same language that would be used two years later
for Time’s cover story on SARS. Time’s cover, featuring a disembodied gas mask, asked
“How Real is the Threat?” and promised to “separate reality from rumor.”
For many, the anthrax attack was the harbinger of a new world in which natu-
rally occurring and intentionally spread infectious disease presented a grave threat
to international security. Only a few weeks before the attack, the Georgetown Journal
of International Affairs published a roundtable entitled “Forum: Bioalert,” with con-
tributions from representatives of the WHO, the Center for Disease Control and
Prevention’s (CDC), and the World Bank. In his lead article, the executive director
of the WHO’s Communicable Disease Cluster warned about “jet-set disease threats”:

12. Chris Woodyard and Barbara De Lollis, “Asian Airlines Handle SARS Concerns Differently,” USA
TODAY, May 4, 2003:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/biztravel/2003–05-04-disinfect_x.htm (accessed June 1,
2014).
13. Vittoria Colizza, Alain Barrat, Marc Barthélemy and Alessandro Vespignani, “Predictability and
Epidemic Pathways in Global Outbreaks of Infectious Diseases: The SARS Case Study,” BMC Medicine,
vol. 5, no. 34 (2007): 34.
14. Christina Zarowsky, “SARS, AIDS, and Public Health,” June 20, 2003: http://www.idrc.ca/EN/Themes/
Health/Pages/ArticleDetails.aspx?PublicationID=927 (accessed June 1, 2014).
186 Nicholas B. King

Now more than ever, no country is an island. No country can fortify itself against
an invasion of infectious disease either from its neighbors or from the remotest
corners of the globe . . . we must accept that infectious diseases are not under
control and that a massive effort, as well as constant vigilance, will be needed to
secure greater safety for the world’s populations.15

West Nile Virus, 1999

Two years before the anthrax scare, outbreaks of encephalitis in the United States
sounded a similar herald. Like SARS and H1N1 after it, the appearance of the West
Nile virus illustrated the ease with which insects could hitch a ride on a plane or
ship, transforming mosquitoes from summer pests into vectors of deadly disease. The
September 27th issue of The New Yorker featured a cover duplicating the image of its
inaugural issue, with two key differences: unofficial mascot Eustace Tilley sported a
mosquito net attached to his top hat, and he peered through his monocle at a mos-
quito rather than a butterfly.
In a 2001 article, the director of the CDC’s Division of Vector-Borne Infectious
Disease noted that the West Nile virus epidemic “illustrate[s] that the United States is
at increased risk as the global economy and modern transportation continually shrink
the world to a global village. Although the economic impact of globalization can be
great, the public health impact can be devastating.”16 Several years later, the work-
shop report from an Institute of Medicine forum on “The Impact of Globalization on
Infectious Disease Emergence and Control” commented:

Just as modern modes of transportation allow more people and products to travel
around the world at a faster pace, they also open the airways to the transconti-
nental movement of infectious disease vectors. That mosquitoes can cross the
ocean by riding in airplane wheel wells is a commonly cited example of this phe-
nomenon and is one of several hypotheses proposed to explain the introduction
of West Nile virus into New York City in 1999.17

Emerging Diseases, 1992–1998

The visual and narrative motifs accompanying the four episodes outlined above,
which range from bioterrorist attacks with a death toll under ten (Anthrax) to highly
localized outbreaks among small populations (West Nile Virus) to global pandemics

15. David L. Heymann, “The Fall and Rise of Infectious Diseases,” Georgetown Journal of International
Affairs, vol. 11, no. 2 (2001): 7–14.
16. Duane J. Gubler, “Silent Threat: Infectious Disease and U.S. Biosecurity,” Georgetown Journal of
International Affairs, vol. 11, no. 2 (2001): 15–24.
17. Stacey Knobler, Adel Mahmoud, Stanley Lemon, and Leslie Pray, ed., The Impact of Globalization on
Infectious Disease Emergence and Control: Exploring the Consequences and Opportunities, Workshop
Summary—Forum on Microbial Threats (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2006).
Mediating Panic 187

that impacted thousands (SARS and H1N1), all drew on a prehistory of coverage of
threats of “emerging diseases” in popular and scientific media. Whereas each of these
episodes was heralded as “new” at the time, during the preceding decade journalists
such as Garrett and Richard Preston, along with a group of virologists and infectious
disease researchers, aggressively promoted a sense that “new” infectious diseases
were a general threat to human health and security.18
The year before the West Nile Virus outbreak, the specter of a new strain of pan-
demic influenza emerging from Southeast Asia garnered widespread attention in
American media and public health. Against a backdrop of fluorescent green patho-
gens, Time’s February 23rd cover featured a supersaturated picture of a figure clad in
mask, goggles, and biohazard suit to illustrate the story of “The Flu Hunters . . . scien-
tific detectives who are trying to stop a lethal virus before it spreads around the world.”
Yet influenza was not the only pathogen to garner a Time magazine cover story in
1998. Later that year, its August 3rd cover story warned that the “Killer Germ” (E.
coli) was pouring from urban American taps. The eerie green pathogen that provided
the backdrop for the flu was now understood to seep directly into homes.
If the idea of “killer germs” seemed familiar to Americans, it might have been
because three years before that, they had witnessed extensive coverage of the most
famous pathogenic superstar, Ebola. The May 1995 Ebola outbreak in Kikwit, Zaire
(Democratic Republic of Congo), captivated American audiences for several weeks
running. Newsweek’s May 22 cover story on the “Killer Virus” depicted a biohazard
symbol and a pair of gloved hands holding a vial of the invisible pathogen, mislabeled
“E. bola.” The accompanying story, “Outbreak of Fear,” featured a map depicting a
“world of viruses,” and asked: “We want to know whether Ebola is headed our way.
Could it reach critical mass in a Third World capital, then engulf the globe?”19
In 1995, this question expressed a widespread anxiety. Time’s September 12, 1994,
cover featured magnified microbes behind its cover story “Revenge of the Killer
Microbes.” Indeed, the mid-1990s seemed to be an era in which deadly pathogens
emerged from laboratories and jungles alike; The Economist’s May 20, 1995, cover
featured a glowing green skull peering out from a petri dish, underneath the headline
“Disease Fights Back.”
This narrative was no media creation. Time’s cover story was belated coverage of
a 1992 Institute of Medicine report on “emerging infections.” This and other reports
argued that recent global social and technologic changes posed novel threats to
health, and encouraged the emergence of new diseases:

18. On the emergence of the concept of “emerging diseases,” see Nicholas B. King, “Security, Disease,
Commerce: Ideologies of Post-Colonial Global Health,” Social Studies of Science, vol. 32, no. 5–6
(2002): 763–89; and “The Scale Politics of Emerging Diseases,” Osiris, vol. 19 (2004): 62–76.
19. Geoffrey Cowley, “Outbreak of Fear,” Newsweek, vol. 125, no. 21, May 22, 1995.
188 Nicholas B. King

Since the end of the Cold War, the world economy has become increasingly
interconnected and globalized; increased competition, trade, and communica-
tion have brought benefits to people in virtually every country and have created
a remarkable degree of mutual interdependence . . . The movement of 2 million
people each day across national borders and the growth of international com-
merce are inevitably associated with transfers of health risks, some obvious exam-
ples being infectious diseases, contaminated foodstuffs, terrorism, and legal or
banned toxic substances.20

This report and others presented a cartography of emerging diseases, in which

new pathogens appear in developing nations and quickly become global threats.
This concept mobilized an implicit critique of post-imperial “globalization” and the
disequilibrating forces it set in motion through mutual interdependence, situating
disease threats in a “third world,” postcolonial space of poverty, substandard health
care, and failing states.

Disease as “Modern”

From this brief review, it should be clear that coverage of “new” infectious threats
during the 1990s and early 2000s featured several narrative and visual tropes evoking
the unique dangers of globalization and the emergence of a deeply networked society.
Each episode provided cues that recapitulated previous episodes and framed subse-
quent responses and reporting. While it may appear that these tropes are a reaction
to peculiarly late twentieth-century phenomena, they may in fact be traced back
to earlier eras, when important transformations in visual technology, public health
institutions, and the burden of disease influenced the development of a repertoire
of narrative and visual imagery that would persist for decades to come. This section
briefly describes the appearance of these tropes in two important public health films
from the 1930s and 1940s.
The 1927 release of The Jazz Singer heralded the beginning of the sound era in
film, ushering in what has come to be called the Golden Age of Hollywood, lasting
through the end of the Second World War. Capitalizing on advances in sound, color,
and animation technology, Hollywood studios increased production of popular films,
and film emerged as a dominant means of mass communication. This emergence
accelerated during the Second World War, when film was used as a means of inspir-
ing patriotism, disseminating propaganda, and shaping public opinion in the United
States and abroad. This acceleration culminated in what one film historian has called
a “transition from a rational, print-based culture to an impressionistic motion picture
world” in which moving images replaced still ones in the public imagination.21

20. Joshua Lederberg, Robert E. Shope, and Stanley C. Oaks, Emerging Infections: Microbial Threats to
Health in the United States. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1992.
21. Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York:
Mediating Panic 189

The importance of film as a means of mass communication was clear to new

American and international public health institutions responsible for monitoring,
combating, and disseminating information about infectious disease. Disease control
activities in the United States were consolidated under the auspices of the USPHS.
In 1942, US Surgeon General Thomas Parran created the Malaria Control in War
Areas (MCWA) division of the Public Health Service to control the disease in army
training areas in the Southern United States. During the Second World War, the
MCWA expanded its programs, and, in 1946, its leaders convinced Parran to make it
a permanent agency, the Communicable Disease Center—forerunner of the CDC.22
Two years later, the newly formed United Nations (UN) established the WHO, with
the mission of monitoring, classifying, and combating key infectious diseases in the
service of “the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health.”
Ironically, just as industrialized nations in Western Europe and North America
were developing institutions and technologies for tracking and representing infec-
tious disease in novel ways, actual experience of these diseases was disappearing.
Infectious disease mortality rates in the United States declined from 797 deaths per
100,000 in 1900 to 283 in 1937, and to 75 in 1952.23 However, while the industrialized
West enjoyed the benefits of this “epidemiologic transition,” rates of infectious disease
remained high in the developing world.24 While tuberculosis, diphtheria, poliomy-
elitis, and dysentery continued to kill a significant proportion of the population in
Africa, Latin America, and Asia, these diseases were rapidly fading from memory in
Western Europe and North America.
In 1936, the USPHS released The Work of the Public Health Service, a 40-minute
educational film intended to be shown in theaters and educational facilities, which
gives an overview of the service’s history, organization, and activities. It was produced
by Bray Studios, an independent production company that pioneered the use of cel-
luloid sheets in cartoons and animations.
The first and longest section of the film, entitled “Prevention of the Introduction
of Diseases from Abroad,” gives us a snapshot of the image that the USPHS wished to
project about the state of the world and the state of the art in disease control. It also
gives us insight into the state of the art in terms of visual iconography and mass com-
munications. In 1936, film was at the cutting edge of communications technologies,

Columbia University Press, 1993), 6.

22. Elizabeth W. Etheridge, Sentinel for Health: A History of the Centers for Disease Control (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992).
23. Gregory L. Armstrong, Laura A. Conn, and Robert W. Pinner, “Trends in Infectious Disease Mortality
in the United States During the 20th Century,” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 281,
no. 1 (1999): 61–66.
24. Abdel R. Omran, “The Epidemiologic Transition,” in International Encyclopedia of Population, vol. 1,
ed. John A. Ross (New York: Free Press, 1982), 172–83.
190 Nicholas B. King

and, like most other government agencies, the USPHS made many of their films by
contracting out the projects to commercial producers.
The first section of “Prevention of the Introduction of Diseases from Abroad,”
begins with a montage of footage of “modern” transportation: large ships, trains, and
commercial propeller planes. The narrator gravely warns:

The danger of introduction of diseases from abroad has paralleled in growth the
remarkable development of transportation on the sea, on the land, and in the air.
The transportation of disease has been as much facilitated by improved mechani-
cal methods as has the transportation of persons or property.

The imagery shifts to a close-up shot of a rotating mosquito impaled on a pin,

followed by a map of South America, as the narrator intones:

Although yellow fever has been banished from our shores since 1905, it still exists
in South America and Africa, and recent developments in air travel again make
it a menace to the United States. To combat this menace, the YF mosquito must
be eliminated from ships and airplanes, and infected persons must be detected
and isolated. Although the mosquitos which spread yellow fever usually fly but
a relatively short distance, they have been carried by airplanes for thousands of
miles. It’s only by the exercise of the utmost care and constant watchfulness that
this dangerous, ever-threatening disease is kept outside our borders.

As the background shifts to film of well-dressed passengers disembarking from a

seaplane, the narrator describers the inspection of passengers and crew for symptoms
of disease at US ports of entry. Over film of men vacuuming and then spraying the
interior of a plane with an atomizer, he describes the disinfection of airplanes in order
to combat the importation of yellow fever.
Later, the film reiterates an earlier point, displaying a map of the Pacific Rim, with
an air route from China to San Francisco via Manila, Guam, Midway, and Honolulu.
The narrator cautions us that “the opening of air routes to the Orient has created
serious problems in preventing the introduction of diseases, particularly cholera and
smallpox, into Hawaii and the United States.”
In 1948, the United Nations’ Film Board released an educational film entitled The
Eternal Fight. At this time, the UN was extremely interested in the field of mass com-
munications, and both the department of public information and United Nations’
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) were investing heavily
in print, radio, and film. Having just witnessed the effective use of mass communi-
cation by fascist propagandists during the Second World War, these organizations
saw film in particular as a way of educating the public and fostering internation-
alism and democracy worldwide.25 A contemporary catalog of UN-produced films

25. UNESCO, “UNESCO’s Program of Mass Communication: I,” Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 4
(1946–1947): 518–39.
Mediating Panic 191

listed, among others, Battle for Bread and Green Gold (on food problems and the
work of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization), Crossroads of Life (on juvenile
delinquency); Defense of the Peace (a description of UN structure); Fate of a Child
(on underdevelopment in Latin America and the establishment of an Economic
Commission for Latin America); and For All the World’s Children (on the United
Nations’ Children’s Fund).26 In a 1946 program statement on their mass communica-
tion program, UNESCO noted:

During the last half century, we have seen a progressive breakdown, almost eve-
rywhere, of the cultural fixations of the past. New social attitudes and ways of life
are beginning to emerge. But these are not yet defined, and so our age is one of
flux and transition. The media of mass communication have an important role
to play in broadening the impact of the basic forces making for change . . . [they]
have helped to destroy . . . [a] sense of stability, and have projected through the
world in its place a stimulating but alarming picture of change and diversity. At
the same time, by making people conscious of the magnitude and global scope
of many of the forces and problems they have to deal with, they have given the
individual a feeling of helplessness and isolation.27

Well aware of the need to produce films that were both entertaining and informa-
tive, the United Nations often contracted with commercial filmmakers. The Eternal
Fight was produced under the auspices of the UN’s Department of Public Information,
in conjunction with Madeleine Carroll Films. Carroll was a British actress who
appeared in films from the late 1920s through the late 1940s, most notably Alfred
Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, and later worked for UNESCO. The film’s director,
Russian-born Victor Vicas, worked in France and Germany and directed the Jayne
Mansfield vehicle, The Wayward Bus.
The Eternal Fight presents a narrative of international health that starts with the
middle ages and culminates in the establishment of the WHO. Like The Work of the
Public Health Service, it gives us a snapshot of the image that the United Nations
wished to project about the state of the world and the state of the art in disease control.
After a review of the horrific treatment of patients in the pre-germ theory era,
illustrated by woodcuts of plague victims, the film surveys the contemporary land-
scape of infectious disease control. The narrator intones a triumphant narrative of
medical progress:

Despite the raging panic of ignorance, the lurking danger of contagion, scientists
of many nations went to work. Painfully they labored to nurse the flickering light
of research into a broad searchlight of knowledge, using every means of com-
munication to share their findings with each other.

26. Adolf Nichtenhauser Medical Motion Picture Collection, National Library of Medicine, Box 23, folder
“United Nations films.”
27. UNESCO, “UNESCO’s Program of Mass Communication: I,” 519–20.
192 Nicholas B. King

In a live-action recreation, the seventeenth-century scientist Anton von Leeuwenhoek

is depicted in a darkened room, preparing a slide and holding it up to a candle, as the
triumphalist narration continues:

It was the Dutchman, Leeuwenhoek, whose research helped provide scientists

everywhere with the new and powerful vision of the microscope. Now at last the
hidden enemy could be examined under the probing searchlight of science.

Over jerky images of microscopic organisms swimming, the narrator notes that “the
hunt was on for contagious disease and their causes, wherever they existed.” The
camera pans over to a globe, then a map of France, and finally to an actor portraying
Louis Pasteur, sitting in front of a window casting light on his laboratory bench in an
otherwise darkened room, as “medical science marched forward bringing light where
once there had been darkness, hope where once there had been despair.”
After a similar description of Koch’s discoveries, a map of the world with lines con-
necting multiple continents illustrates scientific communication, as “the old preju-
dices were smashed, and the free exchange of information forged modern weapons to
fight the ancient diseases of mankind.”
The film then abruptly switches from a celebratory narrative of scientific progress
to a more somber evocation of global threats. Over a montage of stock footage of
industrialization and urbanization, the narrator proclaims that “in the course of the
nineteenth century, the world underwent a striking change, gave birth to the indus-
trial revolution, transformed man’s way of life.” Then over an animation of a train
bearing a large skull representing cholera passing from one city, across an empty
landscape, and into another city, the narrator warns:

New means of transportation brought the world tight and close together, making
it one tremendous and congested city. From a disease-infected zone the traveller
now became, unwittingly, a carrier of deadly germs. Wherever he went, the germs
stayed, and spread.

Later, as a visual montage of air travel footage and world maps moves across the
screen, the narrator again warns:

Today there are no distances. Today the aeroplane links continents, as trains
linked cities. Today, the people of the world are one people, joined by wings
over the globe . . . Modern transport poses new dangers of complete, universal
contagion.

The Iconography of New Infectious Threats

The above descriptions cannot do justice to the remarkable familiarity of these two
films in terms of visual and narrative content. Their evocation of the threat of infec-
tious diseases spreading through global transportation networks is so familiar that
Mediating Panic 193

if one colorized them, substituted footage of modern jet airliners, and replaced ani-
mations of the cholera bacillus with electron micrographs of the SARS coronavirus,
these films could find a comfortable home in twenty first-century media.
These disparate materials illustrate the persistence of what I call the iconography of
new infectious threats: a set of narrative conventions and images that frame responses
to infectious disease that are, or are thought to be, novel. Across a span of 75 years,
from the tail end of the Great Depression to the post–Cold War era, similar argu-
ments recur: we live in exceptional times marked by massive social and technological
changes that produce novel threats—new diseases, new vectors, new weapons.
It is tempting to dismiss contemporary claims to novelty and historical excep-
tionalism as mistakes, products of a culture that continually forgets its own history.
But I want to inquire a little deeper into this phenomenon. I am not interested in
decrying the historical errors on the part of contemporary observers, but rather in
trying to understand the repetition of strikingly similar historical perspectives across
75 years of change. The repetition of perspectives may be understood as the result of
two interrelated phenomena: first, the persistence of an ambivalent relationship to the
technological and social changes of modernity; second, the peculiar role that visual
technologies play not only in representing disease, but also in representing disease as
modern.
A recurrent dialectic of the visible and the invisible permeates the iconography
of new infectious threats, particularly as represented in the two films discussed in
this chapter. First, it underwrites the historical narratives embedded in these films.
The Eternal Fight tells a familiar story of progress from primitive belief to modern
scientific understanding. This teleological narrative is expressed in profoundly visual
terms: humans were “blinded by ignorance, filled with terror,” and thus they “lashed
out against the Black Plague with witchcraft.” Prejudice, intolerance, and cruelty
resulted from an inability to see disease for what it really was.
In contrast to the blindness that characterizes the premodern era, modern scien-
tists “painfully . . . labored to nurse the flickering light of research into a broad search-
light of knowledge.” Leeuwenhoek holds a slide up to a candle. His invention of the
microscope introduces a “new and powerful vision . . . now at last the hidden enemy
could be examined under the probing searchlight of science.” Similarly, Pasteur sits
in front of a window casting light on his laboratory bench in an otherwise dark-
ened room. His discoveries of the microbial causes of disease inaugurate a new era in
which “medical science marched forward bringing light where once there had been
darkness.”
Visibility also plays a key role in the depiction of medical technology—in this
case, the ability to literally see the causes of disease. Leeuwenhoek and Pasteur did
not just identify microorganisms as the cause of disease, they also capitalized on the
ability to make them visible to the naked eye. In this respect, the films identify visual
194 Nicholas B. King

technology as the hallmark of modern medical science, suggesting that what makes
modern medicine so powerful is its power to see things that have never before been
seen.
Film, in the most obvious sense, is a medium that conveys moving visual images.
It is no coincidence that these narratives of modern science feature scientists seeing
germs, and it is no coincidence that each shot of the scientist is paired with a shot
of bacilli in motion. Cinematic representations of bacteria are not just the basis of
scientific advances; they also are interesting to watch on screen. Moreover, they justify
the use of cinema as a means of conveying information. While nineteenth-century
scientists may have discovered how to see disease, twentieth-century cinema allows
us—the audience—to also see disease, in a way that written words, oral descriptions,
and still pictures cannot. So, in a sense, this is a story not only about the advent
of modern medical technologies but also modern representational technologies. The
modern is what can be seen; it is also the act of seeing and the technology of sight.
This point is further illustrated by the use of different visual techniques and forms
of media to represent the past. So, for example, while both films represent past events,
they cannot use film because no film of these events exists. The past—in this case the
great epidemics of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries—is literally invisible
to the modern cinematic eye. So the directors must resort to rather heavy-handed
techniques of depiction, including woodcuts, newspapers headlines, and a shot of
“Webster on Pestilence,” in order to lend authenticity to their representations of the
past. There is a tension here between cinema’s attempts to make good history and
history’s resistance to making good film.

Five Image Clusters of Disease

The iconography of new infectious threats encompasses five images: the agent, the
vector, the map, the network, and the barrier. Drawing upon the “classic disease triad”
of agent, host, and environment,28 this iconography provides a simple, familiar means
to render infectious disease visible, and to convey a sense of novelty and imminent
threat.
The advent of motion pictures gave scientists a means of rendering otherwise inac-
cessible physical spaces and processes legible to the human eye, including disease
agents: the bacteria and viruses that are the proximate cause of infectious disease. In
1903, British embryologist Robert E. Kelly assembled 2,000 images of stained sections
from the head and neck of a chicken embryo into a film, allowing viewers to “travel

28. On the “classic disease triad,” see Mark L. Wilson, “Ecology and Infectious Disease,” in Ecosystem
Change and Public Health: A Global Perspective, ed. Joan L. Aron and Jonathan A. Patz (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 283–324.
Mediating Panic 195

through” it in a previously impossible manner.29 In particular, the ability to envision

microorganisms, spaces, and spatial relationships inside the body was one of the most
profound innovations of the medium.30
Visual depictions of disease agents play a dual role, providing a visible evoca-
tion of an invisible threat, and celebrating the modern scientific power that allows
this visualization to occur. Animations and pictures of pathogens—often rendered
in a manner that highlights the scientific production of images, as if through the
microscope’s lens or in situ in a petri dish—render an otherwise imperceptible risk
perceptible to the viewer in a way that symptoms or suffering patients do not. In
the post-germ theory era, animations of agents provide evidence of disease and of
modern medical science’s ability to identify, manipulate, and destroy it. It also confers
a reality effect: these germs are real, they are there, we can see them, they move. And
if the germs are real, then we must conclude that the disease is real, the bioweapon is
real, and the threat is real.
Vectors are mechanisms by which microorganisms are introduced from an animal
reservoir into a human population, or transmitted from human to human. While the
iconography of the agent is relatively constant—microorganisms generally all look
the same—that of the vector is surprisingly variable. It might be an animal: the mos-
quito that transmits yellow fever or the pig that transmits H1N1. It might be human:
the air traveler who unwittingly carries germs. It might signify the primitive or the
modern, innocence or culpability; it is often (but not always) marked by race, class,
and/or gender.31
In each case, the vector personifies the otherwise invisible pathogen, giving it
recognizable form and agency, and imparting to it mobility. It transforms the intan-
gible threat identified by science into an image recognizable to the naked eye and to
lay audiences: we cannot see microorganisms unaided, but we can see mosquitos,
flies, pigs, immigrants, and travelers. More recently, media coverage32 and scientific
investigation33 of so-called “superspreaders” has evoked a hierarchy of vectors among
health care workers and the general public.

29. Adolf Nichtenhauser Medical Motion Picture Collection, National Library of Medicine, box I, vol. I,
77–78.
30. Hannah Landecker, “The Life of Movement: From Microcinematography to Live Cell Imaging,” Journal
of Visual Culture, vol. 11, no. 3 (2012): 378–99; and “Microcinematography and the History of Science
and Film,” Isis, vol. 97, no. 1 (2006): 121–32.
31. Kirsten Ostherr, “Contagion and the Boundaries of the Visible: The Cinema of World Health,” Camera
Obscura, vol. 17, no. 2 (2002): 1–39; and Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the
Discourse of World Health (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
32. A. P. Galvani and R. M. May, “Epidemiology: Dimensions of Superspreading,” Nature, vol. 438, no.
7066 (2005): 293–95.
33. L. Temime, L. Opatowski, Y. Pannet, C. Brun-Buisson, P. Y. Boëlle, and D. Guillemot, “Peripatetic
Health-Care Workers as Potential Superspreaders,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of
the United States of America, vol. 106, no. 43 (October 27, 2009): 18420–25.
196 Nicholas B. King

Maps perform much work in the iconography of new infectious threats. As Denis
Woods has argued, maps do not impartially represent a stable geographic reality, but
rather are political instruments that construct the world according to particular inter-
ests.34 Maps also play a crucial role in what geographers Erik Swyngedouw and Neil
Smith call the “politics of scale,” the process by which different actors mobilize geo-
graphic scale as a resource to explain events, support arguments, and enlist allies.35
Whereas images of agents and vectors help visualize and personify disease, maps
establish proximity and connectedness, by visually juxtaposing geographic locations
thought to be so radically different that there can be no traffic between them. When
animated and coupled with imagery of vectors, they convey motion between places,
as in the discussion of the spread of cholera in The Eternal Fight and yellow fever in
The Work of the Public Health Service. Maps also spatially locate agents, populations,
and vectors, inviting viewers to place themselves on the map and see the vast world
of three dimensions as a two-dimensional space of self-evident, direct connections.
The use of maps to visually establish connections also allows researchers and media
alike to engage a politics of scale, lending local disease outbreaks in faraway places an
immediate a global significance.
Closely allied with the map is the iconography of the network. Networks can be
abstracted flows of communication and information exchange, or the material infra-
structure of transportation, trade, and commerce. Networks work together with maps
to establish connectedness; at the same time, they signify modernity and technologi-
cal progress. However, whereas maps represent actual geography, signifying proxim-
ity between different locations and social groups, networks are generally abstractions,
and signify a flattening or erasure of difference, and the promise of universal com-
munication. Maps show us how big the world is; networks show us how small it is
becoming, and invite us to envision ourselves within a system of interconnections.
With the advent of powerful mathematical modeling and social network analysis,
it has also become possible to envision and analyze networks that were heretofore
invisible,36 and to identify “sentinel” nodes in the network that allow us to predict
epidemics before they become legible in a strict statistical sense.37
Networks are both the conduits of infection and the potential mechanism of
prophylaxis: even as transportation networks accelerate the transmission of new
34. See Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York and London: Guildford Press, 1992).
35. Neil Smith, “Geography, Difference, and the Politics of Scale,” in Postmodernism and the Social
Sciences, ed. Joe Doherty, Elspeth Graham, and Mo Malek (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992);
Erik Swyngedouw, “Neither Global nor Local: Glocalisation and the Politics of Scale,” in Spaces of
Globalization: Reasserting the Power of the Local, ed. Kevin R. Cox (New York: Guilford Press, 1996),
137–66. See also, King, “The Scale Politics of Emerging Diseases.”
36. L. M. Glass and R. J. Glass, “Social Contact Networks for the Spread of Pandemic Influenza in Children
and Teenagers,” BMC Public Health, vol. 8 (2008): 61.
37. N. A. Christakis and J. H. Fowler, “Social Network Sensors for Early Detection of Contagious
Outbreaks,” PLoS One, vol. 5, no. 9 (2010): e12948.
Mediating Panic 197

infectious diseases, the advent of better surveillance and communications infrastruc-

ture promises to increase our ability to quickly detect and intervene against epidem-
ics.38 Networks are also both the content of visual communication, and the means of
communication itself. In this respect, when visual media use the iconography of the
network, they also depict the apparatus of film itself.
While the previous four elements depict elements of threat, the barrier represents
a technological fix that intervenes in the transmission of agent from vector to human.
Barriers may be physical, as with cloth surgical masks, cloth or rubberized gas masks,
or portable isolation units. They may be political, as with quarantine regulations at
national borders. Or they may be technological, as with pesticides, insecticides, or
pharmaceuticals. While the barrier may represent prophylaxis, it is usually mobilized
as a sign of vulnerability rather than safety, a visual representation of human anxiety
about our place in a world of agents, vectors, and networks, and about the frailty of
geographic and corporeal borders.

Mediated Panics and Modern Ambivalences

Panics do not just happen, as though arising organically in the face of novel threats.
They must be made. Since the mid-twentieth century, residents of wealthy nations in
the industrialized West have had little direct exposure to infectious diseases in the
early stages of an outbreak or epidemic. Pathogens are invisible to the naked eye, and
must be observed microscopically and represented through photographs or anima-
tion; vectors often show no visible signs of disease, and even the symptoms are often
invisible to all but trained specialists; outbreaks are often geographically and socially
remote, striking the least visible members of society, the poor or socially marginal-
ized; and the diffuse and long-developing threat that these diseases pose is all but
invisible to policymakers and the public. Panic, rarely portrayed as a characteristic
of the already sick, requires some means by which the healthy can have a visceral
experience of an invisible, diffuse, abstract disease outbreak.39 I have argued in this
chapter that the iconography of new infectious threats has performed this critical
role in creating and mediating panics. However, it is worth asking why this particular
repertoire of images persists and continues to persuade.
On a superficial level, it is no surprise that this iconography prominently features
agents, vectors, and maps, as these reflect the material underpinnings of infec-
tious disease. This material semiotics of disease thus reproduces the well-known

38. Nicholas B. King, “Dangerous Fragments,” Grey Room, no. 7 (2002): 72–81; and “Networks, Disease,
and the Utopian Impulse,” in Networked Disease: Emerging Infections in the Global City, ed. S. Harris
Ali and Roger Keil (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 201–13.
39. Charles Briggs, “Pressing Plagues: On the Mediated Communicability of Virtual Epidemics,” in Plagues
and Epidemics: Infected Spaces Past and Present, ed. D. Ann Herring and Alan C. Swedlund (Oxford:
Berg; 2010), 39–59.
198 Nicholas B. King

epidemiologic triad of agent, host, and environment. However, it does so in culturally

specific ways.
The iconography of new infectious threats that I have identified beginning in the
1930s resonates with and borrows heavily from both the cultural logic and the visual
lexicon of marketing and, more broadly, consumer culture. Historian of advertising
and consumer culture Stuart Ewen has argued that an emphasis on the continual
manufacture of novelty also originated in the “consumer engineering” of the 1930s.
Following the collapse of consumer markets during the Great Depression, producers
and advertisers turned to “style obsolescence” as a means of stimulating a continual
expansion of markets for their products. Convincing the consumer that novelty was
in itself a desirable characteristic—a “purchased value” as Roland Barthes calls it—
further ensured the insatiability of consumer appetites: “In the commercial world of
style, the fundamental assumption underlying the ‘shaping of everyday life’ is that life
must visibly change, every day . . . What will appear next is not always predictable.
That something new will appear is entirely predictable.”40
Novelty also stands in as a marker for a wide array of culturally resonant phenom-
ena: buying something new means participation in scientific and cultural progress;
it means being modern and fashionable; and most of all, it means expanding the
range of one’s own freedom of consumer choice, the activity that had come to replace
the franchise as the consummate expression of American freedom. As historian
Michael Smith observes, by mid-century commodification had fused with techno-
logical progress to produce “an inexhaustible conveyor belt of ever newer and more
advanced products . . . consistent with the need for more and bigger markets, and its
promise of consumer involvement provided a substitute for participatory decision-
making.”41This newness is in some respects a key element of American exceptional-
ism and the foundational myth of self-invention.42 In a consumer culture, the “new” is
always “better” (more modern, more creative, more productive) than the “old.”
The pervasive emphasis on the novelty of disease agents, networks, and vectors,
thus echoes in form and substance these obsessions with novelty and modernity.
These are not simply germs, but “new” germs; not just vectors, but “new” vectors;
not just bugs, but “new,” improved, superbugs. As the visual language of public health
participates in the marketplace of signs, it too depicts particular diseases as stylish,
modern, and new. Indeed, we can even see signs of competition, in the form of the

40. Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York: Basic
Books, 1988).
41. M. L. Smith, “Recourse of Empire: Landscapes of Progress in Technological America,” in Does
Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, ed. L. Marx and M. R. Smith
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1994).
42. See, Philip Abbott, Exceptional America: Newness and National Identity (New York: Peter Lang, 1999).
Mediating Panic 199

“disease-of-the-week” phenomenon, as different infections ascend and recede from

the public eye.43
However, the iconography of new infectious threats and its accompanying nar-
rative tropes not only celebrate the novel and the modern, but also articulate a pro-
found ambivalence toward modernity. The imagery is simultaneously critical and
celebratory of modernity, particularly those aspects of globalizing modernity that
compress time and space.44 Even as it agitates, creating a sense of immanent threat or
present crisis, it also comforts, reassuring us that we are modern and technologically
sophisticated. The iconography of new infectious threats rarely uses images of primi-
tive squalor, preferring instead signs of modern technology; not the suffering poor,
but the affluent traveler. In early twentieth-century films, and in early twenty-first-
century visual media, infectious disease does not signify the failure of social welfare,
but rather the unintended consequence of technological triumph. From this point of
view, we have always been modern—and our modernity presents us with new risks,
but also new opportunities.45
This ambivalent narrative is itself hardly new. In his magisterial The Country and
the City (1973), Raymond Williams noted its presence in pastoral narratives across
several centuries:

We hear again and again this brisk, impatient and as it is said realistic response:
to the productive efficiency, the newly liberated forces, of the capitalist break-
through; a simultaneous damnation and idealisation of capitalism, in its spe-
cific forms of urban and industrial development; as unreflecting celebration of
mastery—power, yield, production, man’s mastery of nature—as if the exploita-
tion of natural resources could be separated from the exploitation of men. What
they say is damn this, praise this.46

Whereas Williams discussed a comparison of the modernizing present with an ideal-

ized pastoral past, the iconography of new infectious threats compares the globaliz-
ing, networked present to an imagined past in which humans occupied disconnected,
secure geographic and cultural niches: not an expansive bucolic pasture, but a multi-
tude of self-contained islands.
These self-contained islands also reflect an imagined imperial order in which
“modern” colonial centers are spatially, culturally, and epidemiologically separate
from “primitive” colonized peripheries. On one level, the iconography of new infec-
tious threats clearly reflects Western anxieties about the threatened dissolution of
imperial order in the face of globalization. However, as I have suggested elsewhere,

43. Malcolm Gladwell, “The Plague Year,” New Republic (July 1995): 38–46; Susan D. Moeller, Compassion
Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death (New York: Routledge, 1999).
44. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
45. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992).
46. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 37.
200 Nicholas B. King

this time period witnessed a reconfiguration rather than the dissolution of impe-
rial power. 47 The decline in the sovereignty of nation-states—both as colonial agents
exerting control over distant territories, and as stable entities able to police their
borders and maintain their territorial integrity against extraterritorial political
or economic incursion—has not resulted in the decline of sovereignty in general.
Instead, the imperialism of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries is gradually
giving way to a new form of global sovereignty in which national and supranational
organizations are “united under a single logic of rule.”48 The iconography of new
infectious threats articulates the transition from nineteenth-century imperialism to
twenty-first-century empire.

Conclusion: Visibility and Panic

The iconography of new infectious threats’ simultaneous cautionary and celebratory

narrative, identifying modern networks as both conduits of infection and the infra-
structure of public health prevention, embodies one of the enduring paradoxes of
visibility. Contrary to the narrative presented in The Eternal Fight, we are not on a
one-way trip from darkness to light, but rather on a cyclical journey in which blind-
ness gives way to sight, but sight also begets greater awareness of the remaining blind
spots. The more sophisticated our surveillance technologies become, the more inad-
equate they seem to be. We are able to discern changes in patterns of disease—the
emergence of new pathogens, epidemics, evolving health disparities—quicker and
with greater subtlety. But we also become more and more aware of the changes that
escape our attention, and we raise our expectations about the speed and accuracy
with which we will be able to identify them in the future. Similarly, evolving commu-
nications infrastructure allows quicker transmission of messages about new health
threats. This results in more effective health communication, to be sure; but also an
insatiable thirst for new threats to feed into the machinery of the visible, and increas-
ing anxiety regarding the threats we do as yet see. This is the paradox of sight: the
more we see, the blinder we feel ourselves to be.
Images capture moments, which they make momentous. When confronted with
an iconic image that seems somehow to capture something new and frightening,
something terrifying and unutterably modern, we might stop a moment to reflect
on how this sense of interwoven risk, novelty, and historical exceptionalism is com-
municated to us through pictures and video—and how these depictions may play a
role in framing and fostering panic.

47. King, “Security, Disease, Commerce.”

48. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), xii.
Mediating Panic 201

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank David Serlin and the National Library of Medicine for
providing access to the films described in this chapter, Jonah Campbell for research
assistance, and Robert Peckham for helpful editorial suggestions.
Epilogue
Panic’s Past and Global Futures

Alison Bashford

In late August 2013 an alleged chemical weapons attack took place in the Ghouta area
of Syria. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reported that three hospitals it supports
in the region received around 3,600 patients that morning. MSF’s director of opera-
tions considered that the “symptoms, the massive influx of patients in a short period
of time, the origin of the patients, and the contamination of medical and first aid
workers, strongly indicate mass exposure to a neurotoxic agent.”1 This episode in the
Syrian civil war resulted in tragic death and created panic of many orders, in many
places. It all escalated instantly. Locally, hospitals were overwhelmed with injured
civilians. Thousands of Syrians fled to Jordan or Lebanon, to join the thousands of
refugees already there. The Syrian government itself was described as “panicked” by
the attacks because it had lost control of its own forces, of its own ammunition as it
were. Panic spread in the region and in the media. In Israel, civilians raced to distri-
bution points for gas masks and other supplies. One reason was possible chemical
attacks from Syria; another related to the chances of an American military response.
Even the prospect that the United States would not respond elicited anxiety. Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged Israelis to remain calm, but the panic itself was
heightened, arguably produced by the media’s own reports: “Civilians panicked by
Syria threat,” reported The Times of Israel, the “scramble for cover” thus intensifying.2
And elsewhere: “Fear of West attacking Syria sends panic waves across Middle East.”3
The Middle East might well be concerned about an attack from the West.
Meanwhile, however, the West itself seemed rather more concerned about the pros-
pect of a financial crisis that would accompany any US military response. Real-time

1. “Syria Symptoms ‘Point to Neurotoxic Agent,’” Aljazeera, August 25, 2013. Available at:
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/08/201382417141280856.html (accessed September
17, 2014).
2. “Gas Mask Centers Boost Hours as Israelis Line up for Protection,” Times of Israel, August 29,
2013. Available at: http://www.timesofisrael.com/gas-mask-centers-boost-hours-as-israelis-line-up-
for-protection/ (accessed September 17, 2014).
3. “Fear of West Attacking Syria Sends Panic Waves Across Middle East,” Firstpost, August 29, 2013.
Available at: http://www.firstpost.com/world/fear-of-west-attacking-syria-sends-panic-waves-across-
middle-east-1068443.html (accessed September 17, 2014).
204 Alison Bashford

Internet communication warned investors to prepare for market panic, warnings that
almost ensured it coming to pass.4 The quintessential site of virtual panic with real
effects, the global financial market wavered. In the terrible Syrian events, globalized
and communicated in an instant, bodily suffering became virtual apprehension: the
same event entailed fear of death, fear of war, and fear of financial loss, almost simul-
taneously. This was about communication as much as it was about chemical weapons.
All of the chapters in Empires of Panic deal with communication, the touch of
words, so close etymologically, to contagion. Communication and its means—its
media—are always required for panic to become a phenomenon beyond the individ-
ual and beyond the local. This “touch” is how panic spreads, how it is communicated
or “made common.” A history of panic and disease, then, turns out to be a history of
communication and technology. Panic is therefore also about relative time, depend-
ent in part on the temporality of different media.
Like contagion, panic is not always catastrophic, instant, or fast. Some chapters
in this book observe panic working in slow time—chronic infections. John Carroll’s
“Slow Burn in China” is to the point, a constant low-level concern about fires and
Canton; embers to which oxygen might be added at any point. Public panic some-
times works like this, when it is more rumor than conflagration, more a chronic
anxiety than an acute action. Yet anxiety and fear are different. And Carroll’s chapter
shows a distinction between a diffused and indeterminate colonial “anxiety,” and
“fear” which is ascribable to a particular cause.5 Sometimes anxiety is given a causality
that might, in fact, be fictive.
James Beattie’s chapter looks at responses to longstanding and diffused anxie-
ties about climate and place. This work suggests the extent to which panic itself was
sometimes constructed as the product of a pathogenic “Oriental” environment. As
a contagious emanation belonging to a particular place, panic became, in part, an
environmental concern. Solutions for the misplaced British in India—send them
to climate-appropriate Australasia, or rework the climate in India in the form of
Australasian eucalypts—were hardly panicked responses, but they do invite reflec-
tion on just where the distinction between panic and chronic cultural anxiety lies.
Underneath the latter there is, perhaps, a residual memory of panic that might be
triggered at any point. It may not be an emergency, but it might become one at any
moment. As Amy Fairchild and David Merritt Johns suggest in their chapter, the
nineteenth century set the stage for future dramas, building memories of panic
moments, and of who benefitted and who bore the cost.

4. “Prepare for Market Panic: Jim Rogers (3:07),” Reuters, August 28, 2013. Available at: http://www.
reuters.com/video/2013/08/28/prepare-for-market-panic-jim-rogers?videoId=260178527&videoCha
nnel=5 (accessed September 17, 2014).
5. See Ranajit Guha, “Not at Home in Empire,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 3 (1997): 482–93.
Panic’s Past and Global Futures 205

Disease, news of it, and panic about it, do not necessarily work in lockstep, in the
same temporality. Cholera in a neighborhood might consume quickly, like a fire in
Canton. But in the past communication about this was likely both slow and clumsy.
This was especially the case on an imperial scale, notwithstanding the bureaucra-
cies devoted to scribing and dispatching intelligence.6 Most of the nineteenth century
functioned on maritime, so to speak: ships brought news to the colonial Antipodes
of a cholera epidemic in London that might already be over. The same ship might
simultaneously bring people with disease. As the nineteenth century proceeded,
steamships might bring more prompt communication, but ironically they were more,
not less, likely also to bring disease. Shorter journeys increased the risk of unwittingly
carrying incubating passengers or crew. In this sense isolation, slowness, and global
distance could have their health benefits.
As Robert Peckham here shows, at the end of the century technology overtook this
heavy, unresponsive maritime communication. Cables and then telegraph wired the
world and were deployed almost immediately to communicate epidemiological intel-
ligence. The speed was astonishing to contemporaries. Peckham elegantly describes
the great modern acceleration of communication toward real time, the technologi-
cal globalization represented by telegraphy. It was certainly fast. But the limits of
telegraphy were perhaps less those of time, and more of its linear mode. Enabling
communication from sender to receiver, telegraphy multiplied only slowly. It had to
transfer and transform into a different medium to have a mass effect. Panic requires a
multiplier to really spread: word-of-mouth rumor, print media, radio, or as Nicholas
King suggests in his chapter, film.
If panic about disease has been about communication all along, paradigm shifts
in communication mean paradigm shifts in panic and its effects. Internet time is real
time,7 and the slowness of the old communication regime is only apparent because
of the new digital temporal regime. The gap between telegraphy and real time is now
apparent as very sizeable indeed. News with panic potential is instantly multiplied
the world over. Indeed, all the standard scholarly insights into how the Internet has
created a postmodern world apply tenfold to the nexus of panic and disease. The
digital world has revolutionized the links between communication, panic, and
disease in every possible way. The Internet can simply be used to compound the
effectiveness of health communication.8 It has offered new mechanisms for global

6. The logistics of information in a maritime world are nicely described in Cindy McCreery and Kirsten
McKenzie, “The Australian Colonies in a Maritime World,” in The Cambridge History of Australia:
Volume 1. Indigenous and Colonial Australia, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), 560–84.
7. Heejin Lee and Jonathan Liebenau, “Time and the Internet at the Turn of the Millennium,” Time &
Society, vol. 9, no. 1 (2000): 43–56.
8. Sylvia Wen-ying Chou et al., “Social Media Use in the United States: Implications for Health
Communication,” Journal of Medical Internet Research, vol. 11, no. 4 (2009): e48.
206 Alison Bashford

disease surveillance.9 Authorities now search for patterns of words whereas once they
searched for bodily symptoms. Alerts can be communicated in either contained ways,
as old-fashioned private correspondence—“intelligence”—or in ways that are public
beyond the imagining even of twentieth-century moderns; certainly beyond the
wildest dreams of the telegraphers. Intelligence can escape containment lines easily,
just as it always did: the “sabotage” of telegraph codes endures as hacking. But the
devastating implications are of a different scale altogether.
Perhaps the most important element of the new regime of communication is the
potential for authorities to be irrelevant to the entire process. The presence of disease,
or suspected disease, can be communicated instantly and by anybody, bypassing all
experts, and with little heed for verification or authorization. Social media is a kind
of new prose; an open-ended, multidirectional, un-centered medium, simultane-
ously highly individualized and mass-beyond-comprehension. The new digital world
arguably heralds a shift away from the dominance of images (that King observes in
his study of the “new” iconography of epidemics) and a return to the dominance
of words—text and texting. The digital world is in very real senses, a new world for
panic, disease, communication, and containment.
As the world now knows, after the Arab Spring, it is not the computer at all but the
smartphone that is the hardware-of-the-moment, and its effects are very real. Panic,
riot, and revolution have a long history; add social media, and media contagion is
the result. To a very considerable extent, the politics of a digital world have flattened
distinctions between the most powerful and least powerful, between East and West,
North and South, if not between the richest and poorest. As a contagion, social media
is both a weapon and an opportunity.
As David Arnold explains, efforts to manage, suspend, or neutralize panic can be
utterly confounded. Controlling measures are just as likely to unwittingly create panic.
This is perhaps just as true—perhaps more so—in the digital world. Interventions
intended to solve a crisis—the “over-hasty action of the state” as Arnold puts it—
might easily become accelerants to compound catastrophe. Anti-plague measures in
1896–97 India were themselves incitements toward panic and disorder. His chapter
suggests that panic is always unpredictable, perhaps beyond management, a risk
almost too difficult to calculate and predict. In the context of India, bubonic plague
created major public turmoil while influenza did not, even as mortality and morbid-
ity were on comparable scales. There are lessons, then, in the history of panic and
disease about how authorities might contain both, and in how the history of panic

9. See Lorna Weir and Eric Mykhalovskiy, “The Geopolitics of Global Public Health Surveillance in
the Twenty-First Century,” in Medicine at the Border: Disease, Globalization and Security, 1850 to the
Present, ed. Alison Bashford (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 560–84; Lorna Weir and Eric
Mykhalovskiy, Global Public Health Vigilance: Creating a World on Alert (New York: Routledge, 2010).
Panic’s Past and Global Futures 207

turns into the history of risk management, but might well exceed all management, as
the 2014 Ebola outbreaks show.
The spatial turn in the history of science is appropriately drawn into these chap-
ters and fused with the geographical sensibility that has long marked the history and
historiography of disease management.10 Panic always has a geography—it spreads
over place—just as epidemics of infectious disease do. When that place changes
from one polity to another, epidemic panics turn into international relations. This
has long been so, as João Rangel de Almeida shows here in his analysis of the 1851
International Sanitary Convention. Historians have tended to dismiss this elaborate
meeting between East and West as a failure—nothing was ratified—but Rangel de
Almeida shows the extensive groundwork laid, for better or worse, and built upon by
the next generation of international sanitary conventions. An early exercise in epide-
miological geopolitics, the Sanitary Convention established a health border of sorts,
between the East and the West, between the public health–conscious Europeans and
the negligent Ottomans. As far as public health was concerned, Ottoman rule was
deemed to be rogue, part of a suite of “weak states” that threatened the health of the
West.11
Syria was part of the Ottoman Empire in 1851 and thus part of the International
Sanitary Conference conversations. Indeed, it was close to core business because
Damascus was a major entrepôt for Mecca, and because the annual regional move-
ment of the Hajj was a major issue for the sanitary-minded Europeans. More than 160
years later, Syria, disease, and panic have returned to public prominence. This is again
about the East and the West, not least because discussion of chemical weapons has
raised the question of un/civilized warfare.12 Almost unavoidably, this is now framed
as the “clash of civilizations” between an Islamic and a non-Islamic (but implicitly
Christian) world.13 Chemical weapons were deemed uncivilized—formally—by the
League of Nations’ Geneva Protocol in 1925. But the history of chemical warfare and
the panic about it began as an intra-European event, not one between the West and
the Ottomans, or indeed any other part of the “East.” It was German deployment of
toxic substances on the Belgian fields of war in 1915 that sparked initial outrage, as
well as panic. Men were gassed invisibly, surreptitiously, and thus the unwritten rules
of (gentlemanly) warfare were broken. This was the threat to civilization, not least

10. Diarmid A. Finnegan, “The Spatial Turn: Geographical Approaches in the History of Science,” Journal
of the History of Biology, vol. 41, no. 2 (2008): 369–88.
11. See Patrick Zylberman, “Civilizing the State: Borders, Weak States and International Health in Modern
Europe,” in Medicine at the Border, 21–40.
12. Chris Godburn, “O’Donnell: ‘War Is the Breakdown of Civilization,’” MSNBC, September 10,
2013. Available at: http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/09/10/odonnell-war-is-the-breakdown-of-civilization/
(accessed September 17, 2014).
13. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1996).
208 Alison Bashford

because all sides in that war deployed poison gas. By the Cold War, it was less use of
chemical agents, than threatened use that incited panic, as the United States and the
USSR stockpiled and diversified their arsenals.
Chemical and biological warfare is perhaps the site at which panic and disease
come together most intensely. In the Syrian case, chemical weapons appear to have
been used by the government itself. More often, in the West, the threat is perceived
to be extra-governmental, inhabiting the unpredictable and opaque zones of terrorist
organizations. What is the best prophylactic? Information? Education? At least in
one instance, vaccination was thought to be a start, a public health intervention that
doubles as anti-bioterror: “vaccinate a city against panic.”14 Indeed, this particular
preventative intervention triplicates its effect: immunization against disease, immu-
nization against terror, and immunization against panic itself.
Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the dynamics of panic, disease, and
fear have shifted from an imperial axis of East-West to a neo-imperial axis of the
global North and South on the one hand, and to a US-centered “clash of civiliza-
tions” on the other. Fear—latent panic—was the powerful armory of the Cold War
and became so again in the so-called “war against terror.”15 This is post-imperial at
one level, but at another is a straightforward extension of older imperial logics. Panic
is raw, especially when attached to disease and death. It can also therefore be expedi-
ently directed and redirected, panicked people exploited in the process. There is thus
an ethics to panic and to attempts at its control. Notwithstanding the extraordinary
digital revolution in media and communication, the “making common” of ideas and
information that characterizes the twenty-first century, panic about disease remains
enmeshed in the dynamics of global power.

14. Thomas A. Class and Monica Schoch-Spana, “Bioterrorism and the People: How to Vaccinate a City
against Panic,” Clinical Infectious Diseases, vol. 34, no. 2 (2002): 217–23.
15. Curtis D. Malloy, “A History of Biological and Chemical Warfare and Terrorism,” Journal of Public
Health Management and Practice, vol. 6, no. 4 (2000): 30–38; Jonathan B. Tucker, War of Nerves:
Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006).
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Index

Abeel, David 46 anxiety (continued)

A-bomb 8 sovereignty 74; social 20 (see also
aborigines (Australian) 28. See also indig- “moral panic”)
enous people Arab Spring 206
Adelaide Hills 107 archives 1, 12
affect 6. See also emotions Arlington (Virginia) 155
Afghanistan 96, 156 Armed Forces Epidemiological Board (US)
Africa 24, 26, 27, 30, 31, 33, 34; panic over 171
African men’s assaults on white women Arnold, David 12, 14, 17, 18, 23, 36, 206
15, 24, 26, 29–31 (see also rape) arson 38, 40, 41
agoraphobia 14 Arthur Road Hospital (Bombay) 117, 122
AIDS (acquired immune deficiency Asia 4, 55, 61, 136, 144, 184, 187, 189;
syndrome) 23, 111, 131, 175, 184 immensity and diversity of 1
Al Qaeda 21, 156. See also terrorism Athenaeum Club 30
analogies 14, 16, 20; pathological 11, 14 atomic war 170, 173
Analytic Services Inc. 155 Auckland 95, 96, 97, 99, 101
Andrews Air Force Base (Virginia) 155 Auckland Weekly News (newspaper) 95
Annas, George 177 Auckland Weekly Register (newspaper) 95
anthrax 155, 176, 177, 185, 186 “aura” 120. See also Benjamin, Walter
anticolonial 127 Australasia 17, 88, 90, 93, 98, 99, 101, 105,
anti-panic 8, 133 109, 204
Antipodes 17, 105, 205 Australia 17, 28, 87–110, 183
anxiety 1, 4, 5, 15–21, 30, 37, 48, 55, 57, 85, Austria 65, 66, 71–73, 75, 76, 79, 81, 123
86, 133, 135, 164, 170–76, 187, 197–200, avian flu. See influenza
203; about fire 36, 37 (see also fire); Ayurveda 120
about India’s climate and people 87–92,
94, 98, 101,102, 105, 109; about sexual bacteria 33, 34, 194
assault 30; about the Oriental crowd 48; bacteriology 123, 136, 162
and colonial empire 1, 36, 37, 204; Bagehot, Walter 10, 11, 14
and panic 21, 15, 36, 55, 62, 91; and ballistic missiles 176
telegraph 18 (see also telegraph); Bankoff, Greg 38
chronic 204; confusion with fear 1, Barrett, Ronald 155
36, 55, 204; “epistemic anxiety” 12; Bashford, Alison 14, 20, 169
fictive causality of 204; of modern Batavia (Jakarta) 50, 55
“personhood” 7; over national Bayly, C. A. 21
230 Index

Belgium 79 Canton System 35, 38, 48, 49, 54; factories

Benjamin, Walter 120. See also “aura” 35–55
Bentley, Charles 121 Cantril, Hadley 157
biological warfare (BW). See biowarfare Cape Colony 23, 25
biopolitics 162 Cape Town 33
biosurveillance 57, 84 Carey, James W. 152
bioterrorism 19, 175; Tokyo subway sarin gas cartography 15, 188
attack (1995) 175. See also terrorism Cashmere (Kashmir) 106
biowarfare 19, 159, 171, 172, 203. See also Cassidy, James E. 166
chemical warfare Caucasus 32
Black Death 113, 120. See also plague causality 1, 204
Blake, John D. 166 census: of 1891 (Hong Kong) 1; of 1921
Blue Mountains (Australia) 107 (India) 124. See also Census Bureau
Bluff (New Zealand) 99 (US)
Blum, Alan 7, 15 Census Bureau (US) 162
Boldrewood, Rolf 108 Center for Strategic and International
Bombay (Mumbai) 33, 94, 113–26 Studies 155
bombs 173, 174 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Brandis, Dietrich 104 (CDC) 169, 170–72, 185, 186, 189
Bridgman, Elijah 50, 52, 53 Central Telegraph Department (London)
Briggs, Charles L. 153 131
Britain 1, 28, 55, 65–67, 69, 72, 75, 77, 79, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) 97, 145
90–95, 135, 138, 143, 144 Chan, Margaret 183
British Empire 3, 4, 15, 33, 34, 88, 109, 131, chapatis 2
140, 146, 147. See also Britain character 47, 49, 50, 122, 131, 140, 161
British Medical Journal (BMJ) 138, 139, 144 chemical warfare 176, 203, 207, 208. See also
British Raj 88, 93, 109. See also India biowarfare
Browne, Thomas Alexander. See Chernobyl disaster (1986) 20
Boldrewood, Rolf Chess, Caron 5
bubonic plague. See plague China 1, 3, 16, 33, 35–55, 108, 111, 137, 139,
Buckingham Palace 131 144–46, 150, 183, 184, 190, 204
Buddhism 42 China Mail (newspaper) 145, 149
Bush, George W. (President) 9, 177 Chinatown 158
Choksy, N. H. 122
cables. See telegraphic cables cholera 4, 13, 14, 17, 19, 57–86, 101, 111,
Cairo 81 114, 117, 123, 138, 143, 181, 190, 192,
Cairo (Illinois) 160 193, 196, 205
Calcutta Englishmen, The (newspaper) 91 Choudhury, Deep Kanta Lahiri 137
Calcutta (Kolkata) 33, 91, 92, 94, 113, 114, Christchurch (New Zealand) 100, 106, 109
117 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 155, 178
Canterbury (New Zealand) 87, 99, 100, 106 circulation 2, 32, 33, 63, 66, 67, 84, 116, 117,
Canton (Guangzhou) 2, 4, 8, 16, 35–55, 57, 128, 132
150, 151, 204, 205 Clarke, Lee 5, 12
Canton Press (newspaper) 35, 37, 45, 51, 53, “clash of civilizations” 207
54 classificatory logic 1
Canton Register (newspaper) 36, 39, 40, Cleghorn, Hugh 104
42–44, 47–49, 51–53
Index 231
climate 17, 81, 101, 185; in India (see India);
pathological nature of 17, 87, 88, 92–95,
98, 99, 106, 107, 109, 204
Cohen, Stanley 13, 30, 158. See also “moral
panic”
Cohn, Bernard S. 3
Cohong (Gonghang) 35, 54
Cold War, 7–9, 156, 159, 170, 173–75, 178,
188, 193, 208
“collective mind” 158. See also Le Bon,
Gustave
Collier’s (newspaper) 171, 176
colonial: insecurity 1; quasi 1, 16
Colonial Magazine and East India Review
(newspaper) 28
Colonial Office 147, 149, 150, 151, 152
colonies 27, 34, 55, 64, 93, 94, 97–101, 109,
144, 146, 152
Colorado 166
Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a
World Out of Balance, The (book) 184
Commission on Respiratory Diseases 171
Committee on Biological Warfare (US
Department of Defense) 172
commodities 9, 33, 126
communication 3, 23, 28, 33, 73, 136, 139,
163, 192, 196, 205; and contagion 14,
204; as “scar tissue” 152; communicabil-
ity 14; digital 5, 208; health 200, 205;
history of 69, 152–54, 204; in relation
to panic 3, 6, 7, 13, 15, 205; in relation
to rumor 18; long-distance 132, 142;
mass 188–91; (mis)communication in
producing panic 3; network 24, 143,
153; telegraphic 3, 131–54 (see also
telegraph)
conflagration 16, 35–55, 204. See also fire
Confucianism 42
Conner, Patrick 44
contagion 3, 14, 23, 135, 191, 192, 204; panic
as (see panic); social 142; social media
as 206; theory 156 (see also “affect
contagion”)
Contagion (movie) 155
counterinsurgency 1
Country and the City, The (book) 199. See
also Williams, Raymond
crisis 9, 17, 18, 32, 37, 112, 124, 126, 127,
131, 138, 142, 153, 158, 165, 169, 199,
206; and telegraphic communication
144, 146, 149; as “blind spot” 12;
cholera 17, 58; containment 181; defini-
tions of 11; financial 10, 20, 167, 203; in
relation to panic 11, 12, 15, 17, 20, 133;
medical model of 13, 14; nuclear 7, 8;
SARS 37 (see also SARS)
crowd 6, 14, 36, 45, 47, 48, 128, 163, 175; and
imitation (see also Le Bon, Gustave) 6,
14, 156; irrationality of 6, 12
Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, The
(book) 156. See also Le Bon, Gustave
Damascus 81, 207
Damien (Father) of Molokai 111
Danzig, Richard 176
Darjeeling 109
Das, Veena 2, 3, 14, 18
daubed-trees episode in India (1894) 2, 3
Davis, John 40, 42, 44, 50, 51
Deakin, Alfred 109
Deep South 160
Defense Against Weapons of Mass
Destruction Act (1996) 176
deity: disease as 125
Denison, Sir William Thomas 103
Dennett, Tyler 37
Des Voeux, George William 145, 147
de Winton, Sir Francis 133
Diamond Jubilee (1897) 131
digital 5, 205, 206; revolution 208
diplomacy 17, 26, 60, 86
disease 18, 21, 33, 81, 87, 90, 96, 111, 112,
120, 122, 129, 171, 178, 183, 189, 190,
192, 193, 198; as metaphor 13–15; con-
tagious 34, 162; cultural construction of
18; emerging 19, 21, 186–88; epidemic
66, 68, 78, 79, 83, 84; infectious 4, 19,
117, 131, 170, 181, 182, 186–89, 192,
197; invisible 182; mobility of 34; visu-
alizations of 181 (see also visualization)
dissection 116
Downing, Charles Toogood 37, 39, 40, 42,
47, 49, 51
232 Index
“dramaturgic form” 131, 141. See also
Rosenberg, Charles E.
Dunedin (New Zealand) 99
Durban 26
D’Urban, Sir Benjamin 25, 26
Dutch East Indies 1
earthquake 52, 58
East India Company (EIC) 38–41, 43–46, 51,
53, 94, 99
Ebola 20, 175, 187, 207
ecological exchange 88, 105,109
Economist, The (newspaper) 187
Egypt 79–84, 138
Eisenhower, Dwight D. (President) 171, 174
emergency 12, 113, 146, 155, 171, 173, 174,
177, 204
emigrants 28, 29
emotions 5–7, 14, 156; histories of 5 (see also
affect)
empire 1, 3, 4, 6–10, 13, 18, 20, 23, 27, 32–36,
50, 70, 90, 101, 132, 135, 137, 145,
146, 161, 169, 175, 200; and “network
interruptions’ 33; anxieties in 36 (see
also anxiety); boundary crossings and
27, 32; British (see British Empire);
continuities and discontinuities of 8;
edge of 135; essence of 23; historiog-
raphy of 36; “informal” 37; lost in 1,
36; “reterritorializing power” of 18;
twenty-first-century 200; varieties of
8–9; vulnerability of 137; webs of 34;
Western 9; Qing (see Qing)
enclave 38, 55, 102; as ring-fenced space of
certainty 1
environment 17, 52, 93, 98, 101–3, 107, 194,
198; Oriental 17, 204
Epidemic Diseases Act (India) 113
Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) 172
epidemics 10, 18, 19, 36, 37, 66, 69, 70, 85,
95, 112, 127, 131, 133, 143, 153, 162,
172, 194–97, 200, 206, 207; and panic
4, 57, 58, 111, 161, 167; construction of
19, 161; influenza 36, 111, 128 (see also
influenza); of cholera 68, 83, 114, 143
(see also cholera); of plague 127, 143
(see also plague); of smallpox 114 (see
epidemics (continued)
also smallpox); opportunities furnished
by 17, 58. See also disease
“epidemics of signification” 111, 137. See also
Treichler, Paula A.
epidemiology 158, 171; and geopolitics 207;
of plague 113
Eternal Fight, The (film) 182, 193, 190–200
Etherington, Norman 26, 30, 31
Eurasia 120
“factories.” See Canton System
Fall River Evening Herald (newspaper) 166
famine 10, 114, 116, 126, 127
fear 1, 15, 16, 17, 19, 21, 26, 36, 37, 58, 60, 65,
75, 85, 111, 113, 115, 120, 163, 173, 203,
204; and anxiety 171, 204; and panic
21, 23, 55, 83, 85, 86, 139, 158, 179, 183,
208; nuclear 7, 8, 170; of epidemic 168,
184, 187; of tropical climate on health
90, 99, 102, 105, 107; “primitive” 4–6,
135
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) 155
Federal Civil Defense Administration
(FCDA) 8, 170
Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA) 175
“Festival of the British Empire” (1897) 131
fevers 95–97, 102, 106
financial crash 5; of 1929 20; of 2007/8 20
fire 34; and fire prevention 38, 49; as meta-
phor 2, 16, 37, 166, 168, 173; in Canton
16, 35–55, 57, 204, 205; of Chicago
(1871) 43; of Edinburgh (1824) 43; of
Lisbon (1755) 52; of London (1666) 43,
52 (see also London)
First World War 164, 175, 207
“folk devils.” See “moral panic”
folk memories 113
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 155
Ford, Gerald (President) 169
Fort Bragg (North Carolina) 171
Fox, Paul 108
framing 69, 157, 200
France 32, 64–66, 68, 69, 71, 73, 75–79, 81,
83, 85, 123, 191, 192
Fraser’s Magazine (newspaper) 3
Index 233

Frierson, Cathy 38 Hazen, Robert 39

frontier 15, 23, 25, 26, 29, 34, 138, 161, 162 Headrick, Daniel 24, 152
Frontier Times, The (newspaper) 28 helplessness 38, 43, 45, 119, 121, 191
frustration 37, 38, 43, 45, 150 Hillemann, Ulrike 37
hill stations 4, 17, 88, 94, 101–9
Galen 14 Hindess, Barry 55
Galveston (Texas) 160 Hindu (newspaper), The 127
Gandhi, Mahatma 125–27 Hiroshima 170
Garrett, Laurie 183, 184, 187 Hitchcock, Alfred 191
gas masks 183, 185, 197, 203 HIV (human immunodeficiency virus). See
Geneva Protocol (1925) 207 AIDS
geography 196, 207; “disease geography” 181 Hollywood 155, 179, 188
Georgetown Journal of International Affairs Holmes, Sherlock 112
185 holocaust 21; nuclear 170, 171
Germany 123, 125, 191 homeland security 9
Gilliland, Jason 52 Hong Kong 1, 2, 4, 16, 18, 33, 40, 50, 52,
Gilman, Sander 161 111–13, 123, 135, 136, 144–53, 184
global markets 69, 137 Hongkong Daily Press (newspaper) 146, 152
Global Public Health Intelligence Network Hongkong Telegraph (newspaper) 136
(GPHIN) 184 Hong merchants 36, 41, 43, 46, 50–52, 55
Godlonton, Robert 25, 28, 29 Honigsbaum, Mark 140, 143, 144
governance 3, 9, 17, 62, 70, 73; colonial 115; Honolulu 190
imperial 9, 133, 136, international 17, hospitals 97, 116, 118, 137, 138, 141, 159,
66, 68, 79, 84 203; temporary 122, 124
Government Civil Hospital (Hong Kong) 2, house inspections 2, 117; in Bombay 115,
150 117
Grahamstown Journal (newspaper) 25, 26 humanitarian 25; endeavors in the Cape 25,
Great Depression, The 156; after 1873 10, 11; 26
1930s 167, 198 Humphries, Margaret 160
Greece 66, 79 Hunter, William C. 39, 51
Gregg, Judd 177 Hunter, William Wilson 6
grievances 54, 55 hurricane 155
Guam 190 hysteria 14, 15, 168, 172, 179
Guha, Ranajit 1, 24, 36, 91
Gulf Coast 155 iconography 19, 136, 181, 182, 189, 192–200,
206
H1N1 (see swine flu pandemic of 2009); and immigrants 34, 61, 100, 121, 160, 162, 195
1918 pandemic 119–22, 169 immunization 169, 208
hacking 206 imperialism 9, 37, 91, 109, 148, 153, 200;
hakims 118 US 8, 9; British 23, 37 (see also British
Haffkine, Waldemar 117 Empire)
Hajj. See Mecca India 2–4, 12, 13, 18, 21, 33, 36, 48, 58, 84,
Hamburg, Margaret 155 111–29, 136, 137, 145, 204; climate 17,
Harvey, David 8, 9 87, 88, 90–93, 96, 98, 101, 102, 105, 109,
Havelock (New Zealand) 100 204; government of 112, 113, 120, 121,
Hawke’s Bay 100 123, 126, 128
Hazen, Margaret 39 Indian Forester (newspaper) 102
234 Index

Indian Medical Gazette (IMG) 124 Kant, Immanuel 52

Indian Medical Service 123 Karwi. See Kirwee
Indian Research Fund Association 123 Kaukiainen, Yrjö 152
Indiana 176 Kelly, Robert E. 194
indigenous people 13, 17, 24, 25, 27, 34, 87, Kennedy, John F. (President) 174
96. See also aborigines Kentucky 176
infection 4, 14, 16, 37, 61, 62, 113, 131, 132, Killingray, David 116
135, 138, 139, 141, 143, 183, 196, 199; Kimberley (diamond mines) 30
chronic 204; emerging 184, 187; map Kingdom of Sardinia 66, 69, 73, 79, 85
133; metaphoric 15 Kingdom of the Two Sicilies 66
influenza 111, 181–84, 187, 206; avian Kipling, Rudyard 148
111; in India 12, 17, 18, 36, 111, 112, Kirwee (New Zealand) 100
116, 119–29; late twentieth-century Kitasato, Shibasaburō 149
pandemics of 4, 12, 18, 19, 111, 124, knowledge 1, 11–13, 15, 58, 66, 67, 84, 139,
135–44, 153, 159, 162, 166. See also 152, 191, 193; oppositional 8; uncertain
epidemics 3, 12
Inglis, Andrea 107 Koch, Tom 136, 192
inoculation 117, 121, 124, 178. See also Korean Air 183
vaccination Korea Times (newspaper) 183
insecurity 1, 16, 24 Koselleck, Reinhart 11, 14
Institute of Medicine (US) 177, 186, 187 Krell, Alan 43, 45
intelligence 2, 21, 132, 138, 140, 147, 148, Kuwait 156
172, 205, 206 Kwok A-Sing 147
International Sanitary Conference (1851) 17,
58, 66, 67, 83, 85, 207 laboratory 28, 33, 61, 137, 163, 192, 193;
Internet 5, 204–6 science 18, 131
“investigative modalities” 3. See also Cohn, Lancet 137, 139, 141, 169
Bernard S. Langmuir, Alexander D. 171, 174
Iraq 8, 156 Latour, Bruno 32, 33
Israel 203 League of Nations 207
Lebanon 203
Jackson (Mississippi) 160 Le Bon, Gustave 6, 14, 156
Jacksonville (Florida) 160 Lederberg, Joshua 16
Jallianwala Bagh massacre (1919) 126 leprosy 111
Japan 2, 176 Lester, Alan 4, 15
Jasanoff, Sheila 9 Lisbon 60, 149
Jazz Singer, The (film) 188 Lloyd’s List (newspaper) 152
Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Loch, Henry 108
Biodefense Strategies 155 Lombard Street. See global markets
Johns Hopkins Science Review (film) 172, London 28–30, 37, 45, 60, 65, 123, 131, 140,
173 141; the Fire of (1666) 43, 52
Johns Hopkins University 172 London Missionary Society 45
Jordan 20 London Stock Exchange 142
judicium 14 Lower East Side (New York) 162
Lowson, James 2, 150
kala-azar 123 Lübken, Uwe 38
Kansas 155 Lugard, Sir Frederick 149
Index 235
Mackinder, Sir Halford 10
Madras 103, 104, 125, 126
Maitland, Sir Peregrine 29
malaria 90, 95, 111, 123
Malaria Control in War Areas (MCWA) 189
Malone, R. H. 123
Manila 55, 136, 190
mapping. See maps
maps: and iconography of new infectious
threats 196, 197; and visualization of
disease 136; networks and 196; shaping
responses to epidemics 19; WHO and
183; world maps 192
markets 10, 57, 63, 69, 137, 198
masks 165, 183–85, 187, 197, 203
Massey, Doreen 27
McDougall, William 5, 6
Mecca 207
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) 203
Medhurst, Walter Henry 50
mediatization 143
medical geography 93, 96, 102
Mediterranean 61–66, 72, 73, 83, 84
Memphis (Tennessee) 160
metaphor 15, 16, 37, 62, 158
Mexico 168, 182
Mexico City 182–83
miasma 95, 102, 103, 105
Middle East 86, 113, 156, 203
migrant laborers 30, 31
migration 17, 18, 87–110, 112, 170, 183
militarism 8
Milne, William 50
mob 6, 17, 157, 160, 171, 175
Model State Emergency Health Powers Act
(MSEHPA) 21
modernity 6, 38, 193, 196, 198, 199; ambiva-
lence toward 19, 182, 199; “warping”
effects of 15 (see also Vidler, Anthony)
Molesky, Mark 52
“moral panic” 13, 15, 29, 34, 115, 158. See
also Cohen, Stanley
morbidity 95, 140, 163, 206
Morrison, Robert 35, 41, 44–46, 50
Morse, Hosea 39
mosquitoes 90, 162, 186, 190, 195
Muter, Elizabeth 101
“Mutiny.” See Uprising of 1857
Nagasaki 170
Nairobi 33
Nanee Tal (hill station) 106
Nanking (Nanjing), Treaty of 35
Napier (New Zealand) 100
Natal 23–31
National Academy of Sciences (NAS) 183
National Guard (US) 155
National Security Agency (NSA) 179
Nelson (New Zealand) 99
Netanyahu, Benjamin 203
network 4, 8, 18, 32, 34, 143, 196–98; and
globalization 10, 11, 21, 153, 184, 192;
as descriptive and analytic device 28,
32; iconography of 196, 197; interrup-
tion of 32, 33; invisible 196; migrant
labor 30; more-than-human 24, 32, 33,
61; social 185, 196; telegraphic 132, 137,
140; transnational 9, 11, 31
neuralgia 11, 14
neurasthenia 14
New Hampshire 177
New Orleans (Louisiana) 13, 162
newspapers 26, 28, 30, 34, 57, 62, 93, 96, 99,
116, 132, 135, 136, 140, 142, 148, 183,
194
Newsweek (newspaper) 183, 185, 185, 187
New York 21, 39, 41, 48, 168, 176, 186
New York City Department of Health 16, 168
New York Times Magazine. See New York
Times
New York Times (newspaper) 8, 168, 169, 177
New Yorker, The (newspaper) 186
New Zealand 4, 17, 87–110
New Zealand Waste Lands Act (1858) 99
Nickles, David Paull 147
Non-Cooperation Movement 127
North Island (New Zealand) 97, 99
nuclear 7, 8, 20, 156, 170, 173–76;
Fukushima Daiichi disaster (2011) 20
Nunn, Sam 155
Nye, Gideon 37
Oklahoma 155, 176
Ootacamund (Utakamand) 104
236 Index
Operation Alert 173, 174
Operation Dark Winter 155, 156
Opium. See pre–Opium War
Oppenheimer, Robert J. 173
opportunity: biowarfare as 172; fire as 52;
International Sanitary Conference as
57, 66; panic as 178 (see also panic);
plague as 115; “social drama” and 158;
social media as 206; Uprising of 1857
as 93
Oriental 6, 17, 48, 60, 79, 204
Ostherr, Kirsten 13
Ottoman Empire 57–86, 207
Pall Mall Gazette (newspaper) 141, 142
pandemic 155
panic: as chronic anxiety 204; as communi-
cation 204; as device 12; as fear of lives
at risk 23; as hysteria 15; as modern
6–7, 14, 15, 135; as neuralgia 11, 14; as
“primitive” 5–6; as the diffusion and
amplification of small-scale events 33;
association with the Greek god Pan 6;
collective 4, 5, 12, 157, 197; colonial 4,
8, 15, 2, 37; compounded nature of 12,
13, 17, 153; contagious properties of 2,
10–11, 17, 204; controlled 16; emplace-
ment of 4; history of 157–58; “informa-
tion panics” 88, 91 (see also Bayly, C.
A.); market 10, 204; mass phenomenon
versus individual event 167; memory of
204; monger 169; “myth of ” 157; native
24; non-panic 16; of 1873 10; postco-
lonial 8, 15, 37; prehistory of 15; public
health 169; scales of 16; virtual 204
“panic dramas” 19, 159, 162, 163, 167–69,
173, 175, 178, 181
Panic in the Streets (movie) 13
Park, Robert E. 163
pathogenicity. See pathogens
pathogens 19, 172, 187, 188, 195, 200
Payton, Edward 100
Peckham, Robert 18, 23, 37, 157, 181, 205
Pender, Sir John 143, 45
Pennsylvania 175
Pentagon 155, 176
Peterson, Val 171, 176
Pfeiffer, Richard 139
Philadelphia Inquirer (newspaper) 165
Phillips, Howard 116
Pietermaritzburg (KwaZulu-Natal) 26, 27
placards 1–3
plague 2, 4, 13, 17, 36, 62, 81, 82, 111–29,
136, 137, 143, 148–53, 155, 159, 191,
193; bubonic 12, 16, 18, 33, 111, 112,
127, 135, 144, 151, 163, 206; pneumonic
13
Plague Commission 123
Plague Research Committee (Bombay)
123
plants 90, 105, 106, 108, 109
pneumonic plague. See plague
policymakers 4, 5, 157, 197
polio 167
polygamy 24, 30
Poona 117
Portugal 52, 66, 69, 71
Post Office Department (Washington DC)
160
Prendergast, Robert Keating 96, 97
pre–Opium War 4, 16, 37, 48, 55, 57
preparedness 137, 155, 174–77
press 30, 45, 57, 116, 123, 128, 140, 141, 144,
146, 149. See also newspapers
Preston, Richard 187
Progressive Era 162
prophylactics 63, 117, 123, 208
Prussia 79
psychopathologies 6, 14
public health 4, 16, 61, 66, 79, 81, 83, 85,
114, 118, 129, 133, 163, 167, 175, 179,
187, 207; action 170; and consequences
of globalization 185; authorities
122; education 162; emergency 177;
epidemiologically based 18; event 136;
experts 113, 115, 122, 142; films 182,
188; governance 68, 84; impact 186;
institution-building 161, 162; institu-
tions 188, 189; international regulation
of 65; interventions 13, 17, 58, 68,
164, 208; legislation 177; literature
172; measures 102, 164; officials 127,
142, 155; Ottoman 58; politics of 174;
preparedness 177; prevention 200;
Index 237

public health (continued) rumors 18; as panic 204; as transformation

responses 18, 183; school 177; threat to of language 14; conceived to spread 14.
119, 164; tool 142, 181 See also Das, Veena
Punjab 87, 117, 118, 120, 123 Russia 32, 38, 66, 69–71, 79, 123, 156. See
also USSR
Qing 35, 144
Quarantelli, Enrico 4 sabotage 137, 172, 206
quarantine 4, 13, 17, 57–86, 141, 160, 162, Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) 136, 145
178, 183, 197 Salisbury, Lord 141
Queen Adelaide Province 25, 29 “sampling device” 135. See also Rosenberg,
quinine 24 Charles E.
San Francisco 163, 190
race 20, 30, 90, 91, 195; interracial sex 15; sanatoria 92, 94, 95, 101, 109
racial purity 91 Sand, Jordan 38
radiological incidents 175 sarin. See bioterrorism
Rai, Rajesh 105 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome)
railways 9, 18, 33, 114, 132, 138–42, 145, 152; 37, 111, 158, 184–87, 193
station 115, 121 Science (newspaper) 177
Rand, W. C. 117 Second World War 6, 16, 161, 188–90
Ranikhet (Uttarakhand) 104 securitization 8
rape 15, 24, 26, 29, 30, 31; and panic 24, 29, Sedgwick, William 162
30, 31; scare of 30, 31 “sentinel” 137, 138, 196
Reagan, Ronald (President) 169 September 11, 2001 (9/11 terror attacks) 8,
Reed, Walter 162 21, 155
Reid, Gilbert 146 Shepstone, Theophilus 31
Reuters, Julius 140, 146, 148 Shinrikyo, Aum 175. See also bioterrorism
Reuters (news agency) 140, 146, 148, 149 shocks 17, 57
revolution 105, 109, 206; imaginative 153; in Shreveport (Louisiana) 159
communication 152 (see also digital); signs 3, 88
industrial 192 Simla 101, 106, 108
Rhodes, Cecil 30 Sinclair, Andrew 99
riot 6, 18, 121, 206; food 127; political 161 Singapore 145, 184
Ripon, Lord (George Robinson) 150, 151 Sioux Falls (South Dakota) 174
risk 23, 38, 39, 42, 55, 58, 67, 82, 85, 111, 117, slave 25, 34, 67, 80
169, 178, 179, 186, 188, 195, 199, 205, smallpox 16, 19, 114, 117, 155, 156, 162, 168,
206; management 207; “risk society” 20; 169, 177, 178, 190
telegraph as amplifier of 142 Smart, Alan 52
Robinson, Sir William 2, 150–52 smartphone 206
Roitman, Janet 11 Smith, Neil 196
Roman Empire 14, 77 Snowden, Edward 178
Rose, Sir Hugh 91 social actors 158
Rosenberg, Charles E. 131, 135, 153 “social distancing” 164
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 52 “social drama” 19, 158, 178
Rowlatt Bills (1919) 125 social media 206
Royal Army Medical Corps 114 soldiers 87, 91, 92, 94, 96, 99, 109, 121
Rudé, George 12, 128 South African War 33
South Australian Register (newspaper) 107
238 Index
South Island (New Zealand) 100, 106
space; “panic space” 7; social space 7
Spain 65, 66, 69, 75, 77, 85
Spanish Flu 164, 167, 168. See also influenza
“spatial turn” 23, 27, 207
steamships 24, 132, 141, 145, 152, 205
stigmatization 158
Stirling, Sir James 98
Stockenström, Andries 26, 29
Stoler, Ann Laura 12
Story of New Zealand, The (book) 96–97
St. Paul’s Cathedral 131
St. Petersburg 140
subcontinent. See India
Suez 94
swine flu; 2009 pandemic 19, 20, 181–83,
186, 187, 195; outbreak of 1976 169
Swyngedouw, Erik 196
syphilis 111
Syria 80, 83, 207, 208; conflict in 203, 204,
207, 208
Taoism 42
Tarde, Gabriel 6
Tasmania 94–96, 100
technologies 4, 7, 9, 18, 24; digital communi-
cation 5; of visualization 136
telegraph: telegrams 145, 147–53, 159,
160; telegraphic cables 18, 24, 69, 136,
138, 140, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 205;
telegraphic speech 18; wires 144. See
also technologies
Telegraphic Messages Copyright Ordinance
(1894) 148
telegraphy. See telegraph
Tennessee 176
terror 28, 40, 50, 57, 58, 111, 116, 135, 160,
193, 208; nuclear 8; politicization of
174; space of 26. See also terrorism and
bioterrorism
terrorism 21, 155, 175, 176, 177, 188;
Oklahoma City bombing (1995). See
also bioterrorism
Third Plague Pandemic 135, 144
Thirty-Nine Steps, The (movie) 191
Thompson, E. P. 12, 128
Thomson, Arthur Saunders 96, 97
Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania) 175
Time (newspaper) 187
Times of Israel, The (newspaper) 203
Times, The [London] (newspaper) 28, 29,
140, 144, 146, 148, 149
Tinseltown. See Hollywood
Tomorrow (novel) 170
topography 4, 93
tornado 155
trade 29, 32, 62, 65, 69, 80, 83, 170, 188; in
Canton (see Canton System); in Hong
Kong 136, 144, 145; Mediterranean
trade route 84; slave trade 25
transcolonial 3, 90
Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing) 35
tree-planting 102–6
Treichler, Paula A. 133
troops 17, 57, 87–110, 119, 156
tropical climate 17, 87, 90
tropical medicine 161
Truman Doctrine 16
tuberculosis 111, 123, 127, 189
Turkey 79, 81, 84, 123. See also Ottoman
Empire
Turner, Victor 19, 158, 159, 160, 178, 181.
See also “social drama”
typhoid 97, 106
Unani 120
Unani-tibb. See Unani
uncertainty 1, 3, 12, 20, 24, 60, 75, 140, 178
UNESCO (United Nation’s Educational,
Scientific, and Cultural Organization)
190
Ungar, Sheldon 20
United States (USA) 6, 8, 9, 16, 161, 164, 172,
173, 175, 183, 185, 189, 190, 203, 208
Uprising of 1857 (India) 14, 17, 21, 87–91,
97, 100, 109 114
urbanization 6, 192
US Public Health Service (USPHS) 182, 189,
190
USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics)
156, 176, 208
Uttar Pradesh 100
Index 239

vaccination 117, 168, 176, 177; as anti- Weir, T. S. 115

bioterror 208; mass 168, 169, 178 (see Welles, Orson 157
also swine flu) Wellington 97, 99, 191
vaidyas 118 Wellington Independent, The (newspaper) 97
Van Dyke, Paul 41, 51 West Nile virus 186, 187
vectors 19, 186, 193, 195–98 Whampoa (Huangpu) 38, 43
Venice 63, 113 White, Luise 24
Vesey, George (Captain) 2 White, Norman F. 124, 125
Vicksburg (Mississippi) 160 Williams, Raymond 199
Vidler, Anthony 6 Willingdon, Lord (Freeman-Thomas) 126
Vienna Stock Exchange 10 Wilson, Sir John Cracroft 106
Vietnam (war) 175 World Trade Center 155
Virginia 155 World War Z (movie) 155
virus 123, 131, 139, 158, 169, 182, 182, 187, Wragge, Clement 107, 108
193, 194 Wren, Sir Christopher 52
visuality 13, 19, 28, 136, 181–82, 184, 186, Wylie, Philip 170
189, 192, 193, 194–200, 197, 200
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 52 Xhosa 25, 26, 28, 29

Wagner, Kim A. 36, 91 yellow fever 9, 19, 65, 85, 155, 159–62, 181,
Wald, Priscilla 16 190, 195, 196
War of the Worlds, The (novel) 157 Yellow Jack. See yellow fever
War on Terror 9, 159, 170, 178. See also Young India (newspaper) 126, 127
Bush, George W.
“warping.” See modernity zombie 155
Weather Channel 155 Zoological Gardens (London) 37
Weinstein, Israel 16, 168