The making of a colonial disease in the eighteenth century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Snelders
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Colonial Medicine ◽  
Slave Society ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Dutch Colonial ◽  
Labour Management

Leprosy became a visible problem among African slaves in Suriname in the 1750s, and seemed to threaten to return to Europe. This chapter argues that, driven by the needs and interest of Surinamese slave society and economy, Dutch colonial medicine framed the disease with negative connotations: originating among slaves in Africa, caused by unhealthy living conditions, and related to disreputable sexual morals - a danger to European dominance. The sufferers of the disease who threatened this dominance had a supposedly inferior racial and/or social status. By the end of the century, the solution was to compulsorily segregate and isolate them, and leave them to their fate. Leprosy management became an important aspect of slave labour management in the colony.

NOBILES PAUPERES: VILNIAUS MISIONIERIŲ ŠPITOLĖS GLOBOTINIAI XVIII A.

2018 ◽  
pp. 58-72
Author(s):  
Martynas Jakulis
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Status ◽  
First Year ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Mission Hospital ◽  
Charity Hospital ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
Charitable Institution ◽  
The City ◽  
Qualitative Characteristics

In 1695, Jan Teofil Plater and his wife Aleksandra founded a hospital for six impoverished nobles in Vilnius. Situated near the newly built church of the Ascension and the convent of the Congregation of Mission in the Subocz suburb beyond the city walls, this hospital was the first and, until the end of the eighteenth century, the only charitable institution providing care for individuals of particular social status. The article, based on the hospital’s registry book and other sources, examines the quantitative, as well as qualitative characteristics of the institution’s clientele, such as its fluctuations in size, its social composition, and the causes of its inmates’ impoverishment. The research revealed that, despite the demand for care, the overseers managed to maintain a stable number of inmates, rarely admitting more than one or two persons every year, and thus ensuring a steady operation of the hospital (see table 1). However, in contrast with other charitable institutions in Vilnius, the clientele of the Congregation of Mission hospital changed frequently because of expulsions (39.6 percent of all cases) and inmates leaving the hospital on their own initiative (20.1 percent) already in the first year of their stay. The mortality of inmates (27.8 percent) affected the size and turnover of the clientele to a much lesser extent than observed in other hospitals. Although there are no reliable data on the inmates’ age and health, such statistics show that they probably were younger and healthier than the clients of other charitable institutions in Vilnius. Moreover, the Congregation of Mission hospital’s inmates differed from the clients of other institutions in respect of social composition. Impoverished petty nobles, originating mainly from the districts of Lida and Oszmiana, constituted the majority (56.25 percent) of the hospital’s inmates whose social status is noted in the registry book (62.5 percent). The nobles became clients of the Congregation of Mission hospital either because of old age, disability, as well as other accidental causes, or because of increased social vulnerability outside mutual aid networks, comprised of family members, kin or neighbours. The article argues that the foundation of a hospital designated to provide care primarily for impoverished nobles shows that the poverty of nobles was recognized by contemporaries as a social problem that should be tackled. Keywords: poverty, charity, hospital, the Congregation of Mission, Vilnius, nobles, eighteenth century.

Colonial medicine and folk beliefs in the modern era

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Snelders
Keyword(s):  
Folk Medicine ◽  
Tropical Medicine ◽  
Western Science ◽  
Colonial Medicine ◽  
Conceptual Level ◽  
Biomedical Knowledge ◽  
Folk Beliefs ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Dutch Colonial

The on-going adherence of the Afro-Surinamese and of new British Indian and Javanese migrants to their own folk beliefs and practices necessitated a response from Dutch colonial medicine. If modern leprosy politics were to succeed, some degree of cooperation and compliance from the population was necessary. Folk beliefs were not seen as a possible alternative to Western science and medicine on a conceptual level; however, Dutch colonial medicine found elements in folk beliefs useful for its own health propaganda and communication, while at the same time emphatically rejecting the folk medicine practitioners’ worldview underlying these beliefs. In this sense Dutch colonial medicine did not limit itself to the interventions from above based on biomedical knowledge that historians have found typical of ‘Imperial Tropical Medicine’, but actively sought the compliance of the population.

Sheep, Pastures, and Demography in Australia

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Beinart ◽  
Lotte Hughes
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Aboriginal People ◽  
Social Geography ◽  
Major Product ◽  
Resource Exploitation ◽  
British Colony ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Natural Resource Exploitation

Succeeding phases of British economic growth prompted strikingly different imperatives for expansion, for natural resource exploitation, and for the social organization of extra-European production. In the eighteenth century, sugar, African slaves, and shipping in the Atlantic world provided one major dynamic of empire. But in the nineteenth century, antipodean settlement and trade, especially that resulting from expanding settler pastoral frontiers, was responsible for some of the most dramatic social and environmental transformations. Plantations occupied relatively little space in the new social geography of world production. By contrast, commercial pastoralism, which took root most energetically in the temperate and semi-arid regions of the newly conquered world, was land-hungry but relatively light in its demands for labour. The Spanish Empire based in Mexico can be considered a forerunner. By the 1580s, within fifty years of their introduction, there were an estimated 4.5 million merino sheep in the Mexican highlands. The livestock economy, incorporating cattle as well as sheep, spread northwards through Mexico to what became California by the eighteenth century. Settler intrusions followed in the vast landmasses of southern Latin America, southern Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Australia was one of the last-invaded of these territories, and, in respect of the issues that we are exploring, was in some senses distinctive. Unlike Canada and South Africa, there was no long, slow period of trade and interaction with the indigenous population; like the Caribbean, the Aboriginal people were quickly displaced by disease and conquest. The relative scale of the pastoral economy was greater than in any other British colony. Supply of meat and dairy products to rapidly growing ports and urban centres was one priority for livestock farmers. Cattle ranching remained a major feature of livestock production in Australia. Bullock-carts, not dissimilar to South African ox-wagons, were essential for Australian transport up to the 1870s. But for well over a century, from the 1820s to the 1950s and beyond, sheep flooded the southern lands. Although mutton became a significant export from New Zealand and South America, wool was probably the major product of these pastoral hinterlands—and a key focus of production in Australia and South Africa. The growth in antipodean sheep numbers was staggering.

Stepping Up the Degrees of Resistance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Eugene Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The South ◽  
Slave Society ◽  
Work Routines ◽  
Work Stoppages

This chapter looks at how on the plantations and farms of nineteenth-century Florida, enslaved people, like their counterparts throughout the South, rarely rose up in rebellion against their masters. In their daily dissidence, slaves—as Gerald W. Mullin noted for eighteenth-century slaves in Virginia—more commonly used inward or non-threatening forms of rebellion that did not undermine Florida′s slave society in any profound manner. These could involve work stoppages and feigned illnesses, among other things. Yet, enslaved Florida blacks often did not bite their tongues when expressing thoughts about their work routines. These tactics could have proven self-destructive and even fatal in a violent Florida frontier area, but slaves still used these token forms of rebellion to wrest concessions from their masters as they strove to create, preserve, and protect family and community.

Business of Fiction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael F. Suarez
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Population Growth ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Book History ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Luxury Products

The eighteenth century witnessed a remarkable proliferation of print, with annual publications in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland increasing by more than 350 per cent from the first decade to the last. This chapter relates the growth in novel publishing between 1695 and 1774 to population growth and the growth in literacy. Recent research links the book trade keeping prices artificially high to readers’ consumption of novels as luxury products and evidence of social status. This trend is considered, along with remuneration for authors; the market for fiction; Irish reprints; continuations and spin-offs; abridgements and serializations; translations; circulating libraries; and the significance of book history to understanding the emergence and development of the novel.

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