Nations must be defended: public health, enmity and immunity in Katherine Mayo’s Mother India

This essay explores repressed hostility and punitive fantasies in the discourse of international health, using Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927). Multiple tendencies in interwar thinking converge in Mayo’s book, making it a veritable archive of major, minor and emergent forces, including those shaping the phenomenon of ‘international health’ post-Versailles. Mother India provides a unique opportunity to explore how progressive principles of international public health tend to obscure a ‘minor’ and forgettable yet disturbing truth: the discourse on life and health can ‘safely’ harbour an alternative politics and poetics of enmity. Spotlighting the way international health interventions, centrally shaped by USA, operated across multiple levels of governance, the essay locates the significant detail of Mayo’s representation of India as ‘world-menace’. Propelled by the logic of enmity, her shaming portrait of a dysgenic Hindu India justifying emergency international intervention resonates with a strand of interwar conservatism given theoretical expression in the writings of Mayo’s contemporary, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt’s animosity towards political liberalism helps identify Mother India’s vision of imperial sovereignty as a curious antiliberal, American iteration of the logic of enmity in extra-European space and in the ‘humane’ domain of health. Biologising the discourse of juridical-political maturity at a time when Indian nationalism’s organised challenge to Empire could not be gainsaid, Mother India urges a re-imagination of the political field as a battlefield where ‘the enemy’, construed as a problem of health, will kill. Building a case for continued imperial domination in the name of global health and immunity, the book’s humiliating representation of colonial bodily habits, habitations and contagions aimed to undermine liberal imperialism, internationalism and Indian nationalism, all increasingly vocal after World War I.

John Stuart Mill and the liberal idea of Canada

The writer and politician John Stuart Mill played an important role in the two greatest constitutional moments of nineteenth-century Canada: he publicly supported Lord Durham’s 1838 report on Canada and he voted for the British North American Act (1867) that formed the Dominion of Canada. Mill had a part, in his own mind an important part, in Canada’s evolution from colony to self-governing dominion. I argue that his attitude to Canada was broadly consistent across these three decades and was consistent with his principled defence of liberal imperialism. But it was complicated by Mill’s relatively low opinion of the French Canadians who, he thought, lagged behind the rest of Canada in their development. That is why Mill supported Durham’s recommendation that they be assimilated into the English-speaking mainstream. I conclude that French Canada exposed the limits of Mill’s form of liberalism, which gave priority to the ‘civilising’ imperative over cultural diversity. And it remains questionable just how capacious Millian liberalism really is in accommodating cultural diversity.

The Semiperipheral Hand

This chapter points out that economic globalization, free trade, and liberal imperialism gave rise to an expanding elite of experts—managerial, scientific, and scribal professionals—during the nineteenth century. This new class of worldwide-circulating service professionals was involved in establishing new industries, setting international standards and measures, managing new markets, and surveilling and controlling land and labor across the Global South. With backgrounds ranging from the petty bourgeoisies to financially independent bourgeois elites, this caste was characterized by mobility and middle-class lifestyles. The global rise of capitalism thus produced new global professional groups. These, in turn, formed mobile bourgeois communities.

The Problem of Liberal Empire Reconsidered

This review essay situates Christopher Taylor’s Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism (2018) in the context of the two-decade-long debate about the emergence of a liberal imperialism during the nineteenth century. Through an examination of the political economy of emancipation in the British West Indies, Taylor recasts the problem of liberal imperialism by decentering its justificatory discourses in the metropole to examine its practical effects in the colonies. In this turn, he provides an important and missing “materialization” of liberal empire that makes the deep connections between free trade and freeing slaves legible. The practical and theoretical coincidence of these nineteenth-century developments as well as Taylor’s reconstruction of a West Indian tradition of political economy provide a new way of conceptualizing colonial economic violence elaborated as the product of a neglectful empire. It is in this tradition of critiquing and resisting a neglectful empire that we find critical and normative resources to think beyond the terms of our own entrapments within the terms of liberal political economy.

Introduction

The introduction outlines the core focus of the book, the Kolonialdeutsche (Colonial Germans): officials and settlers who had invested substantial time and money in German imperialism. The book will examine the difficulties this diverse group of men and women encountered adjusting to their new circumstances, in Weimar Germany or in the new mandates, as they situated their notions of group identity between colonizers and colonial subjects in a world of empires that were not their own. The introduction outlines the temporal scope of the book, starting with the Treaty of Versailles and ending the in-depth analysis in 1933. The epilogue looks into the Nazi era and beyond. The author highlights the importance of Colonial German involvement in such diplomatic flashpoints as the Naturalization Controversy in South African-administered Southwest Africa, and German participation in the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) from 1927 to 1933, and the participation of one of Germany’s former colonial governors in the League of Nations’ commission sent to assess the Manchurian Crisis between China and Japan. The introduction also illustrates the contributions this book makes: revising standard historical portrayals of the League of Nations’ form of international governance, German participation in the League, the role of interest groups in international diplomacy, and liberal imperialism. In analyzing Colonial German investment and participation in interwar internationalism, the book also challenges the idea of a direct continuity between Germany’s colonial period and the Nazi era.