London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

This presentation examines of how plantation slavery in the British Caribbean led to the emergence of a distinctive configuration of public health in the Atlantic World. Its target audience are students and staff interested in the colonial histories of public health, the broader historical intersections between race, health, and colonialism, and decolonization.

This paper examines the entanglement of slavery, medicine, health, governance and the plantation system in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean. Through a re-appraisement of the role of the state and medical expertise in this period, the writer hopes to advance the decolonization of the history of public health by reframing its origins chronologically, geographically, and ideologically. Previously, scholars have associated the growth of public health with the English sanitary reform movement of the 1830s and 1840s, locating its emergence in the British metropole and in the evolution of social investigation, epidemiology, prominent medical institutions such as public hospitals and university medical faculty, and philanthropic reform. By contrast, the writer is arguing here for a distinctly different model of public health as it arose in the Atlantic World.  In this environment, a distinct configuration of public health emerged both conceptually and legislatively. Rather than focusing specifically on the prevention of disease, its primary aim was to maintain, physically and psychologically, productive and reproductive African bodies. 

These efforts, the writer argues, can still be defined as "public health" for several reasons. Firstly, the monitoring and governance of this cohort became an increasingly central aspect of state activity in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth century.  Secondly, in both public discourse and legislation, the productivity and reproductivity of African slaves were defined as matters of vital public importance. And lastly, we can define this as public health because measures to monitor and address the physical health of these populations were enshrined in law and, eventually, enmeshed in an increasingly extensive apparatus of official personnel, institutions, and practices. 

Speaker

Dr Sascha Auerbach

Sascha Auerbach is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Nottingham, specializing in the histories of race, the state, and imperialism in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. His current research seeks to decentre the origins of public health in the British World through an examination of plantation slavery. Sascha also serves as director for the Nottingham Institute for the Study of Slavery (ISOS).

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