Epidemics, Empire, and Environments

Throughout the nineteenth century, cholera was a global scourge against human populations. Practitioners had little success in mitigating the symptoms of the disease, and its causes and eradication were bitterly disputed. What experts did agree on was that the environment played a crucial role in the sites where outbreaks occurred. In this book, Michael Zeheter offers a probing case study of the environmental changes made to fight cholera in two markedly different British colonies: Madras India, and Quebec City, Canada.

As a white settlement, Quebec aimed to emulate British precedent and develop similar institutions that allowed authorities to prevent cholera by imposing quarantines and render comprehensive change to the urban environment through sanitary improvements. In Madras, however, the provincial government sought to exploit the colony for profit and was reluctant to commit its resources to measures against cholera that would alienate the city’s inhabitants. It was only in 1857, after concern rose in Britain over the health of its troops in India, that a mission of sanitary improvement was begun. As Zheter shows, complex political, racial, and economic factors came to bear on the reshaping of each colony's environment, and the urgency placed on disease control.

“Michael Zeheter does an excellent job of situating cholera within an important international context of the time by comparing the disease’s impact on two very different British colonial urban spaces.”

—Myron Echenberg, author of Africa in the Time of Cholera: A History of Pandemics from 1817 to the Present

Michael Zeheter is a scientific assistant in the department of modern history at the University of Trier.