Disabled empire: race, rehabilitation, and the politics of healing non-white colonial soldiers, 1914-1940

The First World War and its aftermath gave birth to the trauma industry – an intellectual, political, and institutional response to the widespread experiences of disability and “shell shock” among veterans. “Disabled Empire” follows several million non-white colonial subjects from across the British Empire who fought in the War, and their experience of grievous injury, debility, and trauma. Through a comparative analysis of South Asian and West Indian servicemen, it explains how race shaped the character and goals of bodily and psychological treatments that the British wartime and post-war state offered its non-white veterans. It also analyzes the impact non-white veterans had on how white British psychologists, orthopaedists, hospital staff, policy makers and administrators understood trauma. It reveals how colonial subjects’ service in WWI destabilized long-standing ideologies about masculinity and racial difference, even as it produced an uneven system of care. Throughout the Great War, British officials struggled to resolve the paradox of enacting the Empire’s mission to restore the health of crucial manpower reserves of non-white soldiers, while reinforcing colonial gendered and racial hierarchies. Imperial constructions of race, from the fearless South Asian ‘martial races’ to the hypersexualized black masculinity of West Indians, shaped the kind of wartime service Indian and Afro-Caribbean soldiers were allowed to perform and the treatment of their psychological and physical injuries. Whether in the form of ethnic-specific diets and rations, the provision of impractical prosthetics, or discounting trauma through racialized stigmas, colonial soldiers navigated a health system whose technologies, diagnostics, and treatments denied them the same quality and level of care as their white counterparts. Yet White British Tommies’, Indian Sepoys’, and West Indian labour corps workers’ concurrent experiences of disease, disability, and trauma disrupted ideologies about colonial difference. Drawing on archives from the United Kingdom, Jamaica, and India, the thesis’s transcolonial framework demonstrates how racial ideologies simultaneously played into and were subverted by the process of offering healthcare to non-white colonial subjects. It demonstrates the war’s lasting effects on the policies and practices of healthcare and welfare throughout the Empire.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical referencesby Hilary R. Buxto