Public health and poor relief in the british mediterranean 1800-1860

British colonial administration of the Ionian Islands and Malta during the first sixty years or so of the nineteenth century was distinguished by its massive public charity institutions and poor-relief provisions. This paper sets out to illustrate how the colonial state employed these charitable structures to define, monitor and regulate the native social body and simultaneously to foster consent from the common people. For this reason a systematic inquiry into the economic, social and political functions of the key public charitable establishments operating within the distinctive context of these British-controlled islands is provided. This structured analysis includes an explanation of the colonial state’s strategy to keep its subject peoples compliant in order to maintain in functioning order the naval-military and trade facilities forged in each of these strategic zones. Concurrently, it is demonstrated that this specific colonial milieu gave rise to a negotiated collaborative alliance between the British authorities and the dominant native elites and their power institutions. Subsequent cooperation with colonial rule was provided by local elites on condition that the long-established social class hierarchy and the traditional paternalist style of government were maintained. It is therefore shown that it was the continued deployment of the public charitable establishments by this collaborative governing body that moulded a distinct “paternal benevolent” ideology and specific form of administration. On similar lines, it will be argued that the colonial state used public health and poor-relief institutions to extend its regulation, discipline and policing over growing sectors of the poor, both within the parameters of its port-based urban centres and eventually in the remoter areas under its formal jurisdiction, in the Ionian islands and Maltese archipelago.peer-reviewe