A few weeks ago I posted a blog about some official photographs taken of British measures to combat the plague in Burma taken during 1906. These images showed British doctors administering vaccinations and checking patients’ symptoms. What they omitted were the more coercive and invasive aspects of anti-plague measures, such as the dismantling and disinfecting…
Category: Research
Burmese Jugglers in Imperial Britain
Historians of empire have been increasingly interested in the movement of people around the globe. During the nineteenth century, this was much more than just Brits going off to distant parts. Colonized peoples visited other colonies, as well as Britain itself, occasionally settling, and individuals of diverse backgrounds traveled between, through, and across different empires….
Plague and Photography in Colonial Burma
I recently stumbled across some fascinating photographs of colonial measures taken to arrest the spread of bubonic plague in Mandalay in 1906 through the online archive of medical history images available through the Wellcome Trust, London. These photographs show Burmese residents apparently willingly submitting themselves to British medicine. In the top photo a group are…
Burma’s Anti-Colonial Imperialist
No, not George Orwell. And no, (for those more familiar with Southeast Asian history) not John Furnivall. There was another more trenchant and less ambiguous critic of British imperialism in the interwar years: Bernard Houghton. Having served in the Burma branch of the Indian Civil Service from 1886 until his retirement in 1912, he began…
My Research Trip to Yangon
This month I visited Yangon for the first time since I went in 2008, back when I was still researching for my PhD. I enjoyed the city hugely the first time I went, despite illness, a ‘traffic incident’, and a bomb scare. It felt like a smaller, calmer Kolkata, partly because of the crumbling colonial…
Colonizing Animals 