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Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600–1850
REVIEWS
455
County. Other chapters examine West Texas, Nebraska Sandhills, and northeastern Nevada settings. These varied regional explorations are striking reminders that even though western ranchers share many values and challenges, the West’s internal environmental and cultural variety imposes a complexity that many scholars and Americans generally have been slow to appreciate. Finally, in Part Three, Starrs shifts to more practical questions of the future of ranching in the West and whether or not ranching as a way of life needs to be preserved within the region. Starrs answers in the affirmative, but suggests that “questing after continuity in a land of change” will not be easy. He launches a telling critique of contemporary federal land policy in the West, suggesting that the federal government has still not come to terms with the needs of western ranchers. Worse yet, time may be running out. The author chronicles the rapid population gains in much of the West and ponders how urban values can coexist and even be enhanced by the survival of rural ranching traditions within the region. Starrs set out to write an ambitious and complex book about cattle ranching in the West. By succeeding in doing so, he has produced a study that will appeal to academic historians and geographers, cowboy and ranching enthusiasts, and a regional audience that still needs to come to grips with the values of its ranching culture. Starrs has contributed to clarifying those values, and has suggested why they are as important to the West tomorrow as they were when cattle and cowboys first trod across the region. He also demonstrates how a skilled historical geographer can take particular localities, place them in a larger intellectual contexts, and yet retain a sense of place. This is no small accomplishment and is a reminder of what good geography has always been about. Montana State University, Bozeman
W W
doi:10.1006/jhge.2001.0340, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on
M H, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600–1850 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv+263. Rs 675 hardback) As Clarence Glacken made clear more than 30 years ago, climate has held a prominent place in Western conceptions of disease, culture, and self. Though scholars have been slower to appreciate its significance in shaping Western attitudes toward the nonWestern world, this has begun to change with the work of David Arnold, Richard Grove, and others. Now we can add Mark Harrison to this list. Expanding on a theme he touched on briefly in his earlier book, Public Health in British India: AngloIndian Preventive Medicine 1859–1914 (Cambridge 1994), Harrison examines British perceptions of the Indian climate and, more broadly, the construction of colonial knowledge and identities. He taps into the huge and underutilized body of AngloIndian medical literature, using it to follow Western discourses on the Indian climate from the early seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century, with an epilogue that carries his story into the early twentieth century. His fresh and engaging analysis offers insight into two interrelated issues of central importance to the colonial experience—“the ‘making’ of race and the growing alienation of Europeans from the Indian environment” (p. 215). The broad chronological sweep of his study allows Harrison to identify significant shifts in the British attitude toward India’s climate. In the early era (c. 1600–1750), the British and other Europeans viewed the natural environment of India as strange but 2001 Academic Press
456
REVIEWS
not exceptionally dangerous. They were optimistic about their ability to adapt to it after a period of climatic ‘seasoning’, especially with modifications of diet, hygiene, and other behavioural practices. Long residence in India was believed to bring about physiological changes that made Europeans more like Indians, so much so that they might find it difficult to readjust to their homeland. Informing these views was a medical tradition that shared common Greco-Arabic roots with Mughal medicine and a humoral perspective with Hindu ayurvedic practitioners, encouraging what Harrison insists was a dialogic exchange between these parties (though he offers little evidence to support his claim). Despite the centrality of climate to this shared tradition, it was not regarded as a source of innate and unalterable differences between Indians and Europeans. The period of colonial conquest (1750–1830) saw a slow shift in British attitudes. Though the Indian climate was still regarded as relatively benign in the second half of the eighteenth century, by 1800 it had begun to be associated with more rigid notions of human variation. Increasingly characterized as a ‘tropical’ climate, it was thought by many British commentators to predispose its native inhabitants to physical lethargy and moral laxity. And for sojourners from Europe it came to carry the risk of degeneration, a spectre shot through with notions of racial difference. Pessimism about the ability of the British to ‘acclimatize’ intensified through the first half of the nineteenth century (c. 1820–1860), spurring authorities to map what was referred to as the ‘medical topography’ of India in an effort to determine areas suited for European residence. Insofar as colonization by European settlers was considered feasible, it was widely regarded as constrained by climatic factors to cooler highland zones, giving impetus for the establishment of hill stations. Climate thus came to delineate innate differences between Europeans and Indians. Harrison also insists, however, that British efforts to comprehend and control cholera and other epidemic diseases caused a gradual shift from a climatic to a social interpretation of disease during the first half of the nineteenth century. Doctors increasingly came to attribute diseases to man-made causes such as pollution and poverty—causes that could be contained through sanitary reforms and other sorts of government intervention. By shifting the focus of concern from the Indian climate to the Indian body, the British appear to have intensified the drive on the one hand to set themselves apart from Indians and on the other to reform Indians in accord with their own conceptions of healthy behaviour. This section of Harrison’s study seems intended to serve as a bridge to the issues he addressed in his previous book, which covered the period after 1850. It reads, however, rather too much like research left over from the earlier work, losing sight of the broad themes of race and alienation as it follows the meandering courses taken by various medical investigations and interventions into outbreaks of fever, cholera, and the like. Moreover, its insistence that the sanitation regime that arose out of the “ideology of improvement” had begun to undermine the claims of climatic determinism by mid-century does not correspond with my impressions. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a remarkable expansion in the number and popularity of hill stations, which were seen as sanctuaries from the tropical climate, as were the solar topis, cholera belts, and other forms of protective garb that came into widespread use by the British in India and elsewhere in the tropics at this time; the early twentieth century in turn saw the appearance of tropical neurasthenia, a climatically-attributed diagnosis that quickly acquired epidemic proportions. Harrison himself acknowledges that climatic theories experienced a ‘renaissance’ in the early twentieth century, though he is unable to offer a satisfactory explanation for this resurgence. He might have done so if he had recognized that the rise of the sanitation regime did not so much close the door on climatic theories as drive them into different channels, ones that were equally effective in expressing the British sense of alienation from the Indian environment and difference from the Indian peoples.
REVIEWS
457
These reservations aside, Harrison has written a rich and informative book. Drawing on an impressive range of sources, he has undertaken an ambitious and largely persuasive study of the role that the climatic paradigm played in the European encounter with India over some three centuries. His research challenges and complicates the claims made by Edward Said and the postcolonial cohort about the European construction of knowledge about the ‘Orient’, providing us with a much more historically nuanced understanding of the process by which the British came to see themselves as innately different from the peoples they ruled. George Washington University
D K
doi:10.1006/jhge.2001.0341, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on
S D, Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999. Pp. ix+317. £40.00 hardback) Repton was a trimmer, or put less bluntly, he was ever-flexible in the prolonged attempt to make his name and living in what Stephen Daniels’s masterful study shows to have been a largely self-invented profession. Daniels’s patient excavation of Repton’s farflung practice is marvellously illuminating, if sometimes depressing: one sees how much aesthetic choices depended upon the personal and political alignments of clients and localities, rivals and critics. Nonetheless, Daniels manages to find consistent themes in Repton’s designs. Pre-eminent among these is Repton’s commitment to the social character of scenery: the enjoyments it should offer to owner-residents with their families but also to visitors and even to local passers-by. Aesthetic pleasure is imagined less for the solitary viewer than as sociable sharing. Beauty from a social perspective embeds scenery in the agricultural enterprise of the estate and affects the neighbourhood (village, county) no less than the nation. Daniels’s choice to dedicate one chapter to Repton’s formative work in Norfolk, the centre of agricultural improvement in the later eighteenth century, and another to his fascination with roads (his practice required constant travel; he paid particular attention to approaches and internal routes in his plans) is a fit introduction to Repton’s belief in a sociable landscape. Subsequent chapters are likewise carefully focused on the specific social as well as physical geography of Repton’s work: networks of commissions in Herefordshire, Bedfordshire, Devon, the outskirts of London, Bristol and Leeds, for clients from the smaller gentry, upper aristocracy, or urban merchants and professionals. As Daniels repeatedly emphasizes, Repton subscribed to a vision of polite converse sustaining a consensual society of clearly marked ranks, anchored in domestic civility promoted by attractive scenery. The rising taxes of wartime and the social unrest of the 1790s made his larger vision outdated while they substantially reduced the disposable incomes of potential clients. Repton’s growing interest in flowers and horticulture late in his career poignantly reflect the constriction of his once-national practice. From shaping civil society to cultivating one’s own garden: the shift of emphasis from large-scale beauties of shaped land to the more intimate pleasures of flowers for suburban living prepare for Victorian garden writing. J.C. Loudon cited Repton as an important predecessor, but by then a disappointed Repton was dead. Daniels stresses Repton’s efforts to make himself a professional where there were few guidelines. Hence the importance of defending the name he chose to designate 2001 Academic Press
455
County. Other chapters examine West Texas, Nebraska Sandhills, and northeastern Nevada settings. These varied regional explorations are striking reminders that even though western ranchers share many values and challenges, the West’s internal environmental and cultural variety imposes a complexity that many scholars and Americans generally have been slow to appreciate. Finally, in Part Three, Starrs shifts to more practical questions of the future of ranching in the West and whether or not ranching as a way of life needs to be preserved within the region. Starrs answers in the affirmative, but suggests that “questing after continuity in a land of change” will not be easy. He launches a telling critique of contemporary federal land policy in the West, suggesting that the federal government has still not come to terms with the needs of western ranchers. Worse yet, time may be running out. The author chronicles the rapid population gains in much of the West and ponders how urban values can coexist and even be enhanced by the survival of rural ranching traditions within the region. Starrs set out to write an ambitious and complex book about cattle ranching in the West. By succeeding in doing so, he has produced a study that will appeal to academic historians and geographers, cowboy and ranching enthusiasts, and a regional audience that still needs to come to grips with the values of its ranching culture. Starrs has contributed to clarifying those values, and has suggested why they are as important to the West tomorrow as they were when cattle and cowboys first trod across the region. He also demonstrates how a skilled historical geographer can take particular localities, place them in a larger intellectual contexts, and yet retain a sense of place. This is no small accomplishment and is a reminder of what good geography has always been about. Montana State University, Bozeman
W W
doi:10.1006/jhge.2001.0340, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on
M H, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600–1850 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv+263. Rs 675 hardback) As Clarence Glacken made clear more than 30 years ago, climate has held a prominent place in Western conceptions of disease, culture, and self. Though scholars have been slower to appreciate its significance in shaping Western attitudes toward the nonWestern world, this has begun to change with the work of David Arnold, Richard Grove, and others. Now we can add Mark Harrison to this list. Expanding on a theme he touched on briefly in his earlier book, Public Health in British India: AngloIndian Preventive Medicine 1859–1914 (Cambridge 1994), Harrison examines British perceptions of the Indian climate and, more broadly, the construction of colonial knowledge and identities. He taps into the huge and underutilized body of AngloIndian medical literature, using it to follow Western discourses on the Indian climate from the early seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century, with an epilogue that carries his story into the early twentieth century. His fresh and engaging analysis offers insight into two interrelated issues of central importance to the colonial experience—“the ‘making’ of race and the growing alienation of Europeans from the Indian environment” (p. 215). The broad chronological sweep of his study allows Harrison to identify significant shifts in the British attitude toward India’s climate. In the early era (c. 1600–1750), the British and other Europeans viewed the natural environment of India as strange but 2001 Academic Press
456
REVIEWS
not exceptionally dangerous. They were optimistic about their ability to adapt to it after a period of climatic ‘seasoning’, especially with modifications of diet, hygiene, and other behavioural practices. Long residence in India was believed to bring about physiological changes that made Europeans more like Indians, so much so that they might find it difficult to readjust to their homeland. Informing these views was a medical tradition that shared common Greco-Arabic roots with Mughal medicine and a humoral perspective with Hindu ayurvedic practitioners, encouraging what Harrison insists was a dialogic exchange between these parties (though he offers little evidence to support his claim). Despite the centrality of climate to this shared tradition, it was not regarded as a source of innate and unalterable differences between Indians and Europeans. The period of colonial conquest (1750–1830) saw a slow shift in British attitudes. Though the Indian climate was still regarded as relatively benign in the second half of the eighteenth century, by 1800 it had begun to be associated with more rigid notions of human variation. Increasingly characterized as a ‘tropical’ climate, it was thought by many British commentators to predispose its native inhabitants to physical lethargy and moral laxity. And for sojourners from Europe it came to carry the risk of degeneration, a spectre shot through with notions of racial difference. Pessimism about the ability of the British to ‘acclimatize’ intensified through the first half of the nineteenth century (c. 1820–1860), spurring authorities to map what was referred to as the ‘medical topography’ of India in an effort to determine areas suited for European residence. Insofar as colonization by European settlers was considered feasible, it was widely regarded as constrained by climatic factors to cooler highland zones, giving impetus for the establishment of hill stations. Climate thus came to delineate innate differences between Europeans and Indians. Harrison also insists, however, that British efforts to comprehend and control cholera and other epidemic diseases caused a gradual shift from a climatic to a social interpretation of disease during the first half of the nineteenth century. Doctors increasingly came to attribute diseases to man-made causes such as pollution and poverty—causes that could be contained through sanitary reforms and other sorts of government intervention. By shifting the focus of concern from the Indian climate to the Indian body, the British appear to have intensified the drive on the one hand to set themselves apart from Indians and on the other to reform Indians in accord with their own conceptions of healthy behaviour. This section of Harrison’s study seems intended to serve as a bridge to the issues he addressed in his previous book, which covered the period after 1850. It reads, however, rather too much like research left over from the earlier work, losing sight of the broad themes of race and alienation as it follows the meandering courses taken by various medical investigations and interventions into outbreaks of fever, cholera, and the like. Moreover, its insistence that the sanitation regime that arose out of the “ideology of improvement” had begun to undermine the claims of climatic determinism by mid-century does not correspond with my impressions. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a remarkable expansion in the number and popularity of hill stations, which were seen as sanctuaries from the tropical climate, as were the solar topis, cholera belts, and other forms of protective garb that came into widespread use by the British in India and elsewhere in the tropics at this time; the early twentieth century in turn saw the appearance of tropical neurasthenia, a climatically-attributed diagnosis that quickly acquired epidemic proportions. Harrison himself acknowledges that climatic theories experienced a ‘renaissance’ in the early twentieth century, though he is unable to offer a satisfactory explanation for this resurgence. He might have done so if he had recognized that the rise of the sanitation regime did not so much close the door on climatic theories as drive them into different channels, ones that were equally effective in expressing the British sense of alienation from the Indian environment and difference from the Indian peoples.
REVIEWS
457
These reservations aside, Harrison has written a rich and informative book. Drawing on an impressive range of sources, he has undertaken an ambitious and largely persuasive study of the role that the climatic paradigm played in the European encounter with India over some three centuries. His research challenges and complicates the claims made by Edward Said and the postcolonial cohort about the European construction of knowledge about the ‘Orient’, providing us with a much more historically nuanced understanding of the process by which the British came to see themselves as innately different from the peoples they ruled. George Washington University
D K
doi:10.1006/jhge.2001.0341, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on
S D, Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999. Pp. ix+317. £40.00 hardback) Repton was a trimmer, or put less bluntly, he was ever-flexible in the prolonged attempt to make his name and living in what Stephen Daniels’s masterful study shows to have been a largely self-invented profession. Daniels’s patient excavation of Repton’s farflung practice is marvellously illuminating, if sometimes depressing: one sees how much aesthetic choices depended upon the personal and political alignments of clients and localities, rivals and critics. Nonetheless, Daniels manages to find consistent themes in Repton’s designs. Pre-eminent among these is Repton’s commitment to the social character of scenery: the enjoyments it should offer to owner-residents with their families but also to visitors and even to local passers-by. Aesthetic pleasure is imagined less for the solitary viewer than as sociable sharing. Beauty from a social perspective embeds scenery in the agricultural enterprise of the estate and affects the neighbourhood (village, county) no less than the nation. Daniels’s choice to dedicate one chapter to Repton’s formative work in Norfolk, the centre of agricultural improvement in the later eighteenth century, and another to his fascination with roads (his practice required constant travel; he paid particular attention to approaches and internal routes in his plans) is a fit introduction to Repton’s belief in a sociable landscape. Subsequent chapters are likewise carefully focused on the specific social as well as physical geography of Repton’s work: networks of commissions in Herefordshire, Bedfordshire, Devon, the outskirts of London, Bristol and Leeds, for clients from the smaller gentry, upper aristocracy, or urban merchants and professionals. As Daniels repeatedly emphasizes, Repton subscribed to a vision of polite converse sustaining a consensual society of clearly marked ranks, anchored in domestic civility promoted by attractive scenery. The rising taxes of wartime and the social unrest of the 1790s made his larger vision outdated while they substantially reduced the disposable incomes of potential clients. Repton’s growing interest in flowers and horticulture late in his career poignantly reflect the constriction of his once-national practice. From shaping civil society to cultivating one’s own garden: the shift of emphasis from large-scale beauties of shaped land to the more intimate pleasures of flowers for suburban living prepare for Victorian garden writing. J.C. Loudon cited Repton as an important predecessor, but by then a disappointed Repton was dead. Daniels stresses Repton’s efforts to make himself a professional where there were few guidelines. Hence the importance of defending the name he chose to designate 2001 Academic Press