Leprosy and the Colonial Gaze: Comparing the Dutch West and East Indies, 1750-1950
Snelders, S.A.M.; Huisman, F.G.; van Bergen, Leo
(2021) Social History of Medicine, volume 34, issue 2, pp.
(Article)
Abstract
This article is looking at colonial governance with regard to leprosy, comparing two settings of the Dutch colonial empire: Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. Whereas segregation became formal policy in Suriname, leprosy sufferers were hardly ever segregated in the Dutch East Indies. We argue that the perceived needs to
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maintain a healthy labour force and to prevent contamination of white populations were the driving forces behind the difference in response to the disease. Wherever close contact between European planters and a non-European labour force existed together with conditions of forced servitude (either slavery or indentured labour), the Dutch response was to link leprosy to racial inferiority in order to legitimise compulsory segregation. This mainly happened in Suriname. We would like to suggest that forced labour, leprosy and compulsory segregation were connected through the ‘colonial gaze’, legitimising compulsory segregation of leprosy sufferers who had become useless to the plantation economy.
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Keywords: colonial medicine, tropical medicine, Plantation economy, Labour management, Colonial gaze, Leprosy, Compulsory segregation, Dutch colonial empire, Othering, History, Medicine (miscellaneous), SCI and SSCI Journals
ISSN: 0951-631X
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Note: Funding Information: Stephen Snelders, Freudenthal Institute/History and Philosophy of Science, Faculty of Science, Utrecht University, the Netherlands; Leo van Bergen, Independent Researcher; Frank Huisman, Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. The research project Leprosy and Empire was carried out in the Netherlands at the Julius Center in Utrecht and at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (file number NWO: 360-69-020). We are also very grateful for the support and advice over the course of the project, given by the following colleagues: Peter Boomgaard (), William Faber, Maurits Hassankhan, Liesbeth Hesselink, Henk Menke, Gert Oostindie, Toine Pieters, Henk Schulte Nordholt, Hardyanto Soebono and Henry de Vries. Publisher Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s) 2019.
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