Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The worldwide cholera epidemic originating in Bengal in 1817 also changed the character
of European colonialism and global race relations. Writings on the impact of climate on hu-
man physiology and character post-1817 show a marked shift from an optimistic theory of ac-
climatization—in which even European skin color might naturally be expected to change—to
a rigid hereditarian model, whereby distinct races were tied to their respective environments
by virtue of their indigeneity—that is, their long-term, continuous habitation of a place. His-
tory, according to this new logic, became biology, and eighteenth-century environmental
determinism began its insidious evolution toward nineteenth-century biological theories of
race. The susceptibility of Britons to tropical disease, horrifyingly exposed as never before in
1817-18, and then later in the European cholera panic of the 1830s, helped consolidate views
of India as a dangerous, alien environment to which Europeans could never adapt.
According to the simple, linear model of disease transmission dominant in the nineteenth
century, mobile human populations were the exclusive carriers of cholera. Indians naturally
blamed the British army and merchants for spreading the disease, but Europeans chose reli-
gious pilgrimages as the principal culprit. In India, the seasonal traffic of thousands toward
sacred rivers captured the suicidal folly of Eastern idolatrous practices. Closer to home, and
thus more politically inflammatory, was the pilgrimage to Mecca, site of dozens of cholera
outbreaks through the nineteenth century beginning in 1831 and the source of rabidly anti-
Muslim editorializing in Europe and North America. Perversely, then, despite its global pres-
ence and indiscriminate path, cholera spawned ways of thinking about the differences between
East and West. For Europeans, the racialization of cholera converted an inexplicable and
frightening cultural threat into a blame narrative with a readily identifiable human enemy.
As such, cholera discourse became a cornerstone of Western orientalism, the racist legacies of
which continue to pervade geopolitics in the twenty-first century.
It is thus difficult to overstate the impact of nineteenth-century epidemic cholera—a
deadly product of Tambora-era climate change—on world history. The disease was “an insult
to progress” itself, undermining bourgeois confidence across Europe, North America, and the
colonial dominions by exposing both the vulnerability of the new global marketplace to dis-
ease and the gross economic inequalities evident in the slums that harbored it. 30 The connec-
tion between cholera and class struggle is borne out in the revolution-rich dates coinciding
with major outbreaks—1831-32, 1848, 1871, and so forth. The Tambora-driven cholera of
the middle 1800s thus echoes the cataclysmic Black Death event of the fourteenth century,
which was marked by riots and civil uprising. Cholera was the Victorian age's worst night-
mare. Its symptoms exposed the excretory functions of the private body in the most humiliat-
ing way imaginable, while its victimizing the poor and oppressed exposed the thin veneer of
polite, prosperous modern society. Just as the abolition debate politicized race, cholera politi-
cized class, so that sanitation emerged with slavery as the premier social justice issues of the
nineteenth century.
THE LAST MAN
And yet there is no great Victorian novel about cholera. This is surprising, at first, given the
centrality of cholera to nineteenth-century social history. But novels are Romantic forms of
art, in which empathic young heroes and heroines flower into self-consciousness and emerge
Search WWH ::




Custom Search