Epidemics, Empire and Environments: Cholera in Madras and Quebec City, 1818–1910 by Michael Zeheter (review)

The first question that sprang to this reviewer’s mind on receiving this book—and the first question asked by every single other person who picked it up—was, why ever choose Quebec City and Madras for comparative study? They are worlds apart, one might assume, geographically, socially, and environmentally. Yet both Quebec and Madras were colonies of the British state, and it is that commonality that provides the basis of comparison. Zeheter argues that each city represents a different kind of colonial enclave. Both were colonial capitals for most of the nineteenth century, but Canada was a colony of white settlement whose people enjoyed the rights and privileges of British citizens, while the native population was marginalized; India, by contrast, was “a prime example” of a colony of exploitation (p. 10), where a politically powerless native population was ruled in the economic interests of the British state by a small white elite with military support. The two colonies, he suggests, are “uniquely suitable” subjects in which to study responses to cholera outbreaks over most of a century (p. 11). Quebec was singular among politically important colonies of settlement in its exposure to recurrent cholera epidemics, while cholera soon became endemic in Madras, so requiring a different type of response from the colonial state. Not only were the two colonies different in political and social status, but their cholera problems were representative of two different types of public health challenge.

If the nature of these two colonies was very different, and their experiences of cholera also differed, their responses to the disease were similar in being focused on environment. In both cities, the standard explanation of cholera as being due to foul miasmas operated. Quebec City, seeing the disease advancing across the Atlantic, first tried strategies of exclusion with a quarantine station on the Saint Lawrence River, and when these failed repeatedly, set painfully about major works of sanitary construction. In Madras the colonial state determined initially on a strategy of treatment, but also set about trying to identify the environmental causes of the disease. Quebec was free of cholera after 1854; Madras was not, but a change of governor in that year brought a change of preventive strategy: the colonial government became open to the sanitary ideas that the previous governor had rejected. A critical factor encouraging this change in approach was the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58, which forced a reconsideration of official policy: sanitary improvement was now seen as “a precondition for the continued British presence on the subcontinent” (p. 162). In the 1880s increasing acceptance of bacteriology, which altered understandings of cholera, changed little in Quebec, where the quarantine station remained the first line of defense. In Madras, however, where the cholera hazard was constant, bacteriology not only resolved the mystery of origin but provided the means to tame the disease.

Zeheter’s account of these translations is lucidly written and densely detailed, with ambitions above the simple recounting and contrast of reactions to an epidemic threat in two different types of British colony. Cholera is the tool by which he explores the complexities of colonial rule, and the processes of state formation. Cholera threatened order and exposed the weaknesses of colonial regimes, but it also provided the occasion for taking control. In Quebec, cholera forced the colonial state to accept greater involvement of and eventual control by the local population; in India, the British tightened their control over the colonized. These were gradual processes, and had at times unexpected aspects. The people of Quebec City, despite the British tradition of householder autonomy, accepted stringent measures for cholera control in the early epidemics; in Madras the colonial government, conscious of weakness, moved cautiously in deference to Indian opinion, avoiding intervention in, for example, the women’s quarters. This case study returns attention to the influence of peculiar local circumstances on the processes of...