Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600-1850 (review)

Mark Harrison. Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India 1600–1850. New York, Oxford University Press, 1999. vi, 263 pp., illus. $29.95.

Why, Harrison asks, did the British see the Indian climate as a constraint upon their imperial ambitions? Such a view, he claims, was not inevitable, for the British had been in India for more than fifty years before the subcontinent’s climate assumed its menacing role. In a carefully researched and well-argued monograph, Harrison demonstrates how the interplay among climate, race, and authority shifted from the eighteenth century into the nineteenth and formed the modern view of India’s climate.

During the 1700s, the British East India Company had established commercial privileges with the Mughal emperors. The company’s employees settled mainly along the eastern coast, where Europeans found the temperate climate somewhat similar to that of northern Europe. During this period, a blend of monogenism and Hippocratic humoralism created a rather fluid notion of race. Because monogenism postulated that all humans were essentially the same, and “airs, waters, and places” explained exotic behavior and physiognomy, climatic differences were invoked to explain racial differences. By the late 1700s, the British were optimistic that permanent settlement in India was possible. By the 1820s, however, European settlers who ventured inland to a less European-like climate feared that over time they would become assimilated into the perceived racial characteristics of the Indian, especially the indolence and fatalism for which the torrid zones were famous.

It is impossible to pinpoint when this attitude toward climate and race began to change, but it had clearly done so by the 1830s and 1840s. The other factors had changed as well. The company filled the vacuum left by the Mughal’s declining political authority, and they assumed colonial as well as commercial authority, which were later absorbed by the Crown. Settlements had spread into less temperate and therefore less salubrious inland areas and into Bengal. Ideas about racial fixity, not fluidity, had emerged. Harrison notes the importance of Cuvier’s work, but also points out that some British theorists had argued independently that climate made or changed races, but so slowly that for practical purposes one might as well accept the fixity of species. Assimilation was impossible, and the British viewed the Indian as most definitely “other.”

This hardening of racial categories had a wider impact than just changing the relation between ruler and ruled. In the earlier period, for example, reformers considered improved sanitation as a means of social improvement. Climates, they argued, were fundamentally manmade. Consequently, manmade climatic changes—effected through sanitation and the removal of miasmas—ultimately improved the races who lived there. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the hardening of racial categories and its decoupling from climate made such a reform impetus hard to maintain. Sanitation might preserve the health of the British soldier or merchant, especially against cholera and malaria, but would be useless when applied in attempts to improve the native population.

Harrison’s work also shows that current historiographical notions of “colonial science” need reexamination: the British drew their views on climate and race as much from indigenous sources as from European theories. The British recognized the climatic and medical diversity of India and never included the subcontinent completely among the tropics.