Cultivating the Colonies

Colonial States and their Environmental Legacies

Christina Folke Ax, Niels Brimnes, Niklas Thode Jensen, Karen Oslund, Christina Folke Ax, Niels Brimnes, Niklas Thode Jensen, Karen Oslund

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780896804791
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Historische Geographie

The essays collected in Cultivating the Colonies demonstrate how the relationship between colonial power and nature revealsthe nature of power. Each essay explores how colonial governments translated ideas about the management of exoticnature and foreign people into practice, and how they literally "got their hands dirty" in the business of empire.

The eleven essays include studies of animal husbandry in the Philippines, farming in Indochina, and indigenous medicine in India. They are global in scope, ranging from the Russian North to Mozambique, examining the consequences of colonialismon nature, including its impact on animals, fisheries, farmlands, medical practices, and even the diets of indigenouspeople.

Cultivating the Colonies establishes beyond all possible doubt the importance of the environment as a locus for studyingthe power of the colonial state.

Part 1

_______

Perceiving the Colonial Environment

1

_______

The Prospective Colonist and Strange Environments:

Advice on Health and Prosperity

Andrew Wear

Agriculture must be the foundation of every settlement.

—New Zealand Company settler

PROSPERITY AND HEALTH WERE, if we believe the literature produced for potential settlers, on the wish list of anyone who was thinking of migrating and settling in strange new environments. This conjunction of wealth and health, usually ignored by historians of medicine, lasted across the whole period of British colonization. If a colony was to survive, both wealth (or at least a prosperous subsistence) and health were essential and were also factors likely to shape how the environment was envisaged. In this chapter I will be arguing for stability or continuity in the discourse about health and wealth. Whether this discourse was as applicable to tropical as to temperate areas is discussed in the last part of the chapter.

Places, People, and Health

In the early years of a colony, the way its environment produced health and wealth was to a greater or lesser extent perceived as comparable to England’s, especially if the colony was in a temperate area. (In the rest of the chapter I will refer more often to “England” rather than to “Britain,” as England was usually the “home” model, analogy, or metaphor in descriptions of new settler environments.) There were a number of reasons for the almost universal impulse in this literature to portray a colony as a home away from home for people, plants, and animals. There was the perceived need for English bodies—and likewise, English plants and animals, given the agricultural nature of most colonies from the seventeenth to the twentieth century—to fit their new place. More generally, prospective settlers were believed to need the psychological reassurance that there was something of the mother country in the new country. Set against this was the growing realization that new colonies were different both in their environments and in their developments of increasingly distinct identities.

The idea of the fit between people and places was often expressed through a discourse that linked health and climate. It is important to note at this point that climate and health were set out together along with the economic resources of a place in geography books, and in the accounts and letters that urged people to come to a new settlement. This conjunction of health with resources made up the prospectus for a colony and is something that I will discuss further in the chapter.

As is well known, health was seen as being affected by a place and, in particular, by its climate. This belief was long-lasting. It is found in Hippocratic writings and was only starting to end by the beginning of the twentieth century, after the bacteriological revolution and then the development of scientific tropical medicine. It was based on the humoral and qualitative view of the body developed by Greek medicine and philosophy. The body, being composed of four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile), which in turn were each made from pairs of the four primary qualities of hot, cold, dry, and wet, was shaped and influenced by the external force of climate that essentially consisted of the same four qualities. This also had a cultural significance. It was believed that people’s countries of birth shaped their constitution, and that there was a fit between people and their home country. This was a popular view among lay as well as medical writers. It was also a belief that echoed the English nationalism of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries along the lines that England had the most equable or temperate climate and so produced the best people.¹ In the nineteenth century that nationalism took on an explicitly racial character. Such perceptions helped to produce the desire to find or create something of the mother country in a new colony. What was alien in a colony could be threatening, while the familiar spelled safety and provided a sense of reassurance about one’s identity in body, character, and race.

The attempted re-creation of a home environment, whether in tropical niches or enclaves or wholesale in the temperate new “white land,” became an imperative for British colonists. Ideas of health fed into this imperative, and as we shall see later in the chapter, they were allied to an agricultural economy that transformed alien places into home-type environments or at least environments that had European characteristics.

Initially, fear was often present in the minds of those intending to settle. One aspect of fear was the belief that going to a strange place that differed constitutionally from one’s own country was dangerous to health. For instance, William Bradford reported the debate among the Pilgrim Fathers in 1617 as to “What perticuler place to pitch upon” in America. They rejected “Guiana or some of those fertill places in those hott climats.” Although some saw Guiana as “rich frutfull and blessed with a perpetuall spring, and a florishing greenes [greenness], where vigorous nature brought forth all things in abundance and plenty without any great labour or art of man,” others concluded, “It would not be so fitt for them.” This was an early example of the British fear and suspicions of hot climates that lasted into the early twentieth century. Specifically, the Pilgrim Fathers believed that “such hot countries are subject to greevuos diseases and many noysome [unwholesome] impediments, which other more temperate places are freer from, and would not so well agree with our English bodys.”² Nevertheless, the more temperate areas still posed dangers in English minds. Moving their bodies from the home environment that had shaped their nature to a strange one was feared. The Pilgrim Fathers, Bradford noted, believed that in North America, “the chang of aire [here also meaning climate], diate, and drinking of water, would infecte their bodies with sore sickneses and greevous diseases” (W.T. Davis 1982, 47).

Health, Prosperity, and Agriculture

One response to such concerns was to assert that a new colony was even more like home than the home country and so was healthier. Evidence of healthy people, animals, and plants indicated prosperity, and likewise a prosperous community was often a healthy one. Moreover, the ability of the land to allow agriculture to flourish was closely allied to health, for starvation could result when agriculture failed. Thomas Welde, writing to his former parishioners at Tarling in England in 1632 about Massachusetts, urged them to “come, see and taste” the new country.³ He declared:

Here I find three great blessings, peace, plenty and health, in a comfortable measure. The place well agreeth with our English bodies that they were never so healthy in their native country. Generally all here as never could be rid of the headache, toothache, cough and the like are now better and freed here, and those that were weak are now well long since.

Health, in accounts of a new colony, was often joined with plenty and wealth, or at least a comfortable living, and Welde immediately went on to report: “Here is plenty of corn and that the poorest have enough. Corn is here five shillings six pence a bushel” (Emerson 1976, 96).

Health, agriculture (in the form of plants and animals), markets, and wealth were linked. For instance, the Reverend Francis Higginson, in his letter to his “Friends at Leicester” of 1629, published as New-Englands Plantation. Or, a Short and True Description of the Commodities and Discommodities of That Countrey (1630), stressed as Welde how healthy New England was.⁴ He also emphasized that a healthy environment had economic consequences. Higginson noted how the “fertility of the soil is to be admired at, as appeareth in the abundance of grass that growth everywhere both very thick, very long and very high.” Agriculture was the central economic activity that the English transported to America and reproduced, thus changing the environment. But the original environment had to be favorable to agriculture. Hence the mention of the fertility of the soil and Higginson’s following comment: “It is scarce to be believed how our kine and goats, horses and hogs do thrive and prosper here and like well of this country” (Emerson 1976, 31).

The end results of agriculture (apart from subsistence) were trade, markets, and profit, and without them the motive for large-scale rapid transformation of the environment would have been largely absent. Big outputs and crop yields were always good for profit, and Higginson took care to point out how:

In our plantation we already have a quart of milk for a penny, but the abundant increase of corn proves this country to be a wonderment. Thirty, forty, fifty, sixty [fold] are ordinary here.… Our planters hope to have more than a hundred fold this year.… It is almost incredible what great gain some of our English planters have had by our Indian corn. (Emerson 1976, 31)

The more land cleared for planting, the greater the trade and the profit. In a similar vein, the natural products of a place were praised. The fruit trees, the timber trees, and the abundant fish were all viewed by Higginson as natural resources to be used at will (Emerson 1976, 32–33, 35–36). The nineteenth-century settler literature likewise emphasized the presence of land and the opportunities for trade. In other words, the reports being sent back to England declared that the environment was right for exploitation and change, and the economic conditions were favorable for such a transformation.

This type of discourse continued into and throughout the nineteenth century. Despite wide differences in climates and environments, the new white lands of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa were presented as healthy and not so different from home as to be completely alien and frightening. The discourse about new colonies also gave the sense that settlers’ bodies and the environment were being incorporated into a familiar economic system. For instance, settlers reading about nineteenth-century Canada found health linked to climate and, as in the seventeenth century, to the agricultural products of the place. The numerous guides providing “Information for Intending Settlers” published by the Canadian government and provinces set out to provide reassurance that Canada’s climate, despite misconceptions, was good for health and agriculture. As the Guide … for Intending Settlers of 1887 declared:

There is no more important question for an intending emigrant than the nature of the climate to which he proposed to go. The climate of Canada … is more misconceived abroad than any other fact pertaining to the country. Perfectly absurd impressions prevail respecting the rigours of Canadian winters.

The Guide pointed out that the “dry winter atmosphere is bracing and pleasant,” dryness being an accepted marker of health compared to dampness and humidity. It also declared that “besides being pleasant, there is no healthier climate under the sun. There are no endemic diseases in Canada.” The Guide stressed that snow, far from being a hindrance, helped in communications and played a role in agriculture: Canada’s snow, it stated, “is perfectly dry and packs under foot, making the best roads, and forming a warm covering for the earth” and “has an important manurial influence on the ground” (Dominion of Canada 1887, 10). The agricultural perspective was never far away from the settler literature. The Guide emphasized, like early seventeenth-century writings, the link between climate and agriculture, fertility and productivity. The “warm and bright” summers meant that

fruits and vegetables which cannot be ripened in the open air in England, such as the grape and tomato will here ripen to perfection. The summers are much more favourable for the horticulturalist and agriculturalist than those in England, with the single exception of length of time in which outdoor work can be done.

An independent observer was reported as witnessing to the fine growth of wheat, barley, oats, and maize. Extraordinary plant growth was continually cited as evidence of a country’s fertility. The observer saw a field-grown squash of eight feet three inches weighing 150 pounds. The Guide added: “We have seen them 350lbs; open air growth. No better illustration could be given of a summer, semi-tropical in heat of great duration, than the maturing of the pumpkins and squash of such great size” (1887, 10–11).

In other new white lands a similar discourse was being used to entice migrants to the colonies. Behind it lay the economic impulse to take and transform vast areas of land into “fields,” as the nineteenth century expressed the immigration and agricultural enterprise.

Tasmania was presented in Godwin’s Emigrant’s Guide of 1823 as having “perhaps, the most salubrious and congenial climate of any in the known world for a European constitution … similar to that of the south of France.” “This luxuriant island” (1, 12) was depicted a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Getting Our Hands Dirty
• Part 1: Perceiving the Colonial Environment
• Part 2: Managing the Colonial Environment
• Part 3: The Legacy of Colonialism
• List of Contributors
• Index