The epidemic as a tool for domination … How did colonialism use it to subjugate peoples?

With the outbreak of the Corona virus in India for the first time in March 2020, the government announced a package (1) of legal measures that allowed for a more flexible and firm dealing with the epidemiological situation in the country, starting with the closure of schools, obliging people to their homes and fines, and ending with declaring exposure to doctors a crime. It puts the citizen under the authority of the law, but these laws are in fact not new. Rather, they are a modified form of the “Epidemic Diseases Law” issued by British colonialism in 1897 to confront the plague that spread in several Indian regions.

English colonialism did indeed contain disease, but for many years things like this law were seen as the achievements of colonialism in the land of ignorance. In fact, the philosophy of colonialism itself, and we mean those fundamental ideas lying in the background of every colonial act as a justification for undertaking it, was based on the leadership of these peoples that were described as ignorant to the light of science, knowledge and civilization, but that – especially in the case of epidemics – was far from being For the truth.

For example (2), one of the most common features of medical intervention in colonial countries was its association with military aspects, not only because many of the medical directors of those medical policies were military, or that the only work devices that participated in Tropical Medicine were military, but politics. The clear colonialism – according to David Arnold in his book Imperial Medicine and Local Societies – was that the treatment of the health battle was a military operation, while in the meantime the armies were allowed to cross borders, and the epidemics were used to suppress the movements of rejection and opposition.

In India, in particular, you could easily notice that the introduction of vaccination for epidemics at the end of the nineteenth century was based mainly on the “health belt” policy, meaning that the closest to the Indians to vaccinate was only the closest in distance to the English, so workers came in their factories, servants and health-care workers participating Indian In the medical teams and those dealing directly with British doctors at the top of the list, after that comes the closest to these, and then the vaccination continues, with the English being its center.

In fact, this prompted the Indians themselves to question the intentions of the British, at first glance you might think that a people rejecting the vaccine due to an epidemic that kills it is an ignorant people who support the idea of ​​the colonizer about it, but put yourself in their place. But what if he wants – through medication – to reduce my fertility or just encourage me to work like a donkey and use that as an excuse? There are many indications that the Indians ’position on the vaccine was logical, for example that the vaccine was being damaged during its trip in the ocean and did not protect against disease, which confirmed to the Indians their vision.

In addition to that, the interest in tropical medicine (3), in Asia, Africa and Latin America, was based on diseases that could cause infection to the colonizer, and researchers and doctors neglected other diseases related to the inhabitants of those regions themselves, such as tuberculosis, gonorrhea, dysentery and pneumonia, these diseases continued. Without treatment for long periods, it ate from the bodies of the indigenous people, increasing their ignorance, poverty and vulnerability, but the worst of that is what the colonialists brought about in terms of change in their country.

The environmental changes brought about by the colonialists, whether through the construction of factories, mines, roads and railways on the continent of Africa, for example, contributed to the spread of epidemics at a greater rate, because they push the elements of infection – such as mosquitoes – from their environment to nearby cities and villages, which the indigenous population was not prepared for. , In addition to that, colonialism contributed to the spread of diseases by moving citizens, workers and slaves, from one region to another, so they contributed to the spread of epidemics, but the most important of all is that – often – colonialism brought new diseases to a land that had not spread to it before. Here about epidemics powerfully with smallpox, the plague and the Spanish flu.