4 - Segregation in the high imperial era: island leper colonies on Hawaii, at the Cape, in Australia and New Zealand

Summary

Total institutions

Isolation of one kind and another was a time-honoured way of dealing with leprosy. Compulsory segregation, however, only became widespread in the later nineteenth century, and even then there was variation across the imperial world. In most parts of Africa colonial governments lacked the resources to enforce segregation, and in India the scale of the problem defied any such policy. The most rigorous application of the compulsory segregation of lepers occurred in smaller colonies with a higher proportion of European settlers. Many of these were island colonies in the Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Oceans, or coastal ones such as the Cape Colony or around the fringe of the island continent of Australia. Such settlements typically had offshore or contiguous islands where lepers could be removed and detained. Although there were many inland leper colonies as well, island ones best typified the new forms of intervention and institutionalisation that marked the response to leprosy in this period. They were also an especially visible example of more general disease practice and related forms of control that were central to the repertoire of high imperialism.

In this section I shall consider and compare several island leper colonies from different parts of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial world. Islands, because of their bounded geography, have frequently been used for detention and quarantine. They are natural sites of concentration, places where contaminants from the mainland can be dumped.