Disabled Empire: The Colonial Body in First World War Britain / Hilary R. Buxton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Buxton, Hilary R., Author.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago University of Chicago Press, [2026]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Explores the minute interactions between military servicemen and medical caregivers during World War I to tell a broader story about race, colonialism, labor, and global health. Disabled Empire examines how imperial precedents and racial ideologies shaped the medical treatments that the British state offered to several million Black and brown servicemen during World War I. In recovering the voices and experiences of these soldiers, Hilary R. Buxton illustrates how they navigated the institutional culture of the imperial military and how they helped to shape health and welfare systems well beyond the interwar period. The Great War was the first time that troops and volunteers from nearly all reaches of the Empire participated in the war effort side-by-side. Despite official attempts at segregation, colonial troops met in trenches, mobile camps, casualty clearing stations, hospital ships, and convalescent homes. Just as importantly, those organizing treatment encountered men of different ethnicities, religions, and cultures from across and beyond the British Empire. For British officials, this moment offered an opportunity to remake colonial efficiency and medical knowledge. Yet, as Buxton shows, colonial servicemen were not passive subjects in a wartime laboratory: they were vocal participants who demanded a say in the therapies prescribed to them, the rations they required, the psychiatric care they received, and the prosthetics with which they were fitted. Together, these encounters profoundly remade colonial relations, reshaping imperial science, administration, and colonial understandings of subjecthood. Disabled Empire pushes literature on the war and medicine outside its national, Eurocentric focus to confront the colonial logic of global health inequity.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1 Bodies for War: Recruiting and Healing the Colonial Serviceman

2 Stomachs: Nutrition, Deficiency Disease, and Multiracial Rationing

3 Nerves: Mental Health and the Ethnicization of Military Psychiatry

4 Bones: Rehabilitation and the Project of Imperial Re-Membering

5 Bodies in the Aftermath: Pensions, Petitions, and Protest

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed April 28 2026)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780226847535

OCLC:

1587431759