Infective Economies: Empire,Panic and the Business of Disease

The Third Plague Pandemic in Asia during the 1890s, and the institutional stresses it produced, exposed inherent vulnerabilities within the global networks that sustained the British Empire. While commercial and informational routes meshed disparate imperial dominions, they also functioned as pathways for disease and conduits of panic, undermining imperial commerce and threatening social order. Focusing in particular on the 1894 outbreak of bubonic plague in Hong Kong, the paper suggests that an analysis of a ‘local’ epidemic episode and its wider reverberations provides a new perspective on the often heated debates during the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about the meaning and scope of empire in relation to new communication networks. The paper shows how expanding global networks were construed alternatively as sustaining and jeopardising imperial power. The bubonic plague in Hong Kong—a hub of ‘free trade’ in East Asia—and the panicked reactions elicited by the disease's diffusion westwards revealed the economic priorities that informed colonial public health concerns as well as the challenges posed to laissez-faire economic policy and ‘free trade’ by the expanding influence of capital in the ‘New Imperialism’. In so doing, the paper suggests that contemporary preoccupations with ‘globalisation’, ‘biosecurity’ and ‘emerging diseases’ have antecedents that lie beyond the Second World War and the interwar period in a late-nineteenth-century imperial biopolitics.