This book argues that the history of colonial empires has been shaped to a considerable extent by negative emotions such as anxiety, fear and embarrassment as well as by the regular occurrence of panics. The case studies it assembles examine the various ways in which panics and anxieties were generated in imperial situations and how they shook up the dynamics between seemingly all-powerful colonizers and the apparently defenceless colonized. Drawing from examples of the British, Dutch and German colonial experience, the volume sketches out some of the main areas (such as disease, native savagery or sexual transgression) that generated panics or created anxieties in colonial settings and analyses the most common varieties of practical, discursive and epistemic strategies adopted by the colonisers to curb the perceived threats. 

 

Harald Fischer-Tiné is Professor of Modern Global History at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zürich), Switzerland. Previous to his appointment in Zurich he taught at Jacobs University, Bremen, Humboldt-University, Berlin and the University of Heidelberg. He has published extensively on South Asian colonial history, the history of the British Empire and global history. His most recent monograph is the biography of an Indian revolutionary in European exile:Shyamji Krishnavarma: Sanskrit, Sociology and Anti-Imperialism (2014)

Chapter 1. Introduction: Emires and Emotions; Harald Fischer-Tiné and Christine Whyte.- Part I: The Health of Body and Mind.- Chapter 2: Minds in Crisis: Medico-Moral Theories of Disorder in the Late Colonial World; Dane Kennedy.- Chapter 3. The Poison Panics of British India; David Arnold.- Chapter 4. The Settlers Demise: Decolonization and Mental Breakdown in 1950s Kenya; Will Jackson.- Part II: Imperial Panics and Discursive Responses.- Chapter 5. Mass-Mediated Panic in the British Empire? Shyamji Krishnavarmas Scientific Terrorism and the London Outrage, 1909; Harald Fischer-Tiné.- Chapter 6. The Art of Panicking Quietly: British Expatriate Responses to Terrorist Outrages in India, 1912-33; Kama Maclean.- Chapter 7. Mirrors of Violence: Inter-Racial Sex, Colonial Anxieties and Disciplining the Body of the Indian Soldier during the First World War; Gajendra Singh.- Part III: Practical and Institutional Counter-Measures.- Chapter 8. Colonial Panics Big and Small in the British Empire (1865-1907); Norman Etherington.- Chapter 9. Imperial Fears and Transnational Policing in Europe: The German Problem and the British and French Surveillance of Anti-Colonialists in Exile, 1904-1939; Daniel Brückenhaus.- Chapter 10. Repertoires of European Panic and Indigenous Recaptures in Late Colonial Indonesia; Vincent Houben.- Chapter 11. The Swiss of all People! Politics of Embarrassment and Dutch Imperialism around 1900; Bernhard C. Schär.- Part IV Knowledge and Ignorance.- Chapter 12. Arrested Circulation. Catholic Missionaries, Anthropological Knowledge and the Politics of Cultural Difference in Imperial Germany, 1880-1914; Richard Hölzl.- Chapter 13. The strangest problem: Daniel Wilberforce, Human Leopards panic and the Special Court in Sierra Leone; Christine Whyte.- Chapter 14. Critical Mass: Colonial Crowds and Contagious Panics in 1890s Hong Kong and Bombay; Robert Peckham.- Notes on Contributors