2026/03/04 by Sascha Auerbach · 1 voice
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Caribbean history, culture, and politics #Colonialism, slavery, and trade #Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices
paper · doi:10.1093/pastj/gtag011
openalex publication_date 2026/03/04 · openalex created_date 2026/06/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
Abstract This article seeks to reframe the historical origins of modern public health in the Atlantic World geographically, chronologically, and ideologically. Historians working in the British context have customarily located the origins of modern public health in the metropolitan sanitary reform movements of the 1830s and 1840s, associating it with the ideologies of liberalism and Utilitarianism. In contrast, I relocate these origins to the Anglo-Caribbean plantation colonies, to the late eighteenth century, to the debates over abolition, and to the reform of slavery and the slave trade. The array of concepts and practices that emerged from this context had profound implications for the broader character of both colonial and metropolitan governance. New approaches to health pioneered in the reform of Anglo-Caribbean slavery became entangled, in official policy and public discourse, with wider questions about the general character of the modern state; its authority over working bodies, both enslaved and free; and the increasingly central role of medical and scientific expertise and evidence in shaping state practices.