Alison Bashford
Biographic Data
| ID | 124208 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alison Bashford |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alison |
| FAMILY NAME | Bashford |
| SIGNATURE | BASHFORD A |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1703-5843 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 77 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 245 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 72 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 5 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Is Deep History White? An Afterword
In this Afterword, I suggest that this Focus Section has highlighted a bio-mythology as well as a geo-mythology within deep time knowledge. I point to a recurrence of African histories in the articles and signal two versions of deep history. First, a “paleo” deep history is knowledge and practice constructed within various modern natural, physical, and human sciences; second, an Indigenous deep history, which is an actual phenomenon. These vie fo…
Maritime geographies and the borders of disease: Three historical precedents of quarantined vessels
In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, vessels were suspended across the oceans, unable to dock and with passengers and crew denied local permission to disembark. These scenarios were another way in which the effects of this virus were understood to be ‘unprecedented’, seemingly disrupting existing protocols, regulations and lines of authority. However, this article historicizes the stranded cruise ship in examples from the late ni…
The Disenchantment of Chiromancy: Reading Modern Hands from Palmistry to Genetics
We might expect chiromancy in the modern period to be analysed best within the well-known late nineteenth-century occult revival. The specific practice of palmistry, as it happens, is minimally examined in that historiographical context. Yet the purpose here is not to reinstate palmistry into our already extensive understanding of an Anglo-American modern occult, but to show how other readers of hands, including those trained in biomedical scienc…
New Earth Histories: Geo-Cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World
Malthus and gender
This article re‐reads Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population for his explicit discussion of men and women, masculinity and femininity. A feminist reading is possible, but not undertaken here. Rather, the purpose is simply to demonstrate how ‘gender’ was Malthus's own object of inquiry. Historical actors, perhaps especially economic thinkers, often considered gender far more fully and explicitly than almost all subsequent analysts of them.…
Lines of Hygiene: Pandemic Border Control in Australia, 1919
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) crisis has highlighted the public health history of infectious disease control. Yet while much historiographical focus has been directed to the management of international movement in pandemic times, this has proved insufficient as restrictions on movement have turned inward and become far more domestic and local during COVID-19. We argue for a new significance of, and for, local historical analysis of medico-le…
Jeremy Martens rewrites our understanding of immigration restriction, race and sovereignty
Jeremy Martens rewrites our understanding of immigration restriction, race and sovereignty." History Australia, 18(2), pp. 418–419
World History and the Tasman Sea
Tracking and analyzing connection and mobility are now conventional in oceanic and world historiography and in many Indigenous historiographies. This article offers a counterargument and counterinstance. On both sides of the Tasman Sea lie human histories of almost incommensurably different temporal orders, separate for several centuries and suddenly connected in 1770, when Polynesians and Aboriginal people met. The Tasman Sea turns out to be one…
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan. As the World Ages: Rethinking a Demographic Crisis
Twentieth-century demography and global population change have engaged a range of historians over the past decade. Many have analyzed population growth and the international and personal politics of the fertility control response. Others have historicized long-standing and ongoing fertility decline over the modern period, what that has meant to states, to economies, and to families. Yet I do not know of another book that has so thoroughly histori…
On nations and states: A reflection on ‘Thinking the Empire Whole’
In key respects I agree with, and appreciate, the interventions presented in Pincus et al.’s ‘Thinking the Empire Whole’. I agree that after a generation of cultural approaches to the history of th
Malthusian Moments: Introduction
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Malthus and China
T. R. Malthus was deeply interested in how his principle of population operated in societies distant to, and different from, his own. In this respect, China served as an intriguing case, already famous in his own time for its large and dense population and the central regulation of a closed economy. Malthus drew on both centuries-old Jesuit material and recent accounts from the Macartney embassy to the Qianlong emperor to assess its past and pres…
The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population
The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus is a sweeping global and intellectual history that radically recasts our understanding of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population , the most famous book on population ever written or ever likely to be. Malthus's Essay is also persistently misunderstood. First published anonymously in 1798, the Essay systematically argues that population growth tends to outpace its means of subsistence unless kept in …
Forced Migration in the Spanish Pacific World: From Mexico to the Philippines, 1765–1811, by Eva Maria Mehl
The wide geography of Eva Maria Mehl’s study—the Spanish Pacific world from Mexico to the Philippines—indicates the large and connected fields of scholarship to which this book will contribute, and with some considerable force. Yet its scope is even greater, for one of Mehl’s claims—well substantiated—is that military and penal transportation systems from Mexico to Manila were enmeshed in transportation systems around the Atlantic too. She does n…
Roundtable: The Anthropocene in British History
The following exchange was the result of ongoing informal conversations among the contributors, who are all, in different ways, interested in the emergent concept of the Anthropocene and the challenges it posed, and the opportunities it provided, for historians working on Britain and the world. The conversation began at the end of 2015 and continued for about a year
Oceanic Histories: A Roundtable
Oceanic HistoriesA Roundtable Renaud Morieux, Clare Anderson, Jonathan Lamb, David Armitage, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram Oceanic Histories Edited by David Armitage, Alison Bashford and Sujit Sivasundaram. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Oceanic Histories opens a new series for Cambridge University Press. By bringing world history, maritime history and environmental history into one conversation, it presents the very lates…
Deep Genetics: Universal History and the Species
The popularity of books such as Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind suggests that universal history-writing has a continuous not a broken past. Rather than "returning," it is perhaps the most enduring genre of all. This review essay explores the deep-history element of universal histories and the ongoing purchase of the stadial tradition for a new history of the species. Why are deep histories of the species so reliably appe…
Quarantine
Oceanic Histories
Maritime Quarantine: Linking Old World and New World Histories
Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species by Neel Ahuja
Reviewed by: Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species by Neel Ahuja Alison Bashford Neel Ahuja. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016. xix + 262 pp. Ill. $24.95 (978-0-8223-6063-6). After decades of publications on biosecurity, Ahuja's title—Bioinsecurities—promises something different. On the one hand, there is much that is fam…
Environment, Race, and Nationhood in Australia: Revisiting the Empty North
Environment, Race, and Nationhood in Australia: Revisiting the Empty North." Australian Historical Studies, 48(2), pp. 301–302
Terraqueous Histories
In her Inaugural Lecture, Alison Bashford, Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, introduces the concept of ‘terraqueous histories’. Maritime historians often stake large claims on world history, and it is indeed the case that the connections and distinctions between land and sea are everywhere in the many traditions of world history-writing. Collapsing the land/sea couplet is useful and ‘terraqueous’ history serves world histor…
New Perspectives on Malthus
Quarantine: Local and Global Histories
Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health
This is a cultural history of borders, hygiene and race. It is about foreign bodies, from Victorian Vaccines to the pathologized interwar immigrant, from smallpox quarantine to the leper colony, from
Global biopolitics and the history of world health
Many scholars have historicized biopolitics with reference to the emergence of sovereign nations and their colonial extensions over the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. This article begins to conceptualize and trace the history of biopolitics beyond the nation, arguing that the history of world health - the great 20th-century reach of 19th-century health and hygiene - should be understood as a vital politics of population on a newly large field of …
Is White Australia possible?' Race, colonialism and tropical medicine
This article investigates the early twentieth century discourse of tropical medicine as a site in which "whiteness" became the object of biomedical scrutiny. Australian tropical medicine is notable in that it reversed the usual raced and gendered dynamics of Western medico-scientific research. Rather than studying the black body, it studied the white body, and rather than pathologizing women, it pathologized men. In the early to mid twentieth cen…
Terraqueous Histories
In her Inaugural Lecture, Alison Bashford, Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, introduces the concept of ‘terraqueous histories’. Maritime historians often stake large claims on world history, and it is indeed the case that the connections and distinctions between land and sea are everywhere in the many traditions of world history-writing. Collapsing the land/sea couplet is useful and ‘terraqueous’ history serves world histor…
At the border contagion, immigration, nation
In recent publications and as an ongoing project I have been pursuing the idea that public health and infectious disease control have been part of the legal and technical constitution of 'undesirable' and prohibited entrants: an under-recognised means by which individuals and certain populations have been specifically classified and excluded from the territory and body politic of Australia. This article surveys and summarises these ideas and poin…
The Colonial History of the 1905 Aliens Act
The passing of the Aliens Act of 1905 was a defining moment in British immigration law and history. This article investigates the influence of settler-colonial immigration restriction laws on the passing of the Act, and questions the current historiographical inclination to focus solely on the influence of American immigration restriction laws. By analysing the trajectory of contemporary public debates, the evidence given to the Royal Commission …
The Right to Asylum: Britain's 1905 Aliens Act and the Evolution of Refugee Law
From the 1880s, states and self-governing colonies in North and South America, across Australasia, and in southern Africa began introducing laws to regulate the entry of newly defined “undesirable immigrants.” This was a trend that intensified exclusionary powers originally passed in the 1850s to regulate Chinese migration, initially in the context of the gold rushes in California and the self-governing colony of Victoria in Australia. The entry …
Nation, Empire, Globe: The Spaces of Population Debate in the Interwar Years
There are several analytical strands through which historians and demographers understand the evolution of twentieth-century population politics and expertise. One is the history of the declining birthrate, nationalism, pro-natalism, and modern degeneration anxieties, including histories of eugenics. A second strand is the story of global overpopulation, its mobilization as a mid-twentieth-century issue in Cold War politics, the dominance of the …
Quarantine and the imagining of the Australian nation
This article explores ways in which the technology of quarantine functioned in the imagining of Australia as a nation in the early 20th century. With the aim of historicizing scholarship on the formation of identities through boundary maintenance, this article explores that literal boundary which creates 'clean' and 'dirty' spaces and subjects, the quarantine line. Quarantine produced cultural ideas and effects of a pure national self, and a path…
Immigration restriction: Rethinking period and place from settler colonies to postcolonial nations
Immigration acts have long been analysed as instrumental to the working of the modern nation-state. A particular focus has been the racial exclusions and restrictions that were adopted by aspirationally white, new world nation-states: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. This article looks again at the long modern history of immigration restriction in order to connect the history of these settler-colonial race-based exclusions (…
The Anthropocene is Modern History: Reflections on Climate and Australian Deep Time
This reflective piece asks whether there is a particular Australian connection to recent discussion of an Anthropocene. Australian historians are perhaps predisposed to ‘deep time’; at the very least they are more accustomed to thinking about great time-scales than historians writing from and about other national history traditions
Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education
Journal Article Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education Get access By Jonathan Zimmerman. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. xii, 202 pp. $25.95.) Journal of American History, Volume 102, Issue 4, March 2016, Pages 1226–1227, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav681 Published: 01 March 2016
Roundtable: The Anthropocene in British History
The following exchange was the result of ongoing informal conversations among the contributors, who are all, in different ways, interested in the emergent concept of the Anthropocene and the challenges it posed, and the opportunities it provided, for historians working on Britain and the world. The conversation began at the end of 2015 and continued for about a year
Anticolonial Climates: Physiology, Ecology, and Global Population, 1920s–1950s
Historiography on tropical medicine and determinist ideas about climate and racial difference rightly focuses on links with nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial rule. Occasionally and counterintuitively, however, these ideas have been redeployed as anticolonial argument. This article looks at one such instance; the racial physiology of Indian economist, ecologist, and anticolonial nationalist Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889–1968). It argues that …
New Earth Histories: Geo-Cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World
Deep Genetics: Universal History and the Species
The popularity of books such as Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind suggests that universal history-writing has a continuous not a broken past. Rather than "returning," it is perhaps the most enduring genre of all. This review essay explores the deep-history element of universal histories and the ongoing purchase of the stadial tradition for a new history of the species. Why are deep histories of the species so reliably appe…
Rewriting Quarantine: Pacific History at Australia's Edge
There is no doubt that the historical geographies of quarantine and racial nationalism overlapped at Sydney's North Head Quarantine Station. To conflate these practices into a single narrative of immigration restriction, however, obscures other stories and agendas. Drawing upon inscriptions left in the Sydney sandstone by those detained at North Head, we argue that for many Pacific voyagers, quarantine was merely a temporary interruption rather t…
Malthus and colonial history
It is rarely recognised—either by scholars of Australian history or of Thomas Robert Malthus—that the famous political economist wrote about New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land in later editions of Essay on the Principle of Population. This occasional lecture examines just what he said about Aboriginal people in 1803, at a time when native people and their land was high on many a colonial agenda. This Lecture suggests the need to analyse Malthu…
Thinking historically about public health
This paper argues that analysing past public health policies calls for scholarship that integrates insights not just from medical history but from a broad range of historical fields. Recent studies of historic infectious disease management make this evident: they confirm that prior practices inhere in current perceptions and policies, which, like their antecedents, unfold amidst shifting amalgams of politics, culture, law and economics. Thus, exp…
The Return of the Repressed: Feminism in the Quad
Malthusian Moments: Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Geographies of commemoration: Angel Island, San Francisco and North Head, Sydney
World population and Australian land: Demography and sovereignty in the twentieth century
While much Australian historiography focuses on the declining national birth rate, this article demonstrates the extent of concern about world overpopulation. Analysing the work of three internationally significant demographers, it argues that Australian land—Australian ‘emptiness'—was closely scrutinised in an intellectual and political milieu more global and cosmopolitan than national, regional or imperial. In this tradition of expertise, the e…
Tuberculosis, migration, and medical examination: Lessons from history
The health screening of migrants, asylum seekers, and other entrants to the UK is currently high on the political and public health agenda. Two features of this debate are worth highlighting—the focus on single diseases such as tuberculosis, and the emphasis on the experience of Australia. In February 2005, the government announced proposals to implement existing powers by screening visa applicants for tuberculosis on "high risk" routes, and requ…
Oceanic Histories: A Roundtable
Oceanic HistoriesA Roundtable Renaud Morieux, Clare Anderson, Jonathan Lamb, David Armitage, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram Oceanic Histories Edited by David Armitage, Alison Bashford and Sujit Sivasundaram. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Oceanic Histories opens a new series for Cambridge University Press. By bringing world history, maritime history and environmental history into one conversation, it presents the very lates…
Frances gillam holden and the children's hospital dispute, 1887: Woman's Sphere, Feminism and Nursing
This paper examines the confrontations of a late nineteenth-century ‘lady superintendent’ with men and masculinity. It analyses the problematical links between femininity, feminism and ‘reformed’ nursing, in a period when the latter two were emerging from the first. A central focus is the extent to which the discourse of ‘woman's sphere’ was meaningful for such single, employed, middle-class women as the subject of this paper, Frances Gillam Hold…
The art of midwifery: Early modern midwives in europe
Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism
A Miller’s Tale
Starch on the collar and sweat on the brow: Self sacrifice and the status of work for nurses
The Return of the Repressed: Feminism in the Quad
Quarantine and the imagining of the Australian nation
This article explores ways in which the technology of quarantine functioned in the imagining of Australia as a nation in the early 20th century. With the aim of historicizing scholarship on the formation of identities through boundary maintenance, this article explores that literal boundary which creates 'clean' and 'dirty' spaces and subjects, the quarantine line. Quarantine produced cultural ideas and effects of a pure national self, and a path…
Epidemic and governmentality: Smallpox in Sydney, 1881
This article interprets a smallpox epidemic which took place in Sydney in 1881, in the light of Michel Foucault's work on health, populations and the development of administrative government. It is a local and historical study informed by, and written in response to, a critical sociological literature which traces the development of public health strategies in the modern West. It examines, first, the ‘writing’ of the epidemic in and by a new colo…
Is White Australia possible?' Race, colonialism and tropical medicine
This article investigates the early twentieth century discourse of tropical medicine as a site in which "whiteness" became the object of biomedical scrutiny. Australian tropical medicine is notable in that it reversed the usual raced and gendered dynamics of Western medico-scientific research. Rather than studying the black body, it studied the white body, and rather than pathologizing women, it pathologized men. In the early to mid twentieth cen…
Asylum–Seekers and National Histories of Detention
The Australian system of mandatory detention of asylum–seekers has become increasingly controversial. Insofar as commentary on detention has been framed historically, critics have pointed to Australia’s race–based exclusionary laws and policies over the twentieth century. In this article, we suggest that exclusion and detention are not equivalent practices, even if they are often related. Here we present an alternative genealogy of mandatory dete…
At the border contagion, immigration, nation
In recent publications and as an ongoing project I have been pursuing the idea that public health and infectious disease control have been part of the legal and technical constitution of 'undesirable' and prohibited entrants: an under-recognised means by which individuals and certain populations have been specifically classified and excluded from the territory and body politic of Australia. This article surveys and summarises these ideas and poin…
Contagion
In the age of HIV, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the Ebola Virus and BSE, metaphors and experience of contagion are a central concern of government, biomedicine and popular culture.Contagion explores cultural responses of infectious diseases and their biomedical management over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also investigates the use of 'contagion' as a concept in postmodern reconceptualisations of embodied subjectivity.The essays ar…
Isolation: Places and Practices of Exclusion
Peer-reviewed
Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health
This is a cultural history of borders, hygiene and race. It is about foreign bodies, from Victorian Vaccines to the pathologized interwar immigrant, from smallpox quarantine to the leper colony, from
Colonialism and Contagious Diseases
Colonialism and Contagious Diseases Alison Bashford This is a book that matters. At the dual levels of information and interpretation — equally important — we learn much from Levine in Prostitution, Race and Politics. And in methodological terms, this book will stand for many years unsurpassed: it is a model for a fresh kind of comparative history. Ambitiously tackling not just the classic comparative ‘two’ cases, but four distinct colonies of th…
Border Medicine
Colonial Dis-Ease: US Navy Health Policies and the Chamorros of Guam, 1898-1941 (review)
Reviewed by: Colonial Dis-Ease: US Navy Health Policies and the Chamorros of Guam, 1898-1941 Alison Bashford Anne Perez Hattori . Colonial Dis-Ease: US Navy Health Policies and the Chamorros of Guam, 1898-1941. Pacific Islands Monograph Series, no. 19. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 2004. xiv + 239 pp. Ill. $45.00 (0-8248-2808-9). This book is one answer to the question posed some time ago by Warwick Anderson in the pages of this journal:…
Books
Civil Rights: How Indigenous Australians Won Formal Equality. By John Chesterman. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2005. Pp. 357. $22.95 paper. Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney's Romance with Modernity. By Jill Julius Matthews. Sydney: Currency Press, 2005. Pp. 342. $32.95 paper. Conciliation, Compulsion, Conversion: British Attitudes to Indigenous Peoples 1763–1814. By Merete Falck Borch. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Pp. 320. US$43 pap…
Books
Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth Century Australia. By Pat Jalland. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006. Pp. 409. $39.95 paper. A Different Sort of War: Australians in Korea, 1950–53. By Richard Trembath. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2005. Pp. 266. $34.95 paper. New Zealand and the Vietnam War: Politics and Diplomacy. By Roberto Rabel. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 443. NZ$49.99 paper. The Encyclopedia of Melbourne. E…
Global biopolitics and the history of world health
Many scholars have historicized biopolitics with reference to the emergence of sovereign nations and their colonial extensions over the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. This article begins to conceptualize and trace the history of biopolitics beyond the nation, arguing that the history of world health - the great 20th-century reach of 19th-century health and hygiene - should be understood as a vital politics of population on a newly large field of …
Tuberculosis, migration, and medical examination: Lessons from history
The health screening of migrants, asylum seekers, and other entrants to the UK is currently high on the political and public health agenda. Two features of this debate are worth highlighting—the focus on single diseases such as tuberculosis, and the emphasis on the experience of Australia. In February 2005, the government announced proposals to implement existing powers by screening visa applicants for tuberculosis on "high risk" routes, and requ…
Thinking historically about public health
This paper argues that analysing past public health policies calls for scholarship that integrates insights not just from medical history but from a broad range of historical fields. Recent studies of historic infectious disease management make this evident: they confirm that prior practices inhere in current perceptions and policies, which, like their antecedents, unfold amidst shifting amalgams of politics, culture, law and economics. Thus, exp…
World population and Australian land: Demography and sovereignty in the twentieth century
While much Australian historiography focuses on the declining national birth rate, this article demonstrates the extent of concern about world overpopulation. Analysing the work of three internationally significant demographers, it argues that Australian land—Australian ‘emptiness'—was closely scrutinised in an intellectual and political milieu more global and cosmopolitan than national, regional or imperial. In this tradition of expertise, the e…
Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain , by Hilary Marland
Reviewed by: Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain Alison Bashford (bio) Dangerous Motherhood: Insanity and Childbirth in Victorian Britain, by Hilary Marland; pp. xii + 303. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, £50.00, $75.00. This book is an important addition to the history of women and gender in the Victorian period, to the history of psychiatry, and to criminal justice history on infanticide and in…
Nation, Empire, Globe: The Spaces of Population Debate in the Interwar Years
There are several analytical strands through which historians and demographers understand the evolution of twentieth-century population politics and expertise. One is the history of the declining birthrate, nationalism, pro-natalism, and modern degeneration anxieties, including histories of eugenics. A second strand is the story of global overpopulation, its mobilization as a mid-twentieth-century issue in Cold War politics, the dominance of the …
History (47 works) · Political science (45 works) · Sociology (45 works) · Law (44 works) · History (27 works) · Politics (27 works) · Law (23 works) · Archaeology (19 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Colonialism (17 works)