A Decided Inaptitude in His Constitution
Race, Slavery, and Disability in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3924439 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sanjay Seth (0000-0002-2591-6977, corresponding author), Suman Seth |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 39 |
| Pages | 95-113 |
| Publication date | 2024-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Osiris (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0369-7827 • E-ISSN: 1933-8287 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/730404 |
| OpenAlex | W4400032716 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
This chapter explores relationships between disability, race, slavery, medicine, and statistics in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. At its core are reports on military medical statistics, principally authored by Alexander Tulloch, that would become the backbone for subsequent claims about the reality and numerical value of race. Tulloch’s Statistical Reports drew on his earlier (1837) statistical defense of plantation owners’ treatment of the enslaved, published only a few years after the formal abolition of slavery. In those Reports, Tulloch argued for the inability of Africans to adapt to climates far removed from those of their homelands. White bodies, by contrast, were hyper-able. Maladaptability, in other words, was cast as a form of racialized disability. Africans, by Tulloch’s logic, could move (or be moved) to relatively few places safely, while Europeans—committed to a range of settler-colonial projects—could claim a swathe of the world as their domain, even if the tropics remained a graveyard
Constitution · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Economic and Legal Thought · History · Law · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |