This lecture explores relationships between race, slavery, medicine, statistics, and disability in mid nineteenth-century Britain.
At its core are a series of reports on military medical statistics, principally authored by Alexander Tulloch, that would become the backbone for a swathe of 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 made an argument for the inability of Africans to adapt to climates far removed from those of their homelands. Enough has been stated, he wrote in 1840, to afford another striking instance how unfitted is the constitution of the Negro for any other climate than that in which he is the native. White bodies, by contrast, were hyper-able.
Africans, by Tulloch’s logic, could travel 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.
This event will take place in room "Torrino" and on zoom (hybrid mode).
Please register in order to reserve your seat in the room or to get the zoom link.