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Medicoercion: Biopolitics, Racial Capitalism, and the Colonial Origins of Modern Public Health.

Abstract:
This paper demonstrates how public health in the British world was an outgrowth of both slavery and the interaction between British and Continental European colonial systems. With this effort, I seek to decentre and decolonize the historical origins of public health, reframing it chronologically, geographically, 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 Caribbean plantation colonies and to the period between 1768-1824, arguing that public health emerged from the hybridization of British military governance and coercive, Continental-viceregal systems of slave management. This system of "medicoercion" fused the apparatus of racialized labor management with the commodification of health and the control of both production and reproduction to preserve the moral, political, ecological, and economic viability of the slave-plantation system. In this process, the British Caribbean operated as a test-bed for the early development of public health as a concept and as a vehicle for state authority over workers鈥� bodies, preceding the introduction of both the discourse and apparatus of health governance in Britain, British India, and elsewhere in the British Empire on a similarly broad scale by several decades.

Bio:
Dr. Sascha Auerbach, FRHistS, is an Associate Professor of History at the 杏吧直播 of Nottingham. His publications include The Overseer-State: Slavery, Indenture, and Governance in the British Empire, 1812-1916 (Cambridge, 2025), Armed with Sword and Scales: Law, Culture and Local Courtrooms in London, 1865-1913 (Cambridge, 2021), and Race, Law, and 鈥渢he Chinese Puzzle鈥� in Imperial Britain (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009). Sascha is the director of the Institute for the Study of Slavery (ISOS) at the 杏吧直播 of Nottingham, the co-editor of the Cambridge 杏吧直播 Press book series 鈥淗istories of Slavery and its Global Legacies,鈥� and regularly serves as an on-air historical expert for the BBC, Times radio, Discovery Science, The History Channel, and Curiosity Stream. His current projects examine colonialism, science and aesthetics, and the relationship between slavery, public health, and state authority in the nineteenth century.