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Coolie Therapeutics: Labor, Race, and Medical Science in Tropical Australia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 April 2017

Warwick Anderson
Warwick Anderson*
Affiliation:
University of Sydney
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Abstract

This essay considers the biomedical framing of labor in tropical Australia from the late-nineteenth century until the early twenty-first century. This entails critical inquiry into racialized estimates of labor capacity or fitness, as well as skeptical examination of medical assumptions of risk and danger. Racial theories and medical conjectures have constituted flexible analytic toolkits that might adjust, adapt, and justify a variety of exploitative labor practices in Australia’s tropical north. Debates about coolie or indentured labor were never simply economic calculations: They also concerned notions of races and their proper places, and expressed particular moral sensibilities and medical fears. Thus labor history becomes entangled with histories of racial formation and of science and medicine

Type
Labor Rights and The Coolie Question
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 91: Thinking Labor Rights Through the Coolie Question , Spring 2017 , pp. 46 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2017 

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References

NOTES

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