This is a chapter about the public articulation of disability in terms of concerns about the British nation. From sensory impairment, to stature, to intellect, from the end of the nineteenth century, disability became an issue relevant not only to the lives of the disabled, and those who cared for them, but to everyone. It became not only a national issue but also an imperial concern. Ultimately, I argue that these reconfigurations tie in with similar shifts that were occurring around attitudes towards race and class. In the later nineteenth century rapid imperial expansion, not least the ‘Scramble for Africa’, provided an additional backdrop against which attitudes towards race regrouped. Another important movement was the rise of thinking about ‘degeneration’ and eugenics. What I argue here is that some of these concerns not only applied to disability, as well, but coalesced around the same issues. ‘Feeble-mindedness’, for example, a category ostensibly about intellectual and cognitive impairment, became a key issue which spoke to issues of race ‘hygiene’ and class concerns. The valorisation of the strong, masculine, white, non-disabled, young adult body, in this period became increasingly linked with heredity and therefore became a matter of public concern.

The conclusion sums up the findings of the study and suggests new directions for future research.

This chapter uses notions of language and civilisation to understand how disabled people were understood in the context of the British empire.The chapter begins with a discussion of the long-standing association in western European thought between language and humanity. Debates about whether animals had access to language, which gained renewed importance during the Enlightenment and again with evolutionism, identified language acquisition as the ‘true marker’ of what it meant to be human. This left those with aphasia, intellectual disabilities that affected speech or deaf muteness in a highly vulnerable position. Whilst the development of deaf education helped mitigate fears around disability, during the nineteenth century, it became deeply contested and the question as to whether deaf children should be educated using sign language or spoken English became of surprisingly wide importance. Drawing on the work of Douglas Baynton, who argues that in nineteenth-century America sign language was increasingly linked with an early stage of evolution and ‘foreignness’, I resituate these trends, found also in Britain, in the context of colonialism and imperialism. I argue that the intolerance of sign language was linked to a wider intolerance of difference, both the difference of disability and the difference of ‘race’.

The Introduction makes an argument for the importance of disability as an analytical category and sets out an agenda for doing this work. The basis of this argument lies both in the historiographical demand for this kind of analysis, and the historical, political and theoretical importance of including disability as a key concept in discussions of the nineteenth-century British empire. The relationship between disability and race is an element to this and historical examples are used to demonstrate this argument. The introduction also defines key terms that are used throughout such as ‘disability’, ‘disablism’, ‘ableism’ and sketches out the scope and structure of the book.

This chapter is about processes of display. Examining the history of ‘freakshows’ I argue that those labelled ‘freaks’ not only constituted part of the population of disabled people, but helped to contribute to the conceptualisation of that category in the public sphere.I argue that the popularity of the freakshow and the prevalence of impairment as a key part of it, attests to the significance of disability as a contemporary social concern. Relatedly, I argue that freakshows contributed to how disability came to be objectified as something ‘other’ and something beyond, if not antithetical to, the self. The chapter is structured around the lives of key performers on the nineteenth-century freakshow circuit: Joseph Merrick (the ‘Elephant Man’); Eng and Chung Bunker (the ‘original Siamese Twins’); Tom Wiggins (‘Blind Tom’); Krao (the ‘Missing Link’); and Maximo and Bartola (‘The Aztec Lilliputians’). It will be noted that all of these performers, except for my first example, Joseph Merrick, were not only disabled or disfigured but were also people of colour and often from colonial sites. This fact, which arises from the sources, tells us something important about the relationship between disability and race in the construction of bodily anomaly.

One consequence of the increased enumeration of disabled people and their constitution as pitiable, was the imperative to ‘save’ them from physical destitution and spiritual damnation. Co-currently, from the late eighteenth century onwards a series of intellectual and pedagogical developments meant that helping or ‘civilising’ certain disabled populations, started to be seen as possible. Philanthropists, educationalists, religious figures and, later, government officials, declared they could ‘save’ disabled people and advocated new techniques and instruments to do so. Like the racialised others of empire, disabled people were deemed incapable of helping themselves and dependent on white, non-disabled people. Taking different geographical frames, this chapter tracks these developments in thinking about the development of ‘special’ education, the development of philanthropic work and the increasing role of the state. I make several arguments. First that developments in education were linked to the wider ‘civilising project’. Secondly, that the opening of schools and institutions, whilst uneven and sporadic were based on networks of knowledge that facilitated the transcolonial exchange of information. And thirdly that the discrepant development of institutions across different colonial locations also reflected racialised forms of knowledge about the people who lived there.

This chapter explores how one particular group of people defined as disabled, Deaf people, experienced and articulated that identity. Whilst deaf people were labelled ‘foreigners in their native land’, in this chapter I argue that deaf people came to inhabit distinct cultural identities, positively identifying with what they called the ‘deaf World’, or sometimes the ‘deaf nation’. Working from the twenty-first century backwards, there is good reason to focus on deafness as a particular case study here: contemporary theorists have argued that deaf identity is so strong that it operates as a form of ‘ethnicity’. Whilst, as I discuss, there continues to be disagreement about the utility of framing deaf people as an ethnic group, I use the idea of deafness as an ethnicity as a starting point to think about deaf community in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, I explore what deaf belonging means for the intersection of identities based around nationhood with those constructed around disability. The Chapter therefore explores, deaf communities in Britain (through the deaf press, deaf intermarriage etc), deaf plans for a separatist deaf state or colony, and deaf internationalism.

This chapter explores the discourses used to construct disability as different in nineteenth-century Britain and its empire. First, I argue that in this period a constellation of figures came to be seen as a class of people distinct from the remainder of the British population. The census and philanthropic literature functioned to crystallise disability as something tangible and other. Conceptualising disabled people in this way required considerable discursive, architectural, administrative, philanthropic and pedagogical work and this work occurred both in the empire overseas and at home in imperial Britain. Secondly, I argue that the status of Britain, throughout the nineteenth century, as the heart of a global empire, was crucial to how ideas about disability came to be formed. My third argument is that whilst empire shaped the way in which disability was constructed, the reverse was also true: thinking about disability moulded the way in which the colonial ‘other’ was imagined. People of colour who may otherwise be considered non-disabled were repeatedly described using language that evoked disablement. My overarching argument is, therefore, that discourses of race and disability, whilst not one and the same, were not simply related discourses but were mutually constituted.

A considerable historiography now details the racism upon which immigration restrictions are formed. My first argument here is that disabled people were also refused entry first to the colonies in the British empire and then to Britain itself, exclusions which have often continued to be naturalised. Secondly, I argue that exclusions of disabled peoples should not just be added onto our understanding of restrictive legislation on racial grounds, but that disability and race intersected. Disability was used to justify racial exclusions, and differences of disability were often raced. Particular kinds of bodies were being constructed as ‘valuable’ to the nation. These bodies were to be white and North European, but they were also to be mentally and physically ‘fit’ and that ‘fitness’ was defined in rigid terms. The values attached to race, ability and gender were mutually constituted. Masculine bodies were to be independent, working bodies. Whether or not a deaf or disabled person could work, their body was read as dependent, incapable and as a liability. Feminine bodies were read in terms of their reproductive value. Disabled women, infantilised and desexualised were not always read as capable of reproduction. And when they were, this too had frightening potential.