TY - JOUR
AU1 - Pomfret, David, M
AB - Abstract In recent years scholars have argued that “rejuvenation” took distinctively modern forms as a specific set of surgical procedures intended to realize sexual potency and libidinal enhancement, as well as anti-aging medicine and cosmetic body projects. However, this article underlines the earlier, imperial dimensions of rejuvenation as a set of modern, state-sponsored practices taking shape outside Europe. An important turning point in the modern history of rejuvenation was a shift around 1830 in thinking about “the tropics,” as scientists who identified heat as accelerating the process of aging rejected the possibility of acclimatization in hot zones. Because racial vitality supposedly diminished more quickly in the tropics, the older ideal of the grizzled, mature colonial soldier fell into decline, and rethinking the globe in racial-climatological terms made youth an essential corequisite of empire. Military commanders confronted the need to rejuvenate armies by recruiting soldiers at younger ages. Together with medical experts, they responded to fears of racial-climatological impotence by developing a range of strategies—from troop rotation to the development of hill stations—which scaled up rejuvenation to the level of entire population groups. Focusing on strategies elaborated in Asia to address this problem, this article shows how ideas about youth, time, geography, and modernity gave rise to spaces and networks designed to slow or reverse the aging process, or in other words to achieve “imperial rejuvenation” well before rejuvenation became a buzzword in late nineteenth-century Europe. Introduction In recent times an interdisciplinary scholarship has emerged exploring the modern history of attempts to reverse the aging process. Most of these studies have focused on “rejuvenation” as a set of medical interventions by physicians and physiologists whose work on restorative surgery and hormonal treatments were all the rage in Europe and the United States in the early twentieth century.1 Separately, historians have produced a corpus of work showing how, between roughly 1880 and 1930, mass literacy, cheap print, and popular rituals democratized new male and female ideals of health predicated on youth and beauty, as the use of cosmetics was normalized in different national contexts.2 This article argues that there is a need to look beyond the nationalist-surgical-cosmetic body projects of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe in order to uncover the deeper roots of rejuvenation in modern history. In particular, it argues for the importance of the technologies of imperial conquest and control that were implemented globally in the early to mid-1800s and scaled up to the level of entire populations. The focus here is on those who served in the armed forces. Their presence on the ground underpinned empire building. And initiatives designed to mitigate the conditions troops encountered in hot zones in the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent, and East and Southeast Asia helped to produce rejuvenation as a diverse, contested, and sometimes competing set of projects and practices in global circulation. These hot zones were referred to as part of a distinct “tropical” space where the climate was understood to have an especially destructive impact upon white bodies. There, scientists claimed heat acted as an accelerator, speeding up the life cycles of organisms accustomed to colder climes, frittering away their vital capital and hustling young men toward an early death.3 Precisely because climate and environment made the young old before their time, imperial rule required an ample supply of youthful bodies. So, by mid-century, as the British empire headed toward its zenith, engagements with environmentally determinist views of the tropics produced youthfulness as a core criterion of the ideal colonial’s identity. This became embedded as a formal requirement in recruitment schemes channeling not only Britons but also other Europeans toward tropical places as imperial contest accelerated into the nineteenth century and nation-states vied for a “place in the sun.” As the accompanying debate over “white settlement” rumbled on across the century, the ascription of biological and political significance to the presence of youth or young adults in hot climates prompted military-medical experts to experiment with new ways of cyclically rejuvenating the exhausted “periphery.” Drawing on debates about soldiers’ mortality in South, Southeast, and East Asia, and the British Army in particular, this article examines innovations intended to mediate the depreciative effects of spatial relocation and to replenish stocks of human matériel in the tropics. It reveals how the quest to rejuvenate those serving in hothouse conditions lurked within a variety of pan-imperial projects, from barrack building to army reform. This quest also informed the rise of new specialist areas of tropical hygiene and government-supported schemes, such as the building of hill station enclaves. Inasmuch as contemporaries perceived the benefits of such schemes in terms of a return to earlier conditions or a more vital stage of life—closer to the physical and mental condition of younger men more recently arrived in the tropics—these broadly therapeutic interventions took on the aspect of a mass, state-sponsored system intended to realize “rejuvenation” across entire population cohorts defined in racial-hygienic terms.4 Finally, although elite and military medical interventions made youth a core referent in these schemes, as we shall see, a powerful set of political and social obstacles emerged to check the valence of “rejuvenation” in British colonial and metropolitan contexts. Elites eschewed the explicit naming or recognition of intended transformative interventions in such terms. The reasons for this were complex and related to controversies over army reform, emerging understandings of disease, demands for imperial uplift, and colonial subject people’s interpretation of “rejuvenation” as a process through which entire societies could imagine or achieve a future beyond colonial oppression. These factors limited the appeal of explicit calls for rejuvenation in conservative imperial cultures. Nevertheless, insofar as they turned youth into something to be achieved or retrieved with technological assistance, a variety of cultural texts, structures, and spaces produced under colonial conditions continued to serve and legitimate desires for imperial rejuvenation. Life, Death, and Youth in the Tropics In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, British troops resisted the challenge posed by French Revolutionaries in the Caribbean and delivered control of the greater part of the Indian subcontinent. With this, the fate of the British Empire became more thoroughly entangled with areas of the world between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. In the writings and visual strategies of a range of scholars and travelers, the tropics had long operated as a site of exoticism or radical difference. Some theorized links between climate and degeneration. Others offered romantic, ecologically inflected imaginings of the tropics as an Edenic space. However, beyond these academic debates, the most critical point of difference that medical professionals and military commanders observed in environmental transfer lay in the devastating impact of hot climates upon the bodies of white troops.5 In returns enumerating the dead filtering back to metropolitan Britain from imperial stations in the Caribbean and India, as well as in the writings of commanding officers, a darker vision of “tropicality” as tragedy took shape. As Mark Harrison and others have shown, heat lay at the heart of explanations for the deleterious impact of the tropics on white bodies.6 Heat was understood to have accelerated growth to the extent that plants and animals appeared outsized by comparison with their equivalents in temperate zones. Moreover, it appeared to have acted upon diseases already known in Europe, making them more acute. Medical theorists held that heat weakened those who were originally from cooler climes, either by direct exposure to heat or via miasmas created by its action upon tropical vegetation. Experts nuanced these environmentalist interpretations of tropical perils using older ideas of humoral pathology–disorders of blood, bile, and body fluids—and newer ones emphasizing physiological “overstimulation” and fatigue.7 Nonetheless, the relationship between disease and troop mortality and the correlative impact of both on imperial profitability appeared well established. Indeed, determinist thinking about tropical climates and environments spread beyond scientific communities. Through such means as the wide-ranging surveys of the East India Company, India and other places were “made tropical.”8 In the early nineteenth century, experts studying the topography and climate of tropical places remained convinced that the impact of the environment was remediable. Military commanders and medical professionals who held that foreign bodies could undergo some form of gradual adaptation articulated this through the concept of “seasoning,” which referred to the possibility that those who survived their first “seasoning sickness” were supposedly less likely to die off thereafter. Such beliefs informed calculated efforts to modify constitutions in order to ensure the survival of transferred organisms. Experts referred to this process of recalibrating white bodies through managed contact with tropical nature as “acclimatization.”9 Some held that Europeans might be acclimated if seasoning was approached with sufficient care and would thereafter be able to endure lengthy periods of residence or even settle. At the very least, medical experts serving the military command anticipated that such practices might lower rates of mortality among troops and administrators. For the first few decades of the nineteenth century, army commanders continued to apply this knowledge in the field. Its logic informed long rotations of soldiers in India and the West Indies. All ranks were required to serve in India for ten years (except in cases of certified sickness) before they were rotated out or allowed to be absent on furlough.10 Overseers claimed the troops’ chances of survival were further enhanced if their initial immersion occurred in the supposedly healthier season from November to April, rather than May to October. Meanwhile, knowledge about the spatial distribution of disease also held special value in the battle to preserve troops. Properly applied, it might allow environmental medicine, ventilation, drainage, and sanitation to be more carefully managed. The pursuit of acclimatization shaped understandings of not only the environment and its management but also the specific bodies judged most suitable to fulfill Britain’s expanding imperial commitments. In particular, the logic of “seasoning” underwrote prevailing views that older soldiers were the best soldiers to assign to hot climates. Since the acquisition of immunity required long service, newer arrivals (most of whom were young) appeared to be at a comparative disadvantage. But while acclimatization was an achievement associated with greater age, the expansionist plans of the British East India Company created such high demand for men that the company often had to make do with strikingly young recruits. Cadets joined its infantry and cavalry service from age fifteen, and critics had long disparaged the results of dispatching youth overseas. For example, when the conservatives Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox sought to whip up support for an “India bill” intended to address the corruption and unresponsiveness of the East India Company in 1783, they did so by criticizing the obvious youthfulness of its recruits.11 This issue had acquired a sharper edge by the early nineteenth century as the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars placed still more onerous demands on Britain’s army. In 1806, the secretary for war and the colonies, William Windham, complained in the House of Commons: our only resource has been recruiting boys. Men grown up . . . are too wary to accept our offers; we must add to the thoughtlessness arising from the situation the weakness and improvidence of youth.12 Twenty years later in a letter to the government minister Charles Williams-Wynn, the Duke of Wellington highlighted the comparative lack of physical vigor and resistance of younger soldiers and their supposed unsuitability for service in hot climates. As the Duke put it, “men from thirty to forty years of age, particularly if they have been soldiers to that age, are the most efficient for soldiers, particularly in warm climates.” Wellington based this claim on his own recollection of serving in the East Indies and argued that owing to the capacity of men of thirty-five and over to survive for longer than those who joined from eighteen to twenty-two, “it would be cheaper for the East India Company to send the former.”13 Throughout the British Empire, military commanders grasped the value of experience and regimental discipline as they competed with army surgeons for authority, but as Britain headed toward its imperial apogee, doubts over the prophylactic benefits of “acclimatization” were growing. The imperial line shifted further east following the acquisition of Singapore (by treaty) in 1819 and Hong Kong (by force) in 1842 and the opening of treaty ports along the China coast. Britain committed more troops to tropical climes and for longer periods. Epidemic events continued to have a devastating impact on the military. So staggering were the costs in terms of morbidity and mortality that statisticians, scientists, and medical doctors serving company and crown created new sets of data to assist in efforts to reduce the expense of empire. The Army Medical Department emerged as a leading source of such data.14 Dr. Henry Marshall, deputy inspector general of hospitals for the British Army (who had served in Ceylon) started up the army statistical reports in 1835. The reports of Dr. T. Graham Balfour of the Army Medical Department in India led to the establishment of the Registrar General’s Department, which collated and recorded information on mortality. By the late 1830s, inquiries into the mortality of British troops around the world produced a series of reports laid before the British parliament. These were drawn up using data sets that permitted analyses of rates of mortality over much longer periods of time. So, for example, the Statistical Society of London’s report into “Sickness and Mortality among the European and Native Troops Serving in the Madras Presidency” published in July 1840 was based on statistics gathered by James Annesley (president of the Madras Medical Board) and covered the period from 1793 to 1838 and territories from India to South East Asia in the hope it would “stimulate enquiry into the causes of the excessive mortality which prevails among the European portion of that body and lead to the adoption of remedies.”15 Experts dwelling on these new datasets drawn from different tropical locations noticed a surprising pattern emerge. In his study of Dragoon Guards and Dragoons stationed in West India published in July 1839, J. W. C Lever noted that mortality did not decline but increased much more rapidly with the advance of age. Data for soldiers under age eighteen by contrast suggested “the comparative exemption from mortality of persons at that early period of life.”16 A few months later, Dr. Arthur S. Thomson, stationed in Bombay with the Seventeenth (Leicestershire) Regiment of Foot arrived at similar conclusions. This led him to challenge the “general opinion” that Europeans were especially vulnerable to disease upon arrival and “after their first ‘seasoning fever’ they became less liable to death.”17 He argued instead that mortality progressively increased (from 20/1,000 to 48/1,000) the longer men stayed.18 While rates of mortality varied from place to place and between cavalry and infantry, Thomson concluded that “no length of seasoning will diminish the deleterious influence of a tropical climate on the European constitution” and insisted, “the New Comer or Recruit can resist the tropical climate of India better than the long and debilitated residents.”19 By 1845, further studies inverted older assumptions about age and capacity for resistance, and this new position was gaining ground.20 But the acceptance of these findings raised a host of new problems for the army, for Britain had one of the oldest armies in Europe by the 1830s: between twenty-nine and thirty years old on average.21 Military commanders and medical professionals wondered how these findings could be applied to enhance imperial efficiency on the ground. For some, the answer lay in boosting contingents of locally recruited troops. Medical professionals had long speculated over whether differences in racial immunity might explain differential rates of British and Indian soldiers’ mortality. The data compiled on “Native troops” was less abundant than that for Europeans, but experts explained differential mortality in light of the former’s “natural” immunity to disease.22 However, this did not translate unequivocally into recommendations for the direct replacement of European troops by Indians, in part because experts interpreted locals’ resistance to heat and fatigue not just in terms of innate racial differences but, suggestively, in terms of the physical attributes of biological age. A committee of the Statistical Society of London thus explained differences in the health of the Indian soldiers serving the East India Company (judged “capable of undergoing great fatigue”) and Europeans by the fact that, “the Sepoys are in general healthy active young men.”23 The committee assumed that, like British troops, Indian troops’ effectiveness would also decline if they were recruited older or relocated. Transplanted troops might never thrive in new environs, but their robustness was viewed not merely as a function of racial geography but also as a common trait of age.24 As opinion swung away from the prophylactic value of “experience,” imperial stakeholders sought to formally regulate, and lower, the ages of those serving in tropical zones. The East India Company’s military seminary at Addiscombe House admitted candidates between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. Would-be cadets had to be age sixteen to graduate. In the case of the army, unlimited service was discontinued and service in the infantry was fixed at ten years in 1847. By 1842, Haileybury, the “East India College” where those nominated for the Civil Service were trained, introduced a rule whereby no candidate could be nominated unless they were between sixteen and twenty-one years old. Similarly, no one could be appointed to the East India Company’s civil service under age eighteen or over age twenty-three.25 From the early 1850s, military conflicts also paved the way toward the recruitment of younger men as soldiers. Commentators interpreted the bloody Crimean War (1853–56) as underlining the inadequacy of an experienced, long-service army for imperial defense.26 The Indian Mutiny and Rebellion of 1857–58 had a similar impact. After the governance of India became the responsibility of the British state, soldiers of the British Army came under the Army Medical Department, and the East India Company’s European regiments were disbanded. A force of approximately 55,000–70,000 men remained in India (around 25% of the whole British Army). And the chief recommendation of the “Peel Commission” (named for the secretary of state for war, Jonathan Peel), set up following the Mutiny and Rebellion, was that a ratio of one European soldier to every three Indian soldiers should apply to colonial troops. Since there were approximately 300,000 men in Indian regiments, this was understood to require not just a significant reduction in the Indian regiments but a large increase in the recruitment of Europeans too. At recruiting centers once again, “the standard was lowered to such an extent as to bring boys instead of men into the ranks.”27 This time, however, the imperative of recruiting among boys was no longer interpreted as having a uniquely weakening effect. Indeed, some saw the frightful losses of recent wars as usefully reducing the average age of those who served. While Secretary of War Sydney Herbert vaunted the “fabulous” effects of sanitary regulations proposed by the Royal Commission of 1857 he attributed reduced mortality to the “fact that the army is much younger than it was, in consequence of the clearances made by the Crimean war.”28 In 1863, according to the statistician James Hunt, 77% of the European troops in Bengal were under age thirty, and only 23% were above that age, while 94% were under age thirty-five.29 By the 1870s, the Standard Life Assurance Company, like other insurance agents, routinely made older lives more expensive to insure when posted to hot climates.30 And as mortality rates fell, some bullishly suggested the principal challenge would soon no longer be keeping soldiers alive but channeling their natural reserves of youthful energy in “constructive” directions.31 The logic of recruiting for colonial armies at younger ages gained traction in a context where Darwinian ideas were transforming understandings of the world. Darwin, who had so done much to bring the iconography of the tropics to Europe, ruled out the possibility that environmental acclimatization could be achieved within a single lifetime, arguing instead that variations were produced over the longue durée. For many, his influential work appeared to affirm mid-century views of the tropics as a space of death and disease. Darker depictions of race in the torrid zones had by then gained ground, in geographies associating extreme fertility, “supercapacity,” and lower competency with native populations.32 As David Arnold has argued, recasting India and South China as “the tropics” reflected a European preoccupation with fixing such places within “the geographical schema of the imperial world,” and it also involved an act of subordinating nature, which Europeans had supposedly “understood and overcome.”33 This also involved a repositioning of dominated societies in relation to their own histories—as “static” and “fixed”—and set up a valuable contrast with a more flexible, mobile, and dynamic British imperialism under which young colonials were emergent. The privileging of youthful mobility, via vast state-sponsored rotations of troops and administrators could thus be made to fit understandings of climate as a driver of history.34 It lent weight to the quest to naturalize empire via claims that heat sped indigenous peoples into racial fixity before they could as fully racially “recapitulate.” The discovery of deep geological time around mid-century revealed the human race was far older than previously thought.35 And this stunning insight potentially backdated the decay of the “oldest” civilizations while also creating space for the re-imagining of individual lifetimes. It was no coincidence that from mid-century imperial Britain also witnessed an emphatic shift in cultural weight toward childhood and youth. This occurred elsewhere too, not least in the United States, where the nation’s trajectory would soon come to be grounded in an explicitly rejuvenationist myth of the “frontier.”36 As rivalry intensified in tropical zones, and American exceptionalists taunted Europe as old and tired, British imperialists clung to the notion that their empire was neotenous, or emblematic of the leadership of a vital “young Europe” consolidating control over decayed older civilizations. Growing emphasis on youth as a formal requirement for imperial service arose from more than just medical-scientific considerations. Privileging youthfulness as a dimension of the colonial self proceeded alongside efforts to reorient imperial governance in the direction of a more paternalistic conservatism following the Indian Mutiny and Uprising of 1857–58. Experts called before parliamentary committees seeking to explain this tumultuous event laid the blame squarely on the European settler class. The “intimacy” of this group with the land, its customs, and indigenous women had, they claimed, produced social tensions that eventually erupted. The parliamentary select committee thus linked environmentally induced settler degeneracy to racial decline, gesturing toward the large and growing déclassé “Anglo-Indian” population who, in the words of Lord Canning, were “loosely brought up and exhibiting most of the worst qualities of both races” and, as such, were a “glaring reproach” to British rule in India.37 Reconfiguring older, less mobile settlers as a problem, elites reinforced the drift from the reformist utilitarianism of the early nineteenth century and drew sharper distinctions between ways of governing in colonies of settlement and not for settlement. As desires to “Anglicize” Indians, to teach them to become like those who ruled, faded out, older arguments about maturity, experience, and age also lost their cachet. This new political trajectory favored a selective predisposition toward younger men as emblems of racial vigor. And, indeed, beyond brute resistance to the climate, military experts began to theorize the value of young colonials in terms of a youthful adaptability contrasting with the older acclimated Europeans—whose adaptation manifested in the adoption of indigenous dress and lifestyles and was thus suggestive of worryingly ambiguous ethnic, racial, and national affiliations. Making the army younger was in part a response to “mistakes” in India. Subaltern soldiers could not be fully trusted to represent elite values, but their youthfulness at least made them “malleable” enough to be inducted more fully and rapidly into evolving institutional hierarchies. This conviction set the tone for policy far beyond India. The quality of youthfulness emerged as a critical component in the profile of the ideal “expatriate” empire-builder. So, for example, when the governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring, sought to root out amateurishness and indiscipline in administrative circles, he established a system of “Eastern cadetships” (for Hong Kong and, from 1869, the Straits Settlements) requiring candidates to be between twenty-two and twenty-four years of age. By 1889, the government required candidates for the colonial civil service to be between seventeen and nineteen years of age. From the late 1870s, commercial companies expanding aggressively into Asia also established “London policies,” which involved the adoption of very similar rules on age. Stakeholders forced down not only the upper age threshold of recruitment but retirement ages too.38 Reassuringly malleable though they may have been, younger bodies were not guaranteed to survive extended periods of exposure to the tropical heat. G. O. Trevelyan described in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1863 how those destroyed by disease in the tropics were not just “old Quihyes, with clogged livers and shattered nerves, but picked men in the very spring and prime of life, sent forth from home.”39 A few years later in 1867, William T. Mercer, a retired former colonial administrator in Hong Kong, published a set of poems exploring themes of precocious degeneration and early death. In one poem, “The Sun of Hong Kong,” he warned an unnamed mother “weeping over thy departing boy” to urge him to “shrink from that sun as from a taming and untameable foe.”40 In another piece, “God’s Acre,” Mercer presented the shocking prevalence of early death among colonial servants, whether “young or in the full strength of manhood.”41 The further expansion of the British imperial state into the torrid zones by the 1880s threatened to impose this unfortunate fate upon greater numbers of young British men than ever before. Still, as young men at least perished at a somewhat slower rate than their older counterparts, they could represent a new beginning of sorts for Britain and its empire. Heights of Rejuvenation: Colonial Troops and Hill Stations In the mid- to late nineteenth century, reinterpretations of environment went hand in hand with a new emphasis on British youth, broadly defined, as an object and agent of change in the empire. Military commanders grasped that imperial rule in its coercive mode required the perpetual rejuvenation of armies. However, until the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, journeys from the heat of tropical stations to the restorative metropole remained dangerous and uncomfortable (the overland section taking the best part of a year), and there was no extensive system of furlough for troops (leave of three years only being allowed to those in the civil service). Because of this, medical experts who dismissed seasoning devoted themselves to exploring ways of sustaining soldiers for longer in the tropics. Could biological clocks accelerated by heat somehow be slowed, or even turned back, they wondered? The title of William Mercer’s collection, Under the Peak, pointed directly to a technology which could be used to confront this challenge. The “Peak” referred to Hong Kong’s equivalent of a hill station. Hill stations had of course emerged long before Mercer wrote. Some of the earliest were built in Asia at Buitenzorg, Java, founded in 1744, and Penang, dating from 1786, serving the East India Company.42 Following the defeat of the Kingdom of Nepal in 1815, hill stations were also under construction on the northwest frontier in the lower ranges of the Himalayas. Similar stations already existed at Maroon Town (Jamaica) and Nuwara Eliya (Ceylon). In India, the government formally acquired stations, which had developed in the 1820s, at Simla and Darjeeling. And there were also soon sites on southern India’s Nilgiri mountains, such as Ootacamund. Early on, these stations served efforts to address high troop mortality through seasoning. Here, medical geographers, colonial planners, and hygienists experimented with the temporary exposure of white bodies to altitude as a means of counteracting the degenerative effects of heat. Even after the impossibility of white settlement came to be generally accepted in medical circles, hill stations continued to develop, mostly as sanitaria. While the sites were often seen as mitigating the effects of cooler temperatures or providing temporary respite from the miasmas of the plains, their advocates became convinced they could provide more than just a “change of air.” As medical experts working in India demolished associations between age and endurance, they discussed the impact of these “magic mountains,” to use Dane Kennedy’s memorable term, using the language of rejuvenatory transformation.43 For example, in 1845, an influential study by Edward Green Balfour, an army surgeon based in Bengal, described their benefits in the following terms: All Europeans [generally convalescents] who have visited the hills, assure us that the change . . . produces a general restoration of mental and physical powers, shown by a great and gradually increasing exhilaration of spirits, and in a most remarkable degree by increased capacity of bearing fatigue, and of relishing and digesting food; and it is asserted by all . . . that these beneficial effects have continued for a long period of time afterwards, extending in some instances to years.44 Relocating to altitude brought about a kind of temporary “restoration” in all Europeans, evidenced by high spirits, greater resistance, and better appetites (characteristics usually ascribed to recent arrivals in India). However, doctors such as T. Graham Balfour argued that special benefits might accrue in particular for “time expired men” from relocating to the hills.45 This altitude-induced “return” to earlier conditions was not permanent, a fact which distinguished it from the older, outmoded practice of “seasoning.” However, as growing numbers of doctors and hygienists advised that repeat visits would be beneficial, support grew for mass rotations to the hills. In 1847, a special committee looking into Balfour’s claims underlined arguments for the efficacy of hill stations. By mid-century, army advisors became so convinced of the health benefits of altitude that they urged the full-time relocation of troops and even entire administrative stations from the plains to cantonments in the heights. In 1858, the question of hill stations came up before the British parliament, where William Ewart MP had emerged as an energetic promoter of their development. From a medical perspective these enclaves were not just cooler, they were islands of environmental sanitation with relatively well-protected water supplies and broad sanitary measures. After the Report of the Commission on the Sanitary State of the Indian Army (1859) urged the improvement of water supplies, drainage, hospitals, and barracks, agitation aroused by parliamentary debate produced demands that one fifth of all troops be assigned to hill cantonments at any one time. The Royal Commission on India of 1863 recommended stationing one third of troops there, by rotation. Balfour added his weight to such proposals, arguing that they should serve as regular stops on a circuit between plains and heights. For Juland Danvers, department secretary of the Public Works department in the India Office, it was a “bounden duty to take advantage of the opportunity they afforded [the hills] of recruiting health and strength.”46 The unspoken practice of rejuvenation in the hills for “all Europeans” thus promised to mediate what often appeared as class-based, exclusionary strategies of the army. The hope that hill stations might have a restorative effect on all individuals soon ran up against evidence that they exposed visitors to other varieties of illness. As outbreaks of typhoid, dysentery, and cholera hit a number of hill stations, medical opinion shifted toward the view that retreating to the hills could not cure disease.47 Outbreaks undermined assumptions that hill stations were curative and raised doubts over their preventative benefits.48 Even a supporter of removing military stations to the hills, Dr. James Hunt, asked in 1863, “are there any places even in the hills in which Europeans can be reared without gradually becoming degenerated?”49 Not long after this, Hong Kong’s sanatorium on the peak was abandoned after convalescents suffered bouts of dysentery. Lingering medical concerns, coupled with army commanders’ strategic priorities, ensured that after 1857, the full-scale relocation of troops did not follow.50 The restorative effects of these “islands on the plains” appeared wanting, especially when compared with relocation to the British Isles (“the only effective means of restoration”).51 Even so, in a period when regular return to the metropole was not feasible, civil authorities and the army command continued to visit hill stations. Between a fifth and a sixth of all British troops in India were still billeted in hill stations by the 1860s, and by the 1890s, the figure had risen to nearly one quarter.52 In seeking to explain this, Dane Kennedy has argued that even as medical evidence undercut claims that troops were protected from disease at altitude, the medical rationale for hill sanataria persisted in understandings that they remedied the “general debility” arising from geographical transfer.53 Commentators continued to insist (in rather vague terms) that the hills had therapeutic value. It appears this very vagueness may have helped to create a space beyond medical convention wherein consumers of the altitude cure could entertain a notional rejuvenation. This they described using the terminology of “improvement,” or the “recovery” of the health and energy of their younger selves. As W. J. Moore, surgeon general for Bombay and author of Health Resorts for Tropical Invalids put it in 1881, “when the bloom of health and youth has departed, and some of the weariness of riper age and failing health is felt, nothing requires more careful thought than change of air.”54 For Moore, the effects of the heights were immediately restorative—he likened the impact to the crisp taste of champagne. But altitude also held out the promise of rejuvenation in less direct ways. For example, it obviated long journeys to recuperate in Europe or the Cape. If short leave in the hills sufficed as an alternative to travel, troops could remain in active service for longer. Moreover, since a principal problem observed by Balfour and others lay in young troops’ propensity to fritter away vital capital on irreverent pursuits, hill stations might facilitate senior commanders’ surveillance of juniors judged prone to excess. Desires to reverse environmentally induced ageing through palliative technology also brought Europeans into contact with indigenous hill peoples. Scholars have studied such interactions in the context of the hill stations of India and elsewhere.55 Indigenous “hill tribes” were often viewed through the lens of the “noble savage” and seen as hardier and more resistant variants of the indigenous peoples on the plains. Hill stations thus facilitated comparison and interaction between exemplars of Europe’s “progress” and the most vital and “picturesque” of Asian races. Even as medical consensus over hill stations fractured, they remained key sites for re-imagining empire in terms of cyclical rejuvenation and for experiments intended to retrieve the youthful vigor of the imperial race.56 The Rejuvenating Effects of Short Service Considerations that a younger army was a better army triggered the introduction of a new “Short Service” system of recruitment in Britain. The Army Enlistment Act of 1870 formed part of the Cardwell Reforms. Its intent was to replenish reserve armies by creating a force capable of defending the metropole and responding to imperial crises.57 The Act required all soldiers to spend six years in the regulars followed by six in the reserve. In 1872, the “Localisation Act” linked battalions at home with foreign garrisons to facilitate the latter’s more regular supply and replacement. In practical terms the result was a new twelve-year system permitting up to three years of training, three to four years of service abroad, and a six-year spell in the reserve. Soldiers could thus return to civilian life (and employment) by the age of twenty-five to twenty-seven—a feature intended to increase the attractiveness of the army. Once back at work, soldiers would remain in the reserve, receiving pay of 4d per day while remaining subject to recall for the next six years.58 Cardwell anticipated this cyclical system would provide 65,000 troops for India, 26,000 for other colonies and a home force of 100,000.59 As historians have noted, the reforms fell far short of achieving these aims, but in practical terms, they put an end to military service as a lifelong career and drove down the average age of those who served. Supporters welcomed the fact that the majority of the army would no longer be made up of a fading biological force but would instead be annually rejuvenated. The new system cycled men much more rapidly from metropole to colonies and back into the reserve at home before the peak age of mortality.60 Although the age at which soldiers were sent out to serve actually increased to twenty, the shorter period of service—amounting to only five years in India and other tropical stations—was seen as ridding the army of its most experienced constituents and changing its profile. By 1880, for example, 41% of soldiers in India were under twenty-five, and a further 34% were between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine. In 1890, only 2,544 or 3.7% of the 66,194 British soldiers in India were married. In the infantry, which made up the bulk of the army, the proportion was as low as 2.8%.61 As Sumit Guha has noted, “the result was a visible juvenilization of the troops.”62 Short service came in against a backdrop of growing skepticism over the medical efficacy of hill stations. As criticisms of the altitude cure gained ground the construction of the Suez Canal raised the prospect of more swift and efficient travel and the more regular, rapid replenishment of colonial troops. When the canal finally opened in 1869, it cut the journey time from Britain to India to less than three weeks. A year after this, the British government brought the short service legislation onto the statute. Europeans continued to seek recalibration of their constitutions in the cooler climes of hill stations, but with short service in place, the emphasis shifted toward a cyclical system rejuvenating troops on the ground. Amid the “great acceleration” of the late nineteenth century—the dramatic expansion of steam travel technology, telegraph, cable, and railways, which came to define high imperialism—troops more regularly and rapidly shuttled between colonies and metropole. Rejuvenation took on the aspect of an empire-wide system, predicated upon relocation of servicemen not to hills nearby, in India, Yokohama, or Tsing-tao, but back to the metropole. As C. R. Francis, an insurance expert, observed in 1878, “Facilities of communication, and less stringent leave-rules throughout the services, make it easy for all to come home more frequently, and thus renew their strength.”63 “Imperial Rejuvenation” as Chimera? The term “rejuvenation” did not become widespread until the late nineteenth century, when it became a keyword applied to Europe’s introspective encounter with degeneracy and its potential reversal through medical technology.64 From the mid-nineteenth century, medical researchers had studied pathological manifestations of aging. Influential here was the work of Jean-Martin Charcot, whose reputation as an instructor at the Salpêtrière in Paris led the translation of his Clinical Lectures on Senile and Chronic Diseases into English in 1881.65 In this period, Charles Darwin’s arguments that acquired characteristics could not be transmitted to offspring prompted doctors to puzzle over how reproductive cells could remained insulated from changes acquired within the individual’s lifetime. And this prompted the French microscopist François Maupas to argue that as populations naturally senesced, sex, and the sex organs, might hold the key to rejuvenation.66 In the 1880s in Euro-American contexts, where assumptions about “spermatic economy” were widely accepted and onanism was linked to the premature decline of intellectual faculties, research focused more intently upon the sex glands. Experts, such as the French-American physician Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard (later Harvard’s first professor of physiology and pathology), engaged in experimental physiology at the École de Médecine in Paris that involved injecting extracts of gonadal fluids and materials as a means of countering age-related decline in male potency.67 What lurked behind such experiments was the assumption that if aging was indeed pathological, then it could be cured like a disease. By 1905, the Nobel Laureate Elie Metchnikoff could write: “Old age, is an infectious, chronic disease, which is manifested by a degeneration, or an enfeebling of the noble elements.”68 New findings from the biological and physical sciences held out the potential for achieving a cure. However, as we have seen, well before Brown and other experts explored links between human development, vitality, aging, and sex, imperial agents associated a range of practices, symbols, and institutions with rejuvenation—the recovery of “lost” values, the implementation of physical repair, and the reversal of chronological aging— in the tropics. In India, Hong Kong, and other contexts where colonial planners claimed that the aging effects of heat could be countered and that tropical degeneracy might be treatable, youth had already been defined as a new norm. This raises the question of why scholars have neglected the imperial-global roots of modern rejuvenation? In considering this, it is worth noting that histories of youth and rejuvenation are similar in that both tend to locate emergence and wider recognition in Europe and North America from the mid- to late nineteenth century. Historians’ tentativeness in regard to rejuvenation in British imperial and colonial cultures is understandable given that even those who rhapsodized on the effects of hill stations rarely made recourse to this specific term. This disinclination persisted during a period when colonial theorists made frequent reference to subject peoples as “childlike” and defined entire subject peoples in terms of future potential and a contemporary lack of the ideal masculine “maturity” of the colonizer. Applying a term such as “rejuvenation” might call to mind the unfortunate potential for colonizers’ aspirations to remain young to slip toward an embrace of (racialized) immaturity. But beyond that, other factors also discouraged the open articulation of desires for rejuvenation within British colonial culture. These included a specific set of imperial concerns relating to controversies over army reform, new understandings of disease, the emergence of a new genre of imperialism predicated upon the domestic values of the British middle class, and indigenous intellectual and reformers’ interest in youth-led “rejuvenation” as a means of realizing a postcolonial future. To take army reforms first, because the defining feature of the army produced by the short service reforms was its youthfulness, influential spokesmen for the military elite latched onto this when they critiqued reform. The result was to check, rather than elevate, youth as a notional imperial norm. From mid-century, British governments strove to modernize not just the army but the civil service, education, and armed services by reducing privilege and rendering these institutions more meritocratic. As the inadequacies of the short service system became apparent, an officer class wedded to hierarchy and entitlement asked whether reform best served the nation’s interests, by criticizing the younger army it had produced. Recruiting centers failed to build adequate reserve forces to replenish foreign garrisons (in 1879 there were only fifty-nine battalions at home providing men for eighty-two abroad). The absence of a reserve capable of defending Britain and handling imperial emergencies prompted calls for the restoration of long service. Lord Roberts, who had experience in India, and the Duke of Cambridge put forward a plan intended to restrict short service to the home army (with three years in the regulars and nine in the reserve).69 The Cardwell Reforms also appear to have resulted in an increase in the enlistment of poor-quality recruits from blighted inner urban areas of Britain. Within a few years of the reforms, complaints surged from the India Office and the Indian Government (which paid for the army) about the inferior physiques of the new recruits and the costs associated with them. In a period when newspaper editors and writers warned metropolitan readerships that urban conditions were producing a racially inferior working-class youth, the tendency of short service to attract precisely this demographic into the army—lampooned as “Whitechapel Highlanders”—was the subject of outspoken criticism.70 Problems of army recruitment stimulated a burgeoning critique of what some termed the “young soldier problem.” As debate revived over the relative efficiency of old and young soldiers, Sir Garnet Wolsely, launching the invasion of Asante (modern-day Ghana) in West Africa in 1873–74 (without Cabinet approval), ostentatiously refused to use new recruits. In 1881, the Times newspaper republished the Duke of Wellington’s letter to William Wynn of July 25, 1826.71 As Philippa Levine has observed, by the 1880s contemporaries argued that Cardwell’s short-service system appeared to have “begat a new species of conscript whose values and attitudes compared unfavourably with those of the ‘old soldier,’” and it became “commonplace among military commentators to point to the increasing youthfulness, inexperience, and enforced singlehood of this short-service army and to assume that these factors decreased professional commitment to the military.”72 As this debate went on, senior commanders found a new medical language through which to express their ambivalence toward younger soldiers. From the 1860s, the Pastorian model promised to “pin down to a hard and fast line germs as centres of disease,” rather than the environment and tropical sun.73 And by the 1890s, research into parasite and vector borne disease etiologies informed the emergence of “tropical medicine.” To some extent unlinking understandings of disease from the wider physical landscape (though as I and others have argued elsewhere this should not be overstated), this paradigm also threatened to undermine claims for the prophylactic value of youth.74 In new research and military medical reports, younger soldiers’ bodies emerged as especially likely sites of infection.75 A particular threat was typhoid (or paratyphoid), or “enteric fever” as it was termed—a disease to which the young were judged susceptible. This association resurfaced in reports on imperial conflicts during the 1870s. After the occupation of the Transvaal and outbreak of the Zulu War in January to July 1879, ten thousand reserves were called up under the “Reserve Forces Act” to serve in South Africa (1879–81) and Egypt (1882).76 The arrival of these younger troops coincided with news of an epidemic of enteric fever. Dr. William G. Don advised, youth and immaturity very strongly predispose to all forms of endemic tropical fever; even in this country, enteric fever is chiefly a disease of early manhood . . . age and acclimatisation are not to be separated as predisposing causes. This arises from the fact that a young soldier is necessarily a recent arrival, and a recent arrival is nearly always a young soldier.77 Whether the root cause was “climatic” effects or germ-based (“faecal impurities”), as Dr. Richard Quill, a Surgeon in the Army Medical Department of Asirgarh, put it, “the principal victims of this fever are young soldiers.”78 Critics highlighted the same vulnerability in Aswan, Egypt, where troops (described as “young soldiers” or “boy soldiers”) were fighting the Anglo-Egyptian War from 1882. In a discussion of the cause of these disease outbreaks at the annual meeting of the British Medical Association in Birmingham in July 1890, Brigade Surgeon J. B. Hamilton of the Army Medical Staff drew attention to: “what we tersely call ‘youth’ and ‘recent arrivals.’”79 As he put it, In former years, in the days of long service, these factors were not present to anything like the extent they now are; regiments went out to India for a period of twenty years; the men were older and more matured, and consequently did not suffer from enteric fever.80 But now, while improved sanitation had attenuated the ravages of small pox and cholera, doctors considered typhoid the “most important disease we have to deal with.”81 This had far reaching implications in the light of state reforms that had produced a younger army. With wariness toward young soldiers on the rise, the War Office stepped in.82 In the House of Commons, Secretary of State for War Hugh Childers proposed raising the minimum age for enlistment from eighteen to nineteen, stipulating that no man under twenty or with less than twenty years service should be sent to a tropical station.83 The period that recruits would spend “in the colours” was to be set at seven years and, in the case of soldiers serving abroad, eight years. At this time more than half of the recruits were under age nineteen. Raising the minimum age for service in the colonies to age twenty meant soldiers would serve from age twenty to twenty-seven, not eighteen to twenty-four. Another powerful factor dampening open engagement with rejuvenation was a cultural and demographic shift accompanying imperial reform and highlighting the agency of elite women. During the 1880s, as travel and transportation became swifter and more comfortable, larger numbers of women and children traveled between metropoles and tropical colonies. Homes proliferated and, concurrently, a moral critique of empire gained ground, targeting certain forms of “colonial masculinity” as brutish, uncivilized, and sexually incontinent. This critique flared in the wake of the successful attempts led by women and evangelical reformers to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts (developed in Hong Kong out of concerns to protect troops against venereal disease). Empowered by their victory, reformers extended the scope of their reformist vision empire-wide. In so doing they focused often on youthfulness as a kind of “Achilles Heel” of the colonial male. As assertions of European cultural superiority came to rest more firmly on domestic norms, imperial reformers and status-conscious stakeholders made mobile young men and women regular targets of criticism. Children, not youth, inside and outside the colonial home were expected to underpin the values of this supposedly more civilized genre of imperialism.84 It was in this context that schemes to relocate a younger army en masse to the hill stations foundered. The hill stations of empire reached their cultural zenith at a moment when elites were bequeathing this older infrastructure of youthful rejuvenation to children. The benefits of the hills, even for young children, were still cast in terms of returns to earlier or “original” conditions—reminiscent of England’s days of yore. The Hill Station of Darjeeling was for example, “one of those places [in] which English children . . . get the rosy cheeks of old England.”85 Locations such as Victoria Peak in Hong Kong, under which Mercer’s young soldiers had “cowered,” now became sites for rambunctious collective celebrations of childhood in which the children of administrators, military, and merchant elites played a prominent part.86 Adults with a stake in Britain’s “old” imperialism thus assigned responsibility to ever-younger actors in their bid to make empire more neotenic. Meanwhile, for the many young men sent out east, “rejuvenation” took on the aspect of a coddling, effeminizing domesticity and kind of extended rule-bound dependency in clubs, societies, and messes.87 Finally, the emergence of youth as a revolutionary symbol around the globe from the turn of the century further discouraged the open articulation of desires for rejuvenation within Britain’s conservative imperial culture. By the late nineteenth century, imperial networks were inadvertently helping to disseminate new visions of youth as a category aligned with cosmopolitanism, freedom, revolutionary values, and anticipations of a future unbound. Youth was emerging as a category of interest to intellectuals, cultural creators, and reformers keen to challenge foreign incursions in parts of the world impacted by imperialism. In turn-of-the-century China, for example, where an infestation of imperial powers made the task of civilizational reinvigoration appear especially urgent, the exiled leader of the Hundred Days Reform (1898), Liang Qichao, linked youth to rejuvenation in his influential “Ode to Young China” (1900). The “Ode” linked China’s weakness to its civilizational longevity. In this reading, age connoted political stasis while youth personified modernity and held out the promise that an “old empire” might be transformed.88 Claims that youth, both as symbol and embodiment, was central to China’s rejuvenation also proved foundational to the “New Culture Movement,” which commenced in 1915 with Chen Duxiu’s publication of the magazine Xin Qingnian/La Jeunesse. In the first issue, Chen famously described: Youth is like early spring, like the rising sun, like trees and grass in bud, like a newly sharpened blade. It is the most valuable period of life. The function of youth in society is the same as that of a fresh and vital cell in a human body. In the process of metabolism, the old and the rotten are incessantly eliminated to be replaced by the fresh and living.89 Not only in China but across the globe in the early twentieth century, reformers and intellectuals articulated “rejuvenatory” responses within and against the framework of empire. To those with a stake in the colonial order of things, youth-led rejuvenation appeared profoundly menacing. As representatives of “Young India,” “Young China,” and others threatened to link up in a transnational, cosmopolitan coalition of anticolonial action, imperial governments scrambled to stymie cross-border interactions.90 Thus, even before antiliberal ideologies seized state power in Russia (where Soviets sought to create “new men” and “new women”) and Italy (where Fascists made youth central to perpetual revolution)—indigenous peoples’ engagements with rejuvenation under conditions of domination inflected conservative imperialisms in new directions. Even as rejuvenation became more crucial than ever to Britain’s defense of its sprawling global empire, British colonial culture hoved toward the accentuation of mid-life manners, mores, and outward appearances. Indeed, the effectiveness with which contemporaries projected and policed this impression of mid-life hegemony may help to explain the neglect of youth, beyond colonies of settlement, in the historiography of British Empire. Conclusion In their introduction to this special issue, Kristine Alexander, Mischa Honeck, and Isabel Richter ask when, exactly, did the war on age begin. Focusing on rejuvenation as a military-imperial concern, this article has argued that the cluster of meanings and practices constituting “rejuvenation” did not emerge fully formed in Europe in the late nineteenth century but instead unfolded outside Europe in a variety of locales worldwide. It took shape in new technologies that emerged in Britain’s empire of coercion as a set of encounters and negotiations with alien environments and peoples. As both process and relationship, empire proved to be a key force weaving together fragmentary stories constitutive of a global history of rejuvenation pursued not narrowly but comparatively as part of a set of linked global initiatives carried along expanding networks of capital, commerce, and military medical knowledge.91 The expansion of British imperialism and the reinvention of the tropics created new connections and forms of knowledge that helped to make rejuvenation a global story. The quest to counter the core problems of governing in hot climates led contemporaries to experiment with rejuvenation in places where the prospects of success appeared remote. However, once the association of age and experience with tropical survival weakened and “youth” or “youthfulness” came to be judged a desirable quality in colonials, experiments followed with rejuvenation—a search at an individual and collective level for a return to a younger, more dynamic condition. This ultimately took many forms in modern times and historians have often emphasized individual body projects, such as the cosmetic rejuvenations discussed by Jane Nicholas and attempts to turn back the “sexual clock” addressed by Leslie Paris in this special issue. But as we have seen, imperial rivalry demanded that the state launch initiatives to ensure that as far as possible, entire population groups rejuvenated themselves. In the light of new thinking about human lifetimes, civilizational difference, and links between race and environment, the pursuit of imperial rejuvenation became the focus of commercial and state-led campaigns, grand planning, and detailed policies. Stakeholders confronted the racial-climatological challenge of reversing or repairing heat-induced accelerated aging in a variety of spaces, notably hill-station enclaves. Therapeutic experiments in the heights inspired hopes of restoring energy, repairing or temporarily reversing climate-induced damage, and achieving the return to an earlier, more vital stage of life. In such places, youth became something to be achieved or retrieved with technological assistance. And while faith in the hills never faded completely, from the 1870s, commitments to “rejuvenation” tacked in a different direction—toward the creation of a younger army, cycling more rapidly between colonies and metropole. While critics lambasted the short service system for turning the colonies into a “training ground” for young troops, biological youthfulness remained a crucial prerequisite in the making or upgrading of colonials.92 The first “new men” or “renewed men” were not agents of Marxist-Leninism, they were British imperialists. In spite of these endeavors, “youth” and “rejuvenation” did not become keywords in modern British imperialism. Contemporaries remained more inclined to associate rejuvenation with older imperial projects, especially with colonies of settlement. And through consideration of this, we have engaged with another key question posed by the authors of the introduction to this special issue: “why were some attempts to stop or revert the aging process socially more accepted than others?” Youth, with its tantalizing hints of destabilizing universalism and radical change, appeared to present as many challenges as solutions to overseers of an imperialism veering toward conservative paternalism. This was especially so from the end of the nineteenth century, as anticolonial agents enthusiastically embraced rejuvenation. Imperial stakeholders reimagined governance in terms of midlife maturity and domesticity and ushered colonial childhood not youth forward to project claims that empire could be both “civilized” and neotenous. Young men fared poorly when judged in the light of evangelical notions of virtue and capitalist morality, and so an aesthetic of colonial “youth” (a category so often gendered masculine) struggled to emerge in colonies of settlement. In Britain and its colonies, seniors worked to obscure youthfulness behind colonial maturity. By contrast with other European elites who had less invested in the global status quo, British imperialists were reluctant to link youth explicitly with their expansionist projects. However, even if, for the British, “rejuvenation” was rarely openly asserted, it remained a key concern of medical professionals and senior military commanders confronting the mortal toll of service. While elites left its terminology obscure, desires for rejuvenation emanated from the cultural texts of the era, the structures that colonialisms produced on the ground and circulations of people, technologies, and the ideas they sponsored. As scholars of youth have often pointed out, the development of distinct age-related categories and meanings often predated explicit recognition through naming. In the words of Harvey Graff, “formal naming often follows rather than precedes basic social change.”93 Naming was often less important than “habitus” to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term, that is, what the principal actors in this story thought they should do. By the late nineteenth century in Europe, the stage was set for “new” regimes of rejuvenation to emerge, following new breakthroughs in the microscopic realm. Findings in the fields of biochemistry, pathology, pharmacology, and endocrinology, as well as in cellular therapy and intestinal intoxification, promised to sustain rejuvenation in the form of a variety of new nationalist-surgical-cosmetic body projects. Around the same time, from 1899 to 1902, the Boer War was shattering any remaining illusions that the British army had been revitalized by reform. With imperial rivalries intensifying, the challenge of rejuvenation now appeared both more urgent and more difficult to openly acknowledge. Though long since applied to entire population groups by those in the service of an aggressively expansionist state, the notion that empire could both be made new again and serve as a driver of renewal faced multiple challenges. In spite of this, longstanding links between empire and rejuvenation never faded completely. Indeed, this idea would continue to resurface in post-war Britain in visions of the future tethered to the imperial past. Research for this article was generously supported by an RGC/CERG grant (HKU748413). Footnotes 1 " Chandak Sengoopta, “Rejuvenation and the Prolongation of Life: Science or Quackery?” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 37, no. 1 (Autumn, 1993): 55–66; John R. Herman, “Rejuvenation: Brown-Séquard to Brinkley,” New York State Journal of Medicine 82 (1982): 1731–39; Laura Davidow Hirschbein, “The Glandular Solution: Sex, Masculinity and Aging in the 1920s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9 (2000): 277–304; D. Schultheiss, J. Denil, and U. Jonas, “Rejuvenatoin in the Early 20th Century,” Andrologia 29, no. 6 (1997): 351–55; Heiko Stoff, Ewige Jugend. Konzept der Verjüngung vom spaten 19. Jahrhundert bis ins Dritten Reich (Köln, 2003); Eric J. Trimmer, Rejuvenation: The History of an Idea (London, 1967) 2 " See for example, Lois Banner, American Beauty (New York, 1983); Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York, 1997); Jane Nicholas, The Modern Girl: Feminine Modernities, The Body, and Commodities in the 1920s (Toronto, 2015); Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton, NJ, 1999); Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York, 1998); David M. Pomfret, “A Muse for the Masses: Gender, Age and Nation in France, Fin-de-Siècle,” American Historical Review 109, no. 5 (2004): 1439–75; Alys Even Weinbaum et al., The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham, NC, 2008). 3 " James Johnson, The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions (London, 1818), 10; Sir James Ranald Martin, The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions (London, 1856), 137, 97. 4 " Michael Joseph, “Military Officers, Tropical Medicine and Racial Thought in the Formation of the West India Regiments, 1793–1802,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 72, no. 2 (April 2017): 142. 5 " Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca, NY, 2001); Philip Curtin, “Disease and Imperialism,” in David Arnold, ed. Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500–1900 (Amsterdam, 1996), 100. 6 " Mark Harrison, Medicine in an Age of Commerce & Empire: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies, 1660–1830 (Oxford, 2010), 85, 106. On the impact of heat, see David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley, CA, 1993), chapter 2; Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989), 1–6; Dane Kennedy, “The Perils of the Midday Sun: Climatic Anxieties in the Colonial Tropics,” in Imperialism and the Natural World, ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester, UK, 1990), 118–40; Michael Worboys, “Germs, Malaria and the Invention of Mansonian Tropical Medicine: From ‘Diseases in the Tropics’ to ‘Tropical Diseases’” in Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500–1900, ed. David Arnold (Amsterdam, 1996), 183–85. 7 " Joseph, “Military Officers,” 148. 8 " Arnold, Colonizing, 36. 9 " Harrison, Medicine, 64, 83; Arnold, Colonizing, 34. 10 " Henry Kerr, A Few Words of Advice to Cadets and Other Young Persons Proceeding to India, 2nd ed. (London, 1842), 126. 11 " Edmund Burke, Speech on Mr. Fox’s East India Bill (December 1, 1783), in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke 2 (Boston, 1865–67): 444–45; The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, India, Madras and Bengal, 1774–1785 (Oxford, 1981, reprinted 2000), 402. 12 " Quoted in Captain H. W. L. Hime, “Universal Conscription: The Only Answer to the Recruiting Question,” Journal of the Royal United Service Institution 19 (1875): 102. 13 " Duke of Wellington to Charles Williams-Wynn, July 25, 1826, in Correspondence, and Memoria of Field Marshal Arthur Duke of Wellington, K. G. vol 3, December, 1825 to May, 1827, ed. by his son, the Duke of Wellington, K. G. (London, 1847), 351. 14 " On the Army Medical Department, see N. Cantlie, A History of the Army Medical Department, vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1974). 15 " “Report of a Committee of the Statistical Society of London, Appointed to Collect and Enquire into Vital Statistics, upon the Sickness and Mortality among the European and Native Troops Serving in the Madras Presidency, from the year 1793 to 1838,” Quarterly Journal of the Statistical Society of London 3, no. 2 (July 1840): 143. 16 " J. W. C. Lever, “On the Sickness and Mortality among the Troops in the United Kingdom. Abstract of the Statistical Report of Major Tulloch,” Quarterly Journal of the Statistical Society of London 2, no. 4 (July 1839): 258. 17 " A. S. Thomson, “On the Doctrine of Acclimatisation,” The Madras Quarterly Medical Journal 2 (1840): 69. 18 " Thomson, “On the Doctrine of Acclimatisation,” 71. 19 " Thomson, “On the Doctrine of Acclimatisation,” 74–75. 20 " See, for example, T. Graham Balfour, “Comparison of the Sickness, Mortality and Prevailing Diseases among Seamen and Soldiers as Shown by the Naval and Military Statistical Reports,” Quarterly Journal of the Statistical Society of London 8, no. 1 (March 1845): 79. 21 " By contrast, the Prussian army was, for example, on average between twenty and twenty-five years old. Lever, “Sickness,” 251. 22 " Peter Coclanis, “Military Mortality in Tropical Asia: British Troops in Tenasserim, 1827–36,” Journal of South East Asia Studies 30, no. 1 (March 1999), 36. 23 " Edward Balfour found those discharged from the Madras Native Army from 1842–7 were on average twenty-four years old and had enlisted at age eighteen.“Report of a Committee of the Statistical Society of London,” 114. 24 " As Dr. James Hunt later explained, citing Tulloch’s table from the “Report of the Commissioners on the Re-organisation of the Indian Army,” of 1859, “As age increases, so does mortality in any place out of the native land of a people.” James Hunt, “On Ethno-climatology, or the Acclimatisation of Man,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 2 (1863): 61. 25 " Cadets had to reside in the college for a minimum of two terms and obtain a certificate before being sent out. 26 " The Crimean conflict also prompted Russians to consider the need for rejuvenation. Calls for a “new man” found a voice in the works of Nikolay Chernyshevsky, which influenced the young Lenin and others who dreamed of ending Tsarist autocracy and engineering a new society. Yinghong Cheng, Creating the New Man: From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities (Honolulu, HI, 2009); Peter Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck, “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany,” in Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick ed., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (New York, 2009), 302–45. 27 " “Report of the Royal Commission on Recruiting,” 1861, 3, quoted in Captain H. W. L. Hime, “Universal Conscription: The Only Answer to the Recruiting Question,” Journal of the Royal United Service Institution XIX (1875), 102; See also Arnold, Colonizing, 64. 28 " “Sanitary Reform in the Army,” British Medical Journal 1, no. 165 (February 1860): 150. 29 " Hunt, “Ethno-climatology,” 67. 30 " C. R. Francis, “Life-Assurance and Residence in Hot Claimates,” The British Medical Journal 1, no. 909 (June 1878), 786. 31 " In 1851, Balfour warned, “the younger soldiers [should be] more constantly employed and thereby exhaust that nervous energy the superabundance of which thrusts them into errors.” Edward Balfour, “Remarks on the Abstract Tables of the Men Discharged from the Military Service of the East India Company,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 14, no. 4 (December 1851): 356. 32 " Stepan, Picturing, 53. 33 " David Arnold, The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800–1856 (Seattle, WA, 2006), 36. 34 " Arnold, Tropics, 5. 35 " M.J.S. Rudwick, Earth’s Deep History: How it was Discovered and Why It Matters (Chicago, 2014). 36 " The historian Fredrick Jackson Turner popularised the “Frontier Thesis,” claiming the American frontier “was a magic fountain of youth in which America continuously bathed and was rejuvenated.” Quoted in David Rio, “Facing Old Age and Searching for Regeneration in a Dying American West: Gregory Martin’s Mountain City,” Atlantis 38, 1 (June 2016): 149–64. 37 " According to one historian, roughly half of the European population of India was comprised of “poor whites.” See Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–1905 (New York, 1980); David Arnold, “European Orphans and Vagrants in India in the Nineteenth Century,” Jnl of Imperial and Commonwealth History 7, 2 (January 1979): 104–27. See also Satoshi Miztuani, The Meaning of White: Race, Class and the “Domiciled Community” in British India, 1858–1930 (Oxford, 2012); Satadru Sen, “Mutiny’s Children: Race, Childhood and Authority after 1857,” in Crispin Bates ed., Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, 176; First Report from the Select Committee on Colonization and Settlement (India) (London, 1858), Session 1857–58, VII, pt. 1, 54. 38 " In 1845, T. Graham Balfour speculated, “were the prospect of a termination to his engagement at a fixed and not very distant period held out to the soldier, it would doubtless restrain him from many of those reckless excesses which cannot but impair his health.” Balfour, “Comparison of the Sickness, Mortality and Prevailing Diseases,” 85. 39 " G. O. Trevelyan, The Competition Wallah (Cambridge, 2010 repr. first published 1864), 201. 40 " William Thomas Mercer, Under the Peak; or Jottings in Verse Written during a Lengthened Residence in the Colony of Hong Kong (London, 1869), 54. 41 " Mercer, Under the Peak, 54. 42 " J. E. Spencer and W. L. Thomas, “The Hill Stations and Summer Resorts of the Orient,” Geographical Review 38, no. 4 (1948): 637–51; Barbara Crossette, The Great Hill Stations of Asia (Boulder, CO, 1998). 43 " Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Delhi, 1996). 44 " Edward Balfour, “Statistical Data for Forming Troops and Maintaining Them in Health in Different Climates and Localities,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 8, no. 3 (September 1845): 205. 45 " T. Graham Balfour, “Discussion,” in Hyde Clarke, “The English Stations in the Hill Regions of India: Their Value and Importance, with Some Statistics of their Products and Trade,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 44, no. 3 (September 1881): 567. 46 " Juland Danvers, “Discussion,” in Clarke, “English Stations,” 565. 47 " Kennedy, Magic, 27–28. 48 " Kennedy, Magic, 29. 49 " Hunt, “Ethno-climatology,” 68. 50 " Instead, improved barracks were built in lower stations. T. A. Heathcote, The Indian Army: The Garrison of British Imperial India 1822–1922 (London, 1974), 111–12. 51 " “The Health and Efficiency of the British Troops in India,” British Medical Journal 2, no. 90 (September 1858): 798. 52 " Arnold, Colonizing, 78–79. 53 " Kennedy, Magic, 29. 54 " W. J. Moore, Health Resorts for Tropical Invalids in India, at Home, and Abroad (London, 1881), 3, 144. 55 " Kennedy, Magic, 88; Eric Jennings, Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (Berkeley, CA, 2011); Queeny Pradhan, Empire in the Hills: Simla, Darjeeling, Ootacamund and Mount Abu, 1820–1920 (Oxford, 2017). 56 " Kennedy, Magic, 4. 57 " Brian Bond, “Recruiting the Victorian Army, 1870–92,” Victorian Studies 5 (June 1962): 333. 58 " Pradeep Barua, The State at War in South Asia (Lincoln, 2005), 127. 59 " Coclanis, “Military Mortality,” 22–37. 60 " Bond, “Recruiting,” 333. 61 " Arnold, Colonizing, 83–84. 62 " Sumit Guha, “Nutrition, Sanitation, Hygiene and the Likelihood of Death: The British Army in India, c. 1870–1920,” Population Studies 47, no. 3 (1993): 386. 63 " Francis, “Life-Assurance and Residence in Hot Climates,” 786. 64 " Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848–1918 (Cambridge, 1989). 65 " Jean Martin Charcot, Clinical Lectures on Senile and Chronic Diseases trans. William S. Tuke (London, 1881). 66 " Robert A. Nye, Masculinity and Male Codes of Honor in Modern France (Berkeley, 1993), 91–92. 67 " Stoff, Ewige Jugend. 68 " Quoted in W. Andrew Achenbaum, “Past as Prologue: Toward a Global History of Ageing,” The SAGE Handbook of Social Gerontology, ed. Dale Dannefer and Chris Phillison (London, 2010), 25. 69 " On Lord Roberts opposition to younger soldiers, see Andrew Davidson, Hygiene and Diseases of Warm Climates (Edinburgh, 1893), 63. 70 " David M. Pomfret, Young People and the European City: Age Relations in Nottingham and Saint-Etienne (Aldershot, UK, 2006), 117–24. 71 " “Surgeon Major,” “Old Soldiers and Young Soldiers,” The British Medical Journal (March 1881), 450. 72 " Philippa Levine, “Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire: The Case of British India,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4, no. 4 (April 1994): 583; Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, 1897 (C.-8379) Report of a Departmental Committee on the Prevalence of Venereal Disease among the British Troops in India, 6. 73 " “The Epidemics of Enteric Fever in the Transvaal, Zulu, and Egyptian Wars Compared,” The British Medical Journal 2, no. 1175 (July 1883), 3. 74 " David M. Pomfret, “‘Beyond Risk of Contagion’: Childhood, Hill Stations, and the Planning of British and French Colonial Cities,” in Imperial Contagions, ed. Robert Peckham and David M. Pomfret (Hong Kong, 2013), 81–104. 75 " John L. Simmons, “The Weakness of the Army,” Nineteenth Century XIII (1883), 529. 76 " “Epidemics of Enteric Fever,” 4. 77 " William G. Don, “On the Endemic Continued Fevers of Subtropical Latitudes,” The British Medical Journal 2, 1036 (November 1880): 738. 78 " Richard H. Quill, “Remarks on Indian Enteric Fever,” The British Medical Journal 1, no. 1151 (January 1883): 102. 79 " According to Hamilton, liability to disease was greatest in the first and second years of service, and 64.12% of cases affected men under twenty-five years of age. Conversely, liability was found to decline in men over thirty. J. B. Hamilton, “Enteric Fever in India, Read in the Section of Medicine and Therapeutics at the Annual Meeting of the British Medical Association, held in Birmingham, July 1890,” The British Medical Journal 2, no. 1553 (October 1890): 787. 80 " Hamilton, “Enteric Fever in India.” 81 " J. Elbert Cutler, “Tropical Acclimatisation,” American Anthropologist 4, no. 3 (1904): 425. By 1882, it had seemed clear that “contagion” diseases were endemic to India, including typhoid, and were the chief cause of death among young soldiers. Sir Joseph Fayrer, “Croonian Lectures on the Climate and Fevers of India,” The British Medical Journal 1, no. 1107 (May 1882): 645. In 1895–98, enteric fever-related mortality among men aged 20–24 in India was thirty-two times higher than in England. “Mortality amongst the Troops at Assouan,” The British Medical Journal 2, no. 1334 (July 1886): 120. 82 " “Papers on Short Service and India,” official papers of Viscount Wolseley at the War Office, W.35, 1876; Hansard 3rd ser, CCLIX (3 Mar 1881), 199, 225. 83 " Childers even used the old language of “seasoning,” asserting, “[the soldier] should not be employed on active service for a year or so – that is to say, until he is acclimatized.” Hansard 3rd ser, CCLIX (3 Mar 1881), 199–200. 84 " David M. Pomfret, Youth and Empire: Trans-colonial Childhoods in British and French Asia (Stanford, 2016), 54–114. 85 " Clarke, “English Stations,” 534. 86 " Pomfret, Youth and Empire, 81–114. 87 " Mrinalini Sinha, “Britishness, Clubbability and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India,” Journal of British Studies 40, no. 4 (October 2001): 489–521. 88 " Tang Xiaobing, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford, CA, 1996), 89 " Quoted in Frank Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual Identities in the Early Republican Period (London, 1995), 147. 90 " Lajpat Rai, Young India: An Interpretation and a History of the Nationalist Movement from Within (New York, 1916). 91 " C. Kelly, War and the Militarization of British Army Medicine, 1793–1830 (London, 2011); M. Ackroyd et al, Advancing with the Army: Medicine, the Professions and Social Mobility in the British Isles, 1790–1850 (Oxford, 2006). 92 " On the extension of criticisms of the compulsory examination of women and licensing of prostitutes beyond Britain, see Arnold P. Kaminisky, “Morality Legislation and British Troops in Late Nineteenth-Century India,” Military Affairs 43, no. 2 (April 1979), 78. 93 " Harvey Graff quoted in J. R.Wegs, “Working Class ‘Adolescence in Austria,’ 1890–1930,” The Journal of Family History 17, no. 4 (1992): 440. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Imperial Rejuvenations: Youth, Empire, and the Problem of Accelerated Aging in “Tropical” Colonies, ca. 1800–1914
JF - Journal of Social History
DO - 10.1093/jsh/shz039
DA - 2020-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/imperial-rejuvenations-youth-empire-and-the-problem-of-accelerated-VsJ7uWw30p
SP - 939
VL - 53
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -