From Divine Judgement to Colonial Courts: Missionary ‘Justice’ in British India, c. 1840–1914

‘Justice’ is a word scattered through missionary writings. Throughout the nineteenth century, missionaries connected themselves with like-minded communities of opinion with labels such as ‘friends of justice and humanity’, the protectors of ‘kindness and justice’, or ‘friends of justice, humanity and religion’. In their published writings, missionaries wrote of the ‘justice [and] beneficence’ of British rule in India and of missionary work as effecting the inculcation of ‘justice, mercy and charity’. As such, missionaries locked themselves in battle with numerous forces of real and perceived injustice in British India. They railed against the ‘injustice’ inflicted upon Hindu widows, child brides and would-be converts by ‘traditional’ indigenous practices. But they also wrote of ‘the imperfect administration of justice’ conducted by the colonial state. At the same time, missionaries interpreted the famines, floods, plagues and rebellions they encountered in India through a theological framework that also hinged on particular readings of justice, punishment and retribution. At a more mundane level, the everyday practice of missionary stations (including the arbitration of disputes between colleagues) also required a working understanding of what was ‘fair’. This article explores the ways in which missionaries used concepts of ‘justice’ to signify a social identity; a moral need; a legal ideal; a theological explanation; and an administrative tool

Deaf Connections and Global Conversations: Deafness and education in and beyond the British Empire, ca. 1800-1900

This article argues that, despite strong metaphorical ties between deafness and the inability to connect, nineteenth-century deaf networks provide an excellent example of how ideas and identities circulated through transnational and transcolonial networks. Educational institutions facilitated the spread of signing. Deaf pedagogies were developed and contested across multiple sites. Ideologies of ableism (the privileging of the young non-disabled body) intersected with changing attitudes towards race. And embodied knowledges of deafness circulated as deaf individuals moved around the globe and formed transnational communities. Tracing deaf connections also enables us to think about the extent to which colonial networks intersected with networks in the US and continental Europe

Disability as a problem of humanity in Scottish enlightenment thought

This article makes a case that disability, particularly visual, hearing, and speech impairments, played a significant role in Scottish Enlightenment thought. Focusing on the work of Dugald Stewart, and in particular on his essay ‘Some account of a boy born blind and deaf’, we argue that disability was a deep preoccupation of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers who used it as a test case for various important philosophical questions including those concerning ‘human nature’ and the limits of humanity. The article starts by situating the philosophical debate in the context of lived experiences of, and proximity to, impairment. The second part offers a close reading of Stewart's text ‘Some account’, about James Mitchell, a fourteen-year-old deafblind boy living in the Scottish Highlands. The third part examines how disability operated in relation to other hierarchies of difference that have been demonstrated to have been central to Enlightenment thought, in particular that of race. Overall, the contribution this article makes is to introduce disability as an important, if currently overlooked, category in Scottish Enlightenment thought that needs further investigation

Orientalising deafness: race and disability in imperial Britain

This article explores the conflations and connections that postcolonial and disability scholars have drawn between ‘race’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘disability’ from a historical perspective. By looking at the connections drawn between ‘race’ and ‘disability’ in the context of nineteenth-century imperial Britain, I hope to probe beyond them to examine the origins and implications of their interplay. I do so by focusing on ideas about deafness, an impairment radically reconfigured in the colonial period, and inflected with concerns about degeneration, belonging, heredity and difference. Disability, I argue, not only operated as an additional ‘category of difference’ alongside ‘race’ as a way of categorising and subjugating the various ‘others’ of Empire, but intersected with it. The ‘colonisation’ of disabled people in Britain and the ‘racial other’ by the British were not simply simultaneous processes or even analogous ones, but were part and parcel of the same cultural and discursive system. The colonising context of the nineteenth century, a period when British political, economic and cultural expansion over areas of South Asia, Australasia and Africa increased markedly, structured the way in which all forms of difference were recognised and expressed, including the difference of deafness. So too did the shifts in the raced and gendered thinking that accompanied it, as new forms of knowledge were developed to justify, explain and contest Britain's global position and new languages were developed through which to articulate otherness. Such developments reconfigured the meaning of disability. Disability was, in effect, ‘orientalised’. ‘Race’ I argue was formative in shaping what we have come to understand as ‘disability’ and vice versa; they were related fantasies of difference