Unpalatable Truths: Food and Drink as Medicine in Colonial British India.

This article considers the significance of eating and drinking within a series of diaries and journals produced in British colonial India during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The discussion of food and drink in this context was not simply a means to add color or compelling detail to these accounts, but was instead a vital ingredient of the authors’ understanding of health and medical treatment. These texts suggest a broader colonial medical understanding of the importance of regulating diet to maintain physical health. Concern with food, and the lack thereof, was understandably a key element in diaries, and in the eyewitness accounts kept by British soldiers, doctors, and civilians during the rebellion. At a narrative level, mention of food also functioned as a trope serving to increase dramatic tension and to capture an imagery of fortitude. In references to drink, by contrast, these sources reveal a conflict between professional and lay opinions regarding the use of alcohol as part of medical treatment. The accounts show the persistent use of alcohol both for medicinal and restorative purposes, despite growing social and medical anxieties over its ill-effects on the body. Close examination of these references to food and drink reflect the quotidian habits, social composition, and the extent of professional and lay knowledge of health and medicine in colonial British India

'A Great Beneficial Disease': Colonial Medicine and Imperial Authority in J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur.

This article examines J. G. Farrell's depictions of colonial medicine as a means of analysing the historical reception of the further past and argues that the end-of-Empire context of the 1970s in which Farrell was writing informed his reappraisal of Imperial authority with particular regard to the limits of medical knowledge and treatment. The article illustrates how in The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), Farrell repeatedly sought to challenge the authority of medical and colonial history by making direct use of period material in the construction of his fictional narrative; by using these sources with deliberate critical intent, Farrell directly engages with the received historical narrative of colonial India, that the British presence brought progress and development, particularly in matters relating to medicine and health. To support these assertions the paper examines how Farrell employed primary sources and period medical practices such as the nineteenth-century debate between miasma and waterborne Cholera transmission and the popularity of phrenology within his novels in order to cast doubt over and interrogate the British right to rule. Overall the paper will argue that Farrell's critique of colonial medical practices, apparently based on science and reason, was shaped by the political context of the 1970s and used to question the wider moral position of Empire throughout his fiction

“We’re Not Gay One Month Out of the Year…We’re Always Who We Are.” Exploring Connections Between Organizations, Pride Branding, and LGBTQ+ Publics

LGBTQ+ visibility has increased in American society; moral acceptability of these identities increased significantly over the last 20 years alone and several US Presidents deemed June to be Pride Month in recognition and celebration of these individuals. To major companies and organizations, LGBTQ+ identities – which constitute more than 11 million US adults – are a growing and richly diverse market segment with considerable buying power and cultural influence. As companies attempt to engage with this segment, they increasingly attempt to engage with Pride Month and events related to Pride – including but not limited to having same-sex representation in advertising, hosting booths at Pride festivals, and selling Pride-laden merchandise. Companies have a historical interest in fostering relationships with audiences in order to affect profits and meaningfully engage with broader society. This theory of relationship management shifts the focus of company public relations (PR) from solely communicating with publics to the quality of relationships with publics, using communication as a tool to influence this quality. This theory has developed in tandem with the idea that company goals, communication, and engagement should transcend mere profit-and-loss; they should engage with diverse social identities and with different social issues to help improve aspects such as socio-economics and environmental policies and actions – this is otherwise known as corporate social responsibility (CSR). While more companies are engaging CSR and are attempting to engage with LGBTQ+ audiences through Pride Month, existing queer PR research needs to examine how engaging with Pride can affect LGBTQ+ perceptions of and engagements with organizations who participate. Through focus group interviews, this research explores how LGBTQ+ people perceive their relationships with companies in general, how they perceive and respond to Pride branding and other Pride PR, how these perceptions and responses influence their real or perceived relationships to the companies, and how other pieces of identity beyond sexuality may help clarify these perceptions and relationships. In order to provide rich descriptions and robust explorations of PR geared towards LGBTQ+ people, the aforementioned diversified PR, relationship management, and CSR contextualize and clarify the findings. This project reinforces and extends the importance of companies managing relationships with their publics (external and internal), of CSR, and clarifies specific meaningful ways for companies to engage with social niches, competing perceptions, and unique cultures

‘Global Britain’? assessing Boris Johnson’s major changes to national security and foreign policy

There is a real risk that the shake-up of UK national security and foreign policy currently being orchestrated by Number 10 will not provide the solutions the country needs, write Edward Elliott and Sam Goodman. Here they interview former National Security Advisers, former Foreign Secretaries, former foreign policy advisers to PMs, and former senior diplomats, to assess recent developments and their potential repercussions

Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire

Book Review: Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire by Jessica Howell, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019, 220 pp., ISBN: 978-1-108-48468-

Spaces of Intemperance & the British Raj 1860-1920

The history of the British Empire in India is one awash with alcohol. Drinking was a common practice throughout colonial society, acting as social necessity and source of a public anxiety. However, rather than only acknowledging what and why individuals in colonial India drank, it is of equal importance to consider where they did so. Despite its ubiquity, alcohol consumption in India was responsive to the dynamics of space and place, and both the habits of drinkers and the social, military or governmental response to their actions altered greatly depending on locations individuals were able to access, and in which they consumed alcohol. This article draws focus on the spatiality of colonial drinking through an examination of key environs that characterise the British experience of India, and in which colonial Britons drank regularly. Examining published sources alongside archival material, the article argues that drinking in colonial India is rendered simultaneously private and public, personal and socially performative, as a result of the hybrid spaces in which individuals access alcohol. The culture of drinking in colonial context, and the manner through which the drinker is constantly under scrutiny makes the act of drinking as much to do with social performance as it is to do with personal taste, with space in each instance a governing influence on choice of beverage, intent, behaviour, and the perceived identity of the drinker themselves