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Leprosy and Colonialism: Suriname Under Dutch Rule, 1750-1950

Online ISBN:
9781526128485
Print ISBN:
9781526112996
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Book

Leprosy and Colonialism: Suriname Under Dutch Rule, 1750-1950

Stephen Snelders
Stephen Snelders
Utrecht University
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Published online:
18 January 2018
Published in print:
26 June 2017
Online ISBN:
9781526128485
Print ISBN:
9781526112996
Publisher:
Manchester University Press

Abstract

Leprosy and colonialism investigates the history of leprosy in the colony of Suriname in the Dutch Caribbean within the context of colonial power and racial conflict - from the plantation economy and the age of slavery to its legacy in the modern colonial state. The book traces the origins of the modern stigmatization and exclusion of people affected with leprosy to the political tensions and racial fears of colonial slave society, tensions exerting their influence up to the present day. Leprosy was framed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Surinamese slave society as an economic and racial problem and a social and political threat to the functioning of the slave economy, a danger to European dominance. Sufferers were attributed with an inferior racial and/or social status and the solution was to segregate and isolate them, and leave them to their fate. After the abolition of slavery, interest in the problem of leprosy diminished for a time in Suriname; however, compulsory segregation received new impetus in the early 20th century in the context of a modernizing colonial state. Modernization included ‘medicalized’ leprosy politics that made more humane treatment possible, but at the same time increased the detection and segregation of sufferers. This colonial management of leprosy was contested: by sufferers who evaded segregation, by Afro-Surinamese and other non-white population groups who kept to their own belief systems such as the importance of taboo violations, and by patients in the asylums who kept their own an agency.

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