Psychiatry and Empire

SLOAN MAHONE is University Lecturer in the History of Medicine at Oxford University, UK, and Deputy Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford. She is currently revising a book manuscript on the nature of 'lunacy' in the tropics and is Director of a new research project on trauma and personhood in colonial Kenya. MEGAN VAUGHAN is Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at King's College, Cambridge University, UK. She is the author of Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultu

'Psychiatry and Empire is a valuable contribution to the history of psychiatry and to understanding current issues of cultural difference in mental health care.' Tony O'Brien, Metapsychology online reviews 'The book includes ten chapters, each of which is impressive in its own right and which collectively add considerable nuance to our understanding of the colonial world as well as the practice and intellectual influence of psychiatry within it. Class, gender and race all emerge as important and interrelated themes that the individual authors handle with great sensitivity. The chapters, individually and collectively, deal with powerful themes and the writing is particularly fluent and persuasive.' - Pamela Dale, History.Transnational

• Introduction: M.Vaughan Taking Science to the Colonies: Psychiatric Innovation in France and North Africa; R.Keller Psychiatry and the Practical Problems of Empire; S.Mahone The Microphysics of Power: Mental Nursing in South Africa in the First Half of the 20th Century; S.Marks Unsettled Minds: Colonialism, Gender and Settling Madness in Fiji; J.Leckie The 'Godless' Freud and his Indian Friends: An Indian Agenda for Psychoanalysis; S.Kapila Mapother of the Maudsley and Psychiatry at the End of the Raj; J.H.Mills & S.Jain The Nature of the Native Mind: Contested Views of Dutch Colonial Psychiatrists in the Former Dutch East Indies; H.Pols Imperial Networks and Postcolonial Independence: The Transition from Colonial to Transcultural Psychiatry; A.Bullard Madness, Vice and Tabanka: Post-Colonial Residues in Trinidadian Conceptualisations of Mental Illness; R.Littlewood