Empires of Panic

Epidemics and Colonial Anxieties

Edited by Robert Peckham

• Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
• Year: 2015
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9789888313600
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Empires of Panic is the first book to explore how panics have been historically produced, defined, and managed across different colonial, imperial, and post-imperial settings—from early nineteenth-century East Asia to twenty-first-century America. Contributors consider panic in relation to colonial anxieties, rumors, indigenous resistance, and crises, particularly in relation to epidemic disease. How did Western government agencies, policymakers, planners, and other authorities understand, deal with, and neutralize panics? What role did evolving technologies of communication play in the amplification of local panics into global events? Engaging with these questions, the book challenges conventional histories to show how intensifying processes of intelligence gathering did not consolidate empire, but rather served to produce critical uncertainties—the uneven terrain of imperial panic.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Book Synopsis
• Author Biography
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction: Panic: Reading the Signs
• 1. Empire and the Place of Panic
• 2. Slow Burn in China: Factories, Fear, and Fire in Canton
• 3. Epidemic Opportunities: Panic, Quarantines, and the 1851 International Sanitary Conference
• 4. Health Panics, Migration, and Ecological Exchange in the Aftermath of the 1857 Uprising: India, New Zealand, and Australia
• 5. Disease, Rumor, and Panic in India’s Plague and Influenza Epidemics, 1896–1919
• 6. Panic Encabled: Epidemics and the Telegraphic World
• 7. Don’t Panic! The “Excited and Terrified” Public Mind from Yellow Fever to Bioterrorism
• 8. Mediating Panic: The Iconography of “New” Infectious Threats, 1936–2009
• Epilogue: Panic’s Past and Global Futures
• Bibliography
• Index