Despite emancipation from the evils of enslavement in 1838, most people of African origin in the British West Indian colonies continued to suffer serious material deprivation and racial oppression. This book examines the management and treatment of those who became insane, in the period until the Great War.

In Colonizing Madness Jacqueline Leckie tells a forgotten story of silence, suffering, and transgressions in the colonial Pacific. It offers new insights into a history of Fiji by entering the Pacific Islands’ most enduring psychiatric institution—St Giles Psychiatric Hospital—established as Fiji’s Public Lunatic Asylum in 1884. Her nuanced study reveals a microcosm of Fiji’s indigenous, migrant, and colonial communities and examines how individuals and communities lived with the label of madness in an ethnically complex island society. Tracking longitudinal change from the 1880s to the present in the construction and treatment of mental disorder in Fiji, the book emphasizes the colonization of madness across and within the divides of culture, ethnicity, religion, gender, economics, and power. Colonization of madness in Fiji was forged by the entanglement of colonial institutions and cultures that reflected tensions and prejudices within homes, villages, workplaces, and churches. Mental despair was equally an outcome of the destruction and displacement wrought by migration and colonialism. Madness was further cast within the wider world of colonial psychiatry, Western biomedicine, and asylum building. One of the chapters explores medical discourse and diagnoses within colonial worlds and practices. The “community within” the asylum is a feature in Leckie’s study, with attention to patient agency to show how those labeled insane resisted diagnoses of their minds, confinement, and constraints—ranging from straitjackets to electric shock treatments to drug therapies. She argues that madness in colonial Fiji reflects dynamics between the asylum and the community, and that “reading” asylum archives sheds new light on race/ethnicity, gender, and power in colonial Fiji. Exploring the meaning of madness in Fiji, the author does not shy away from asking controversial questions about how Pacific cultures define normality and abnormality and also how communities respond. Carefully researched and clearly written, Colonizing Madness offers an engaging narrative, a superb example of an intersectional history with a broad appeal to understanding global developments in mental health. Her theses address the contradictions of current efforts to discard the asylum model and to make mental health a reality for all in postcolonial societies.

Based on over two hundred and fifty psychiatric case files, this book offers a radical new departure from existing historical accounts of what is still commonly thought of as the most picturesque of Britain’s colonies overseas. By tracing the life histories of Kenya’s ‘white insane’, the book allows for a new account of settler society: one that moves attention away from the ‘great white hunters’ and heroic pioneer farmers to all those Europeans who did not manage to emulate the colonial ideal. In doing so, it raises important new questions around deviance, transgression and social control. Sitting at the intersection of a number of fields, the book will appeal to students and teachers of imperial history, colonial medicine, African history and postcolonial theory and will prove a valuable addition to both undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

Claire Edington's fascinating look at psychiatric care in French colonial Vietnam challenges our notion of the colonial asylum as a closed setting, run by experts with unchallenged authority, from which patients rarely left. She shows instead a society in which Vietnamese communities and families actively participated in psychiatric decision-making in ways that strengthened the power of the colonial state, even as they also forced French experts to engage with local understandings of, and practices around, insanity. Beyond the Asylum reveals how psychiatrists, colonial authorities, and the Vietnamese public debated both what it meant to be abnormal, as well as normal enough to return to social life, throughout the early twentieth century. Straddling the fields of colonial history, Southeast Asian studies and the history of medicine, Beyond the Asylum shifts our perspective from the institution itself to its relationship with the world beyond its walls. This world included not only psychiatrists and their patients, but also prosecutors and parents, neighbors and spirit mediums, as well as the police and local press. How each group interacted with the mentally ill, with each other, and sometimes in opposition to each other, helped decide the fate of those both in and outside the colonial asylum.

In this first history of psychiatry in colonial Africa, Jock McCulloch describes the clinical approaches of well-known European practitioners, including Frantz Fanon and Wulf Sachs. They operated independently of one another.Yet, despite their differences,they shared a coherent set of ideas about 'the African Mind', based on the colonial notion of African inferiority.By exploring the association between settler ideology and psychiatric research, this study examines colonial science as a system of knowledge and power.

Based on over 3000 institutional records, Coleborne's study will have wider relevance outside of the history of medicine and psychiatry. It has a global perspective but focuses on specific destinations, and in so doing, contributes in an innovative way to global history and the history of human migration.

This book brings together academics and clinicians from different parts of the world with different experiences of colonialism to share their experiences and analyse the impact of colonialism on mental health.