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Colonising Disability

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View the page of Esme Cleall

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Esme Cleall explores the construction and treatment of disability across Britain and its empire from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century.

Image courtesy of interviewee. April 25, 2024

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The speaker discusses their work which is motivated by personal, academic, and political factors, particularly stemming from their experiences as a British woman with disabilities. They explore the intersections of critical colonial history, race, gender, class, discrimination, and how these relate to disability—a topic they feel is often overlooked. The project began amidst political austerity in Britain, which heightened discrimination against disabled individuals.

The historical context of the British Empire is significant in shaping attitudes towards disability, influencing both how disabled individuals were perceived and how they engaged with empire. The speaker critiques paternalistic and "civilizing" discourses that often stripped disabled individuals of their agency, drawing parallels with similar narratives around indigenous and marginalized groups.

Examples include the education systems for the deaf and blind that emerged in the 19th century, which sometimes benefited individuals by creating communities, yet often imposed oppressive structures that limited their identities and languages, especially with the shift towards oralism over sign language in education due to eugenics and racial ideologies.

The relationship between race and disability is emphasized as complex and interlinked, with discussions around immigration laws in the late 19th to early 20th centuries showcasing how these identities were assessed in overlapping ways. The speaker argues that disability is not a marginal issue but central to understanding British and imperial history, encouraging a broader discourse that includes the experiences of disabled individuals in the shaping of societal structures and cultural narratives.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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So I guess the work has three motivations.

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It's from personal, academic, and political perspectives.

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So the project stemmed from some questions that I,

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that arose from my lived experiences of British woman

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with some complex mental and physical disabilities.

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But it also arose from developments in

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critical colonial history.

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And this was the area that I'd already done some doctoral

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research in, in critical colonial scholarship,

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thinking about race and gender in the British Empire.

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And this led me to thinking about questions of otherness,

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embodied identities, ideas about class, race, gender,

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and ideas about discrimination.

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And these were things that I wanted to explore further.

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Due to my personal background, I thought

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that disability was an important element that perhaps wasn't

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so central to these stories.

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There's also political questions.

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So I started this project about 20 10, 10, 20 12,

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when austerity was a particular political moment

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that intensified some discrimination against

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disabled people in Britain.

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Um, and there was a bit of a pushback against this by,

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disabled people against cuts and other, organizations.

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And so as a historian, I believe

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that history is an important means through which

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to challenge particular constructions,

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and patterns of discrimination.

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So I was really interested in thinking about

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how all this worked historically.

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So the British Empire was an important context,

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for a lot of changes in attitudes towards disability

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in the 19th century.

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Um, also the beginning of the 20th century, of course.

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And at this time, the empire was a huge geopolitical social

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economic, cultural force, that,

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that shaped Britain as well as shaped much of the rest

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of the world or a lot of the world.

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It shaped attitudes towards disabled people,

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and of course disabled people also shaped empire.

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And so I don't think that colon, your otherness

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and the construction of disability are exactly the same

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thing, I think their distinct projects.

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But I think it's really important

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to bear in mind the imperial context, that this was a time

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of empire, a time of colonialism when thinking about

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what happened to, towards disabled people

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and by disabled people in Britain.

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Well, I put these words saving disabled people

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and civilizing project in big quote marks in the book,

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because they speak to so many kind

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of paternalistic discourses about rescuing disabled people.

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And a lot of these discourses,

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deny agency towards disabled people

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as they've denied agency towards indigenous people

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or black people, in, in the British empire.

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And so what I meant by that was attempts to,

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to educate disabled people

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Or to, to convert them,

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to Protestant Christianity primarily,

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to increase ideas about spirituality.

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Um, and I guess I was thinking about this in the broad

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context of a big imperial project, to, of,

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of what I called civilizing, to make people like, so

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to undo difference, in the, in the British empire.

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Um, and so you can look at all kinds of examples of that.

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You might think about, deaf education,

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or you might think about blind literacy,

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or you might think about asylums.

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Um, so there's real concrete, places,

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architectural places

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and spaces where some of these, conversations

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and projects took place.

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Um, but I think I was also thinking about

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what happened both in Britain

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and in the, the world, more broadly.

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So I was thinking about how, these projects say

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to set up deaf schools in London might be,

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thought along alongside, colonizing

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or missionary projects in India or Sri Lanka.

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Um, and to see them all part of, a big picture whereby,

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bourgeois Christianity or Protestantism

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or middle class values or white values

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or ideas about white supremacy.

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All of these could be articulated in different

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and overlapping ways, kind of came to together.

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And disabled people stood at that kind of nexus in terms

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of experiencing some of those projects.

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Well, that, that's an interesting question.

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There's a lot of, diversity, I think,

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in the way in which disabled people do respond

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to these kinds of movements.

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Um, some disabled people found them empowering.

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Um, deaf schools brought together, deaf people

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for the first time and sign languages flourished

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in those environments.

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Um, at least in the first half of the 19th century.

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Um, other people found them, to be very discriminatory,

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very oppressive, and in different deaf schools,

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and particularly towards the end of the 19th century,

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sign language was forbidden

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and the oralist English language was, imposed on them.

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So I think that in regards to thinking about

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how disabled people responded, it's always important

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to be specific both the time

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and place to the kinds of, project

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that you are looking at.

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And also to the individual responses

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and agency of disabled people

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and thinking through, how they might respond to,

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this kind of project.

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Sure. Well, freak shows and isn't it a horrible word?

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Um, I mean, where our kind of places

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where disabled people were displayed or exhibited.

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And of course, it wasn't unusual for people to be disabled.

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There were many disabled people in

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The 19th century as there are today.

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Um, and many people have, bodily anomalies.

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Um, but this was a process by which particular people,

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people with, particular,

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physical difference were displayed in quite crude manners.

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Um, and this is for what,

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what was encompassed under the word freak show had some

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variety, and some of them were more middle class

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and some of them were more medical,

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and some of them were in fairgrounds and circuses,

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and sometimes disabled people had real agency in terms

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of thinking about how they were displayed.

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And sometimes they were absolutely exploited.

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So again, I suppose it's thinking about the specificities in

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different contexts.

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But one of the things I was thinking about when I was

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writing about these histories was the relationship

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between these, so-called freak shows

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and, ethnographical displays of,

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non-disabled people of color, who were taken to Britain

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and displayed as though they were curiosities or exhibits

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and historians like Sadia Qureshi have looked in in great

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detail at, at some of these displays.

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And what I was trying to do was to try

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and think about visibility

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and race alongside each other, to mark them as different

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with different histories,

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but ones that were coexisting in similar kind of spaces.

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So the use of language was so loaded in the 19th century,

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as it has been loaded in different

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times and different places.

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And it was used to really think through relationships

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between humans and animals.

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And obviously in the 19th century,

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this was happening in the context of Darwin

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and, all kinds of debates about evolution that,

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that framed that particular relationship in new ways

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and language was seen as really key to, to,

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to working with deaf people.

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And I must say that by language, these kind of thinkers

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or teachers are really talking about spoken language.

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And they were talking about western European

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spoken languages in particular.

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So the fact that many deaf people used signed languages,

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BSL or a SL or Alan

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or different signed languages, that was quite dismissed

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and not seen as, a kind of valid form of linguistic

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communication.

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But having said that, that's again, something

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that shifts over the 19th century.

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So there is a bit more generosity towards signed languages

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or acceptance of signed languages in the early 19th century.

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But from the 1880s,

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there's a big conference in Milan in Italy, that really,

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sparks a shift in attitudes towards,

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signed languages

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and says they're actually not useful

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for deaf people. Something

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That that deaf people have since contested massively,

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that led to increased in oral education

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with people being taught to, speech read

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or lip read, vernaculars such as English instead.

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Yeah. So I guess the deaf community in Britain,

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and we might talk about communities in Britain.

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There's lots of deaf communities in 19th century Britain,

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and these are to some extent shaped by religion

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and shaped by class, background.

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Um, but we do get the burgeoning of deaf culture, partly

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through deaf schools, in Britain.

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And we also get, really,

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really exciting developments like, internationalism

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and deaf banquets and, deaf, the deaf press

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and newspapers aimed at deaf people.

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And then by the later 19th century actually

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written by deaf people.

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Um, so it's a really vibrant community

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and one that I think, it's both specific

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to Britain, but it always is outward looking as well.

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It's aware of imperial context, it's aware

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of developments in the US particularly,

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in France is another major hub in regards

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to, deaf culture.

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And to some extent, what I was writing about was the

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connections that deaf people saw from one place to the next.

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So I wrote quite a bit about a really extraordinary woman

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called Jane Groom, who was deaf.

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And she, took a group of, deaf people from London,

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well London and Manchester actually, to, to Canada.

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And she was, she was always thinking

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with an imperial perspective.

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And I think that that's kind of key to thinking about a lot

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of ideas about Britishness in the 19th century,

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that British identity is somewhat formed

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through relationships with other places,

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and formed through relationships with the British Empire.

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So the relationship between race

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and disability is extremely complex,

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and I would emphasize that they are different categories

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and that they have their own histories

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and they have their own legacies.

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And one thing that I was keen

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to emphasize in colonizing disability is

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that they are not the same thing.

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But that said, I see them as categories that intersect

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to use the word of, Cobi Crenshaw

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and others, that they, they, they relate to each other.

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They're in negotiation with each other.

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Um, and I was really thinking about

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how this happens in the context of the British Empire.

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So I'll give you an example.

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So, in the late 19th

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and early 20th century, there's a lot of immigration laws,

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both in the colonies

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and in metropolitan Britain, the 1905.

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Um, so-called Aliens act, for example,

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to stop immigration into Britain.

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And this meant that people were being assessed at the border

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as to whether they were considered to be, in crude terms,

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desirable immigrants

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or non desirable immigrants, people who would be let in,

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or people who would be turned away.

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And I think that immigration is a really good place

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to really think through some of these intersections,

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because if somebody was white say,

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that might count in their favor,

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if they were non-disabled, that might count in their favor.

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If they were a strong young man,

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that might count in their favor,

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and all the kind of reverses would work against certain

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people in certain groups as well.

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But people are complicated.

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So disabled women would turn up at the border too,

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and they had assets that were seen as useful

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to a colonizing power

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and things that were sources of discrimination.

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And further than that, I think that certain,

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attributes were seen as dis disabled

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or seen as racialized, in ways that really kind

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of get quite muddled up.

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So ideas about kind of eye disease as being genetic

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or being, specific to specific groups of people,

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or trama in particularly as being a racialized,

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or is, is racialized in immigration discourse.

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Um, whereas it, it is,

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it might also be seen as a medical issue.

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So I think the intersections between race

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and disability are really important

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and I think they need much more investigation.

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Um, but I would, I would say that they're separate

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but related categories.

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Thank you. Yeah, I mean, again,

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we are looking at horrible terms, ideas about race hygiene.

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Um, and this is to some extent a word that comes out

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of the eugenic context of the 19th century, late 19th,

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early 20th century.

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So at some moments, and in some times in some places,

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and in regards to some social situations, disability is seen

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as very much a personal matter or maybe a family matter,

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but at other moments, it seems

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to come into the public spotlight

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and to be really something that is seen

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to be a public facing concern.

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And so in colonizing disability,

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I wrote a bit about the fantasy LERs, a moment

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where there's a lot of public speculation about disability.

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And I think that this is partly

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because of the eugenic context, in fact, not,

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I think it's quite a big thing to do

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with the eugenic context, but it's also to do

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with the fallout from the South African war,

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not least the infamous recruitment statistics, which show

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that many young people were rejected from the army

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on the grounds of health.

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And this led to a lot of hand wring

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and soul searching about the quality of the

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Imperial race, which was a, a discourse

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of white supremacy.

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It was a gender discourse about young men,

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and it was also ableist discourse that that privileged,

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the non-disabled mind and body.

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That's a big question. I think that, I hope that people

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who don't usually work on disability see

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that disability is something that's not just a

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marginal issue that affects a minority population,

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but is actually central to, to British history,

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to imperial history, to thinking about identities

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of all sorts, and can start

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to see ways in which they might connect, their own

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ideas about the past, ideas about community,

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with ideas about disability,

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because I'm sure many readers will be disabled, and,

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and have disabled family members.

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But I've tended to find that disability still seems

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as though it is sometimes presented as a marginal concern.

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And I hope that the book starts to try

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and bring that into, to more discussions.

00:00 - So I guess the work has three motivations. It's from personal, academic, and political perspectives. So the project stemmed from some questions that I, that arose from my lived experiences of British woman with some complex mental and physical disabilities. But it also arose from developments in

00:19 - critical colonial history. And this was the area that I'd already done some doctoral research in, in critical colonial scholarship, thinking about race and gender in the British Empire. And this led me to thinking about questions of otherness, embodied identities, ideas about class, race, gender, and ideas about discrimination. And these were things that I wanted to explore further. Due to my personal background, I thought that disability was an important element that perhaps wasn't

00:48 - so central to these stories. There's also political questions. So I started this project about 20 10, 10, 20 12, when austerity was a particular political moment that intensified some discrimination against disabled people in Britain. and there was a bit of a pushback against this by, disabled people against cuts and other, organizations. And so as a historian, I believe that history is an important means through which

01:19 - to challenge particular constructions, and patterns of discrimination. So I was really interested in thinking about how all this worked historically. So the British Empire was an important context, for a lot of changes in attitudes towards disability in the 19th century. also the beginning of the 20th century, of course. And at this time, the empire was a huge geopolitical social economic, cultural force, that,

01:50 - that shaped Britain as well as shaped much of the rest of the world or a lot of the world. It shaped attitudes towards disabled people, and of course disabled people also shaped empire. And so I don't think that colon, your otherness and the construction of disability are exactly the same thing, I think their distinct projects. But I think it's really important to bear in mind the imperial context, that this was a time of empire, a time of colonialism when thinking about

02:20 - what happened to, towards disabled people and by disabled people in Britain. Well, I put these words saving disabled people and civilizing project in big quote marks in the book, because they speak to so many kind of paternalistic discourses about rescuing disabled people. And a lot of these discourses, deny agency towards disabled people as they've denied agency towards indigenous people or black people, in, in the British empire.

02:52 - And so what I meant by that was attempts to, to educate disabled people Or to, to convert them, to Protestant Christianity primarily, to increase ideas about spirituality. and I guess I was thinking about this in the broad context of a big imperial project, to, of, of what I called civilizing, to make people like, so to undo difference, in the, in the British empire. and so you can look at all kinds of examples of that.

03:31 - You might think about, deaf education, or you might think about blind literacy, or you might think about asylums. so there's real concrete, places, architectural places and spaces where some of these, conversations and projects took place. but I think I was also thinking about what happened both in Britain and in the, the world, more broadly.

03:58 - So I was thinking about how, these projects say to set up deaf schools in London might be, thought along alongside, colonizing or missionary projects in India or Sri Lanka. and to see them all part of, a big picture whereby, bourgeois Christianity or Protestantism or middle class values or white values or ideas about white supremacy. All of these could be articulated in different and overlapping ways, kind of came to together.

04:30 - And disabled people stood at that kind of nexus in terms of experiencing some of those projects. Well, that, that's an interesting question. There's a lot of, diversity, I think, in the way in which disabled people do respond to these kinds of movements. some disabled people found them empowering. deaf schools brought together, deaf people for the first time and sign languages flourished in those environments.

04:57 - at least in the first half of the 19th century. other people found them, to be very discriminatory, very oppressive, and in different deaf schools, and particularly towards the end of the 19th century, sign language was forbidden and the oralist English language was, imposed on them. So I think that in regards to thinking about how disabled people responded, it's always important to be specific both the time and place to the kinds of, project

05:30 - that you are looking at. And also to the individual responses and agency of disabled people and thinking through, how they might respond to, this kind of project. Sure. Well, freak shows and isn't it a horrible word? I mean, where our kind of places where disabled people were displayed or exhibited. And of course, it wasn't unusual for people to be disabled. There were many disabled people in

05:56 - The 19th century as there are today. and many people have, bodily anomalies. but this was a process by which particular people, people with, particular, physical difference were displayed in quite crude manners. and this is for what, what was encompassed under the word freak show had some variety, and some of them were more middle class and some of them were more medical, and some of them were in fairgrounds and circuses,

06:29 - and sometimes disabled people had real agency in terms of thinking about how they were displayed. And sometimes they were absolutely exploited. So again, I suppose it's thinking about the specificities in different contexts. But one of the things I was thinking about when I was writing about these histories was the relationship between these, so-called freak shows and, ethnographical displays of, non-disabled people of color, who were taken to Britain

07:00 - and displayed as though they were curiosities or exhibits and historians like Sadia Qureshi have looked in in great detail at, at some of these displays. And what I was trying to do was to try and think about visibility and race alongside each other, to mark them as different with different histories, but ones that were coexisting in similar kind of spaces. So the use of language was so loaded in the 19th century, as it has been loaded in different

07:28 - times and different places. And it was used to really think through relationships between humans and animals. And obviously in the 19th century, this was happening in the context of Darwin and, all kinds of debates about evolution that, that framed that particular relationship in new ways and language was seen as really key to, to, to working with deaf people. And I must say that by language, these kind of thinkers

08:02 - or teachers are really talking about spoken language. And they were talking about western European spoken languages in particular. So the fact that many deaf people used signed languages, BSL or a SL or Alan or different signed languages, that was quite dismissed and not seen as, a kind of valid form of linguistic communication. But having said that, that's again, something that shifts over the 19th century.

08:32 - So there is a bit more generosity towards signed languages or acceptance of signed languages in the early 19th century. But from the 1880s, there's a big conference in Milan in Italy, that really, sparks a shift in attitudes towards, signed languages and says they're actually not useful for deaf people. Something That that deaf people have since contested massively, that led to increased in oral education

09:01 - with people being taught to, speech read or lip read, vernaculars such as English instead. Yeah. So I guess the deaf community in Britain, and we might talk about communities in Britain. There's lots of deaf communities in 19th century Britain, and these are to some extent shaped by religion and shaped by class, background. but we do get the burgeoning of deaf culture, partly through deaf schools, in Britain. And we also get, really,

09:38 - really exciting developments like, internationalism and deaf banquets and, deaf, the deaf press and newspapers aimed at deaf people. And then by the later 19th century actually written by deaf people. so it's a really vibrant community and one that I think, it's both specific to Britain, but it always is outward looking as well. It's aware of imperial context, it's aware of developments in the US particularly,

10:10 - in France is another major hub in regards to, deaf culture. And to some extent, what I was writing about was the connections that deaf people saw from one place to the next. So I wrote quite a bit about a really extraordinary woman called Jane Groom, who was deaf. And she, took a group of, deaf people from London, well London and Manchester actually, to, to Canada. And she was, she was always thinking with an imperial perspective.

10:43 - And I think that that's kind of key to thinking about a lot of ideas about Britishness in the 19th century, that British identity is somewhat formed through relationships with other places, and formed through relationships with the British Empire. So the relationship between race and disability is extremely complex, and I would emphasize that they are different categories and that they have their own histories and they have their own legacies.

11:14 - And one thing that I was keen to emphasize in colonizing disability is that they are not the same thing. But that said, I see them as categories that intersect to use the word of, Cobi Crenshaw and others, that they, they, they relate to each other. They're in negotiation with each other. and I was really thinking about how this happens in the context of the British Empire. So I'll give you an example.

11:43 - So, in the late 19th and early 20th century, there's a lot of immigration laws, both in the colonies and in metropolitan Britain, the 1905. so-called Aliens act, for example, to stop immigration into Britain. And this meant that people were being assessed at the border as to whether they were considered to be, in crude terms, desirable immigrants or non desirable immigrants, people who would be let in,

12:11 - or people who would be turned away. And I think that immigration is a really good place to really think through some of these intersections, because if somebody was white say, that might count in their favor, if they were non-disabled, that might count in their favor. If they were a strong young man, that might count in their favor, and all the kind of reverses would work against certain people in certain groups as well.

12:36 - But people are complicated. So disabled women would turn up at the border too, and they had assets that were seen as useful to a colonizing power and things that were sources of discrimination. And further than that, I think that certain, attributes were seen as dis disabled or seen as racialized, in ways that really kind of get quite muddled up. So ideas about kind of eye disease as being genetic

13:08 - or being, specific to specific groups of people, or trama in particularly as being a racialized, or is, is racialized in immigration discourse. whereas it, it is, it might also be seen as a medical issue. So I think the intersections between race and disability are really important and I think they need much more investigation. but I would, I would say that they're separate but related categories.

13:37 - Thank you. Yeah, I mean, again, we are looking at horrible terms, ideas about race hygiene. and this is to some extent a word that comes out of the eugenic context of the 19th century, late 19th, early 20th century. So at some moments, and in some times in some places, and in regards to some social situations, disability is seen as very much a personal matter or maybe a family matter, but at other moments, it seems to come into the public spotlight

14:09 - and to be really something that is seen to be a public facing concern. And so in colonizing disability, I wrote a bit about the fantasy LERs, a moment where there's a lot of public speculation about disability. And I think that this is partly because of the eugenic context, in fact, not, I think it's quite a big thing to do with the eugenic context, but it's also to do with the fallout from the South African war,

14:36 - not least the infamous recruitment statistics, which show that many young people were rejected from the army on the grounds of health. And this led to a lot of hand wring and soul searching about the quality of the Imperial race, which was a, a discourse of white supremacy. It was a gender discourse about young men, and it was also ableist discourse that that privileged, the non-disabled mind and body.

15:04 - That's a big question. I think that, I hope that people who don't usually work on disability see that disability is something that's not just a marginal issue that affects a minority population, but is actually central to, to British history, to imperial history, to thinking about identities of all sorts, and can start to see ways in which they might connect, their own ideas about the past, ideas about community, with ideas about disability,

15:38 - because I'm sure many readers will be disabled, and, and have disabled family members. But I've tended to find that disability still seems as though it is sometimes presented as a marginal concern. And I hope that the book starts to try and bring that into, to more discussions.

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