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Military Mortality in Tropical Asia: British Troops in Tenasserim, 1827–36

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Peter Coclanis
Peter Coclanis
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Extract

The demographic history of Southeast Asia remains largely uncharted. This is particularly true of mainland Southeast Asia prior to the commencement of the era of high imperialism in the second half of the nineteenth century. To be sure, in recent years scholars have begun to explore certain aspects of the mainland's demographic history during the precolonial and early colonial periods. Nonetheless, we still lack basic information on fertility, mortality, and migration — the three fundamental categories in demographic analysis — for most populations on most parts of the mainland prior to 1850.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , March 1999 , pp. 22 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1999

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References

1 See, for example, Death and Disease in Southeast Asia: Explorations in Social, Medical and Demographic History, ed. Owen, Norman G. (Singapore and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Parmer, J. Norman, “Estate Workers' Health in the Federated Malay States in the 1920s”, in The Underside of Malaysian History: Pullers, Prostitutes, Plantation Workers, ed. Rimmer, Peter J. and Allen, Lisa M. (Singapore: Singapore University Press for the Malaysia Society of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, 1990), pp. 179–92Google Scholar; Manderson, Lenore, “Race, Colonial Mentality and Public Health in Early Twentieth Century Malaya”, in The Underside of Malaysian History, ed. Rimmer, and Allen, , pp. 193–213Google Scholar; Arnold, David, “Diseases of the Modern Period in South Asia”, in The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, ed. Kiple, Kenneth F. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 418–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bamber, Scott, “Diseases of Antiquity and the Premodern Period in Southeast Asia”, in The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, pp. 425–40Google Scholar; Taylor, Keith W., “Diseases and Disease Ecology of the Modem Period in Southeast Asia”, in The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, pp. 440–44Google Scholar. For a recent epidemiological study of another part of Southeast Asia, see De Bevoise, Ken, Agents of Apocalypse: Epidemic Disease in the Colonial Philippines (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

2 Porter, Theodore M., The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Cullen, Michael J., The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain: The Foundations of Empirical Social Research (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, Inc., 1975)Google Scholar; Cohen, Patricia Cline, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)Google Scholar. Also see Hacking, Ian, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bernstein, Peter L., Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), pp. 99–193Google Scholar. For the broader context, see Crosby, Alfred W., The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

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4 [Tulloch, Alexander], Statistical Report of the Sickness and Mortality Among Her Majesty's Troops Serving in the Tenasserim Provinces in British Sessional Papers, House of Commons, 1842, vol. XXVII, pp. 219–38Google Scholar; “Report of the Committee…”, Journal of the Statistical Society of London 3 (1840): 113–43Google Scholar; “Second Report of a Committee…”, Journal of the Statistical Society of London 4 (1841): 137–55Google Scholar; Sykes, W.H., “Vital Statistics of the East India Company's Armies in India…”, Journal of the Statistical Society of London 10 (1847): 100–131CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Maulmain Chronicle, 16 June 1838, 23 June 1838. On the Army Medical Department, see Cantlie, Neil, A History of the Army Medical Department, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London: Churchill Livingstone, 1974)Google Scholar. On the Statistical Society of London, see Cullen, , The Statistical Movement, pp. 77–104Google Scholar.

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7 “Second Report of a Committee…”, p. 141; Tulloch, , Statistical Report, pp. 224–34Google Scholar. Note that the port city of Moulmein (Mawlamyine) had a population of almost 30,000 by the early 1840s. The total population of the sparsely-settled Tenasserim Provinces as a whole — including all British military forces and a small number of Western civilians — was only about 130,000 or so at that time. See The Maulmain Chronicle, 16 June 1838, 31 July 1839, 30 June 1841. The above population estimate for Tenasserim is corroborated by J.S. Furnivall, who puts the area's population in 1845 at 127,000. See Furnivall, , An Introduction to the Political Economy of Burma, 3rd ed. (Rangoon: Peoples' Literature Committee & House, 1957), p. 245Google Scholar.

8 Tulloch, Statistical Report, Also see the sources cited in note 4. On Tulloch, see entry, “Tulloch, Sir Alexander Murray”, in Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Stephen, Leslie et al. . (London, 1885–1996), vol. 19, pp. 1233–34Google Scholar.

9 Curtin, , Death by Migration, pp. xvi, 42Google Scholar.

10 Ibid., pp. 44–46.

11 Ibid., pp. 42–47. For contemporary data on “seasoning” among British military and civilservice personnel in India, see Thomson, Arthur S., “On the Doctrine of Acclimatization”, Madras Quarterly Medical Review 2 (1840): 69–72Google Scholar.

12 Curtin, , Death by Migration, pp. 125–26Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., pp. 42–43, 107–108, 125–26. On the humoral theory, see for example, Singer, Charles and Underwood, E. Ashworth, A Short History of Medicine, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 46–47Google Scholar.

14 Tulloch, , Statistical Report, pp. 223–24Google Scholar; Burnett, James, Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day, rev.ed. (London: Scolar, 1979), pp. 30–73Google Scholar; Curtin, , Death by Migration, pp. 125–29Google Scholar. A number of recent studies in the new field of anthropometric history have emphasized the poor nutritional state of many populations in the West in the nineteenth century. For an excellent survey of this body of work, see Steckel, Richard H., “Stature and the Standard of Living”, Journal of Economic Literature 33 (1995): 1903–1940Google Scholar.

15 Tulloch, , Statistical Report, p. 224Google Scholar.

16 Ibid., p. 223.

17 Ibid., p. 224. On medical care, sanitation, and “tropical hygiene” in the middle of the nineteenth century, see Curtin, , Death by Migration, pp. 40–61Google Scholar. Some of the problems relating to sanitation and waste disposal at the military installation at Mergui are captured in H.C. Menzies to The Officer Commanding Detachment, 31st Regiment, Mergui, 8 June 1860, Menzies-Harrison Letters [Tenasserim Province Letterbook], No. 15, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library, London, England.

18 Weeks, John R., Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues, 6th ed. (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1996), p. 183Google Scholar.

19 See for example, ibid., pp. 183–84.

20 Tulloch, , Statistical Report, p. 224Google Scholar. Note that Tulloch attributes the large death total and high crude death rate for 1827 to several factors, including “previous suffering at Rangoon” and “the adverse circumstances in which the troops were placed in regard to diet, duty, and accommodation for some time after their arrival….” See p. 224.

21 Deaths due to fevers, epidemic cholera, and diseases of the liver, stomach, and bowels accounted for 81 per cent of the deaths included in Table 4. Note that in addition to data on mortality, Tulloch collected information on hospital admissions, which we shall employ later in this essay. On the leading tropical killers, and for comparative figures on mortality elsewhere in the tropics, see Curtin, , Death by Migration, pp. 1–39Google Scholar.

22 See, for example, ibid., pp. 132–40. Also see Curtin, 's classic essay, “Epidemiology and the Slave Trade”, Political Science Quarterly 83 (1968): 190–216CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and his more recent essay, “Malarial Immunities in Nineteenth-Century West Africa and the Caribbean”, Parassitologia 36 (1994): 69–82Google Scholar.

23 On the measurement of seasonality, see, for example, Rutman, Darrett B., Wetherell, Charles, and Rutman, Anita H., “Rhythms of Life: Black and White Seasonality in the Early Chesapeake”, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11 (1980): 29–53CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. For an empirical demonstration, see Coclanis, Peter A., The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), Appendix I–A, pp. 161–63Google Scholar.

24 On this procedure, see Fleury, Marcel and Henry, Louis, Nouveau manuel de dépouillement et d'exploitation de l'état civil ancien (Paris: Éditions de l'Institut National d'Études Demographiques, 1965)Google Scholar; Rutman, et al. , “Rhythms of Life”, pp. 29–33 especiallyGoogle Scholar.

25 On the chi-square hypothesis test and its interpretation, see, for example, Horwitz, Lucy and Ferleger, Lou, Statistics for Social Change (Boston: South End Books, 1980), pp. 228–31Google Scholar.

26 Curtin, , Death by Migration, pp. 8, 180–87, 203–210 especiallyGoogle Scholar. Also see Cantlie, , A History of the Army Medical Department, vol. 1, 441–43Google Scholar. For a broad view of the long-term effects of differential mortality rates on Europe and Asia, see Jones, E.L., The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 22–41Google Scholar.