Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial Anxiety

Published by Hong Kong University Press in February 2015; Chinese edition by Zhejiang University Press in December 2021; US distribution by Chicago University Press

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.


Mentioned as an author’s choice essential pandemic reading in the Los Angeles Times. Read here.

THINGS PEOPLE ARE SAYING
ABOUT THIS BOOK:

“There are not many books on a topic as diffuse as this one – the idea itself is unusual, and worthy of a volume. And the book once in hand does not disappoint – though slim, the study punches above its weight in sketching out some of the parameters of this notion across a wide ambit of time and space. This is not history for the faint of heart. It is, however, history that shows how epidemics have spread and caused havoc in various places, and how this phenomenon in turn has been processed and explained by states, and by the human actors that make up the ‘public,’ as well as the sinew of these same states.”

Eric Tagliacozzo, John Stambaugh Professor of History, Cornell University, Asia Pacific Perspectives (2016), author – The Longest Journey.


“Charting the relays of rumor and knowledge that stoke colonial fears of disease, disorder, and disaster, Empires of Panic offers timely and cautionary insight into how viscerally epidemics inflame imperial anxieties, and how words and their communication over new technologies accelerate panic, rally government intervention, and unsettle and entrench the exercise of global power. Relevant a century ago and even more so today.” 

Nayan Shah, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History, University of Southern California, author – Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown.


“Empires generated anxiety as much as ambition. This fine study focuses on anxieties generated by disease. It is the first book of its kind to track shifting forms of panic through different geopolitical regimes and imperial formations over the course of two centuries. Working across medical and imperial histories, it is a major contribution to both.” 

Andrew S. Thompson, Professor of Global and Imperial History and a Professional fellow at Nuffield College; author – Imperial Britain: The Empire in British Politics. 


“The book makes an important contribution to the field of British imperial history by illuminating our understanding of how the everyday life of empire was interwoven with anxieties and panics. Empires of Panic explores how the particular contexts of empire can inflame anxiety and amplify the impact of crises.” 

Reviews in History (2020). 


“The book makes an important contribution to the field of British imperial history by illuminating our understanding of how the everyday life of empire was interwoven with anxieties and panics.” 

Amina Marzouk Chouchene, ‘Empire and Epidemic,’ Reviews in History (2020).

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