Generative Pests and Makeshift Empire: Reframing Plague in Hong Kong

Abstract

Likely the first reflection on how the ‘sad history’ of plague in Hong Kong ought to be written was expressed in June 1894, amidst the chaos of the first outbreak. Governor William Robinson expected celebration of the selfless heroism of those colonial troops and medical offers who combated the epidemic with ‘true British pluck’. Subsequent historiography has not quite followed this prescription. Emphases on heroism have been replaced with those of oppression; descriptions of ‘pluck’ with those – to quote Myron Echenberg - of the state’s ‘harsh and culturally repugnant’ approach. As thesis and antithesis, these two views stand in stark contrast. Yet, this paper argues for the inadequacy of both. It posits that their distinction conceals commonalities: shared parameters of attention to the agency of the state, the treatment of plague as a discrete category, and an overwhelming emphasis on the human and, at best, one or two other animals. This paper repositions plague. It places it in a ‘multi-species’ world – to employ the language of recent anthropology on human-animal relations – expanding far beyond the totemic figures of the rat and flea, to bring in flies, mosquitoes, pigs, cows, cats, and caterpillars. It links plague as an emerging disease with the ‘emergent ecologies’ enabled by Hong Kong’s economies and geographies. Breaking from both pluck and repression, this paper retreats from the agency of the colonial state. It examines the conditions in which certain concepts emerged into administrative and scientific discourse. It refigures plague science in terms of enterprising individuals and institutions, scrambling for prestige and funding in often makeshift and parsimonious circumstances. This paper further places plague in Hong Kong within a wider context of the British Empire in Asia, seeing it as part of broad discourse of ‘pests’ emerging from specific sites across Southeast and East Asia.