Esme Cleall, ed., <i>Global Histories of Disability, 1700–2015: Power, Place and People</i>

Arising out of a 2018 conference, the eight chapters in this book, plus the editor’s Introduction, aim to combine two fields: Global History and Disability History. The editor makes it clear that while the book ‘does not claim to be a Global History in and of itself’ it does consider widely dispersed parts of the world ‘in order to grapple with research questions about disability, power, place and personhood across the world’ (p. 2). In so doing, Esme Cleall argues, the aim is to expand disability history beyond a predominantly Anglophone, white, northern focus by discussing a wider range of perspectives. In the section on ‘power’, three chapters discuss interconnections between disablement and labour relations from violent exploitation to rehabilitation. In a chapter from her 2020 book, Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy describes how enslaved people in 1700s Caribbean were kept between ‘fitness and death’ (p. 23) from the transatlantic passage from Africa to plantation brutalities. The deliberate impairment of enslaved people did not stop planters from barring their labour as happened later among injured European and North American industrial workers. In her article on indentured Indian labourers in Mauritius and Natal from 1840 to 1910, Madhwi also shows that disabled workers were expected to work, though they were paid less and could be punished for being absent. Some disabled workers were deported to India, but others had a more difficult time returning to families due to prejudices around leprosy and madness. This latter group in particular were deemed by colonialists as ‘useless workers’ (p. 53). Increased efforts during the mid-twentieth century to reduce the presumed economic ‘burden’ of disabled people through state-sponsored rehabilitation programs reflect what Sam De Schutter calls ‘the colonial invention of disability’ (p. 57). Borrowing from Sarah Rose’s 2017 book,1 he examines how pre- and post-independence policies in Kenya had a consistency in viewing disability as a ‘problem’ (p. 62) for economic development requiring state intervention. The crucial difference was that disabled people were viewed after Kenyan independence in 1963 as nation builders and citizens, unlike during colonial times.

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