Keywords

Despite the thriving Victorian health industry, propelled by “medical tourism” (Willis 2016, 2018; Bonea et al. 2019), travel itself, like larger patterns of migration, was associated with numerous health hazards. As John M. MacKenzie puts it in “Environment and Empire”, “the patterns of mobility set up by imperial rule led to the accompanying journeys of germs and diseases with often disastrous human consequences” (2016, 9). In this context, what was enigmatically called “the tropics”, and chiefly associated with Africa, was invariably perceived as extremely attractive on account of its natural resources while, at the same time, inspiring awe as the “white man’s grave” (Curtin 1961, 1990), a site of contagion and death. As a geographical but most of all conceptual space, the tropics represented “something culturally and politically alien, as well as environmentally distinctive” from what was seen as the civilised world (Johnson 2009, 537).Footnote 1 Jessica Howell (2014) has shown to what extent explorers maintained the fiction of Africa’s fatal environment. Notoriously, journalist Henry Morton Stanley described the continent as “Fatal Africa!”—a site whose every secret was “environed by so many difficulties,—the torrid heat, the miasma exhaled from the soil, the noisome vapors enveloping every path” (Stanley 1909, 296). In this piece of rhetoric, Africa’s fiendish anthropomorphic climate seems to guard the continent against explorers, settlers, and the “builders” of the British Empire and thus endangers its “civilisational mission”.

It is especially in this context that the health of the travellers and explorers became of issue in official and popular discourses. Clearly, one of the major questions was how it was to be protected. In times when parasitology, sanitary science, and microbiology began to focus on vector-borne diseases while climatic aetiologies put blame on geographical specificities, and miasma theories continued to permeate in many texts (Johnson 2009; Wells 2016), there was very little that could be done for the protection of the citizen-traveller. The coexistence of these paradigms along with the failure of most isolationist strategies led to an emphasis on citizens’ own responsibility in the preservation of their health, the health of the nation, and the empire.

This development could partly account for the importance of “moral hygiene” to the preservation of Europeans’ health—a highly prescriptive regime and a series of practices that always implied proper self-conduct and carried clear moral overtones (Wells 2016).Footnote 2 These practices also involved a particular consumer behaviour that promised to equip the traveller with a necessary shield against tropical and other diseases. Indeed, as critics have acknowledged, “the British built a considerable commodity culture around the preservation of white European health” (Johnson 2009, 530). Tropical outfits—a variety of objects expertly selected for the voyage—were sold with the intention of “easing” the journey’s hardships while inevitably also propelling the exchange of goods between the metropolitan centre and the colonies. They encompassed, next to “tabloid medicine”, also particular dress items. Indeed, besides necessary medications, tropical dress appears to have been central to the colonial project. S. Leigh Hunt and Alexander S. Kenny, authors of On Duty Under a Tropical Sun (1883), make this abundantly clear: “When we consider, that a man’s health and comfort are so materially dependent upon the manner in which his body may be clothed, under the varying circumstances of climate, and the peculiar nature of his occupation, the selection of proper material, and the adoption of such patterns of dress as practical experience may have shown to be most generally fitting and serviceable, becomes a question of paramount importance” (1883a, 147). This “paramount importance” of clothing to the preservation of individuals’ health in the tropics, and, by extension, to the health of the empire, points both to the symbolic but also, if not especially, to the material significance of dress in the colonial networks of health and disease that existed in the nineteenth century.

Despite the continuing prominence of new material studies and an unremitting grip of Victorian commodities on our imagination, “tropical outfits” in the narrower sense of “tropical clothing” have only recently received some critical attention. In fact, some well-known exceptions such as the dress reform movement notwithstanding, clothing and health have rarely been considered together. What partly accounts for this neglect is a general tendency in, for instance, medical humanities as well as cultural and social histories of medicine to overlook the role of clothing and fabrics in larger networks of health provision. In this chapter, I address this critical lacuna by attending to tropical clothing and its role in larger geographies of health and disease in Victorian Britain. In doing so, I pick up cultural health scholar and sociologist Deborah Lupton’s (1994) early call for a critical consideration of health commodity culture and its intertwining with cultural hegemonies, power relations, and resulting social inequalities. For this to be possible, I consider clothes not only with reference to their semiotic/symbolic meaning but also follow Arjun Appadurai’s (2013) sociological approach and see them as travelling objects, whose trajectories and thus biographies are of utmost importance for cultural analysis. In other words, rather than solely concentrating on their symbolic value within discourses of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and the empire, I draw attention to their material significance within the colonial but also domestic geographies of health and disease. I argue that the juxtaposition of the sites of their consumption with those of their production sheds light on the transcontinental networks of dependence that otherwise remain obscured.

Victorian (Health) Commodity Culture and the Tropics

Victorians were fascinated by commodities. Theirs was “a culture organized around the production and exchange of material goods” (Lindner 2003, 3). As consumerism increased in the mid-nineteenth century, “different forms of social life—economic, political, cultural, and literary—became more and more grouped around the new coordinating frame of the commodity” (Pleßke 2020, 163; see also Briggs 1990). As Thomas Richards suggests, in the 1850s, “the commodity became and has remained the one subject of mass culture, the centrepiece of everyday life, the focal point of all representation, the dead center of the modern world” (1990, 1). The scholarship of the last four decades has shown the extent to which the Victorian empire and commodity culture were intertwined as the flow of goods from and to the colonies reached unprecedented dimensions (McClintock 1995; Trentmann 2016). Indeed, scholars agree that the economic, political, and material networks that were thus created were full of tensions and uneven distributions of power and therefore should be read in terms of “multi-sited histories” (Anderson 2004; see also Pratt 1992; Arnold 1993, 2006; Raj 2007).

The commodification of the vast natural resources was one of the goals of colonisation, next to finding space for surplus population, and for new markets and outlets that were necessitated by rapid industrialisation. At the same time, extant commodity culture, in a way, was the precondition of this commodification. The tropics, of course, tempted with yet unexplored raw materials. Medical Officer Thomas Heazle Parke recognises it in his Guide to Health in Africa (1883):

The hitherto dark interior of the African continent is now being gradually opened up to the scrutinizing gaze of the civilized nations of the earth, and there is no doubt that its vast stores of unutilized productive energy will in future be objects of the greatest interest and importance to the overflowing populations of the European and American continents. […] [T]he inducements held out by its mineral and vegetable wealth, and its vast stores of unused water-power, must tend to make the study of its physical and meteorological characters very desirable to the rising generation of the inhabitants of the British Islands. (1893, 1)

In this fragment, the “study” of the continent is justified by stressing its “mineral and vegetable wealth”. Yet the promise of “vast stores of unutilized productive energy” that literally waited to be commodified was counterpoised with the imaginary dangers so vividly evoked by Morton Stanley. Colonial outfits served as material and symbolic defences against the anthropomorphised dangers of the continent and a necessary precondition for the exploration of its raw materials.

It is therefore not surprising that traveller’s guides to the tropics contain never-ending lists of articles that were allegedly indispensable for the journey: from mosquito curtains and portable baths, enamelled pots and kettles to artificial flowers, toilet paper, sketching materials, a knife-cleaning machine, refrigerator, mincing machine, cement, or musical instruments, not to mention a sufficient supply of food including but not restricted to brandy, anchovy paste, and Erbswurst (Hunt and Kenny 1883a, b; Heazle Parke 1893). Among these select, gender-specific lists of articles, clothing takes the pride of place. For women, Hunt and Kenny recommend handpicked textiles for various stages of the voyage: “a black or blue flannel or serge” for a sea journey, “a few prints or cottons for the Red Sea and tropics; and a silk dress to wear at dinner, or in the evenings, with a few sets of lace ruffles, &c. to make some little variety” (1883b, 10).Footnote 3 In their recommendations, they do not only consider travellers’ ease but also pay attention to the means of transportation and the qualities of encountered surroundings: “For travelling on land, by rail &c., a grey or dust-coloured dress of a very light woollen material, simply and loosely made, will be found most comfortable and serviceable” (11). At the same time, they emphasise the importance of the “little extras”: “Take with you a most liberal supply of tulle, net, lace, ruffles, frillings, white and coloured collars and cuffs, artificial flowers, ribbons, and all the little ‘et ceteras’ that go so far in rehabilitating the oft-work dress or bonnet” (18–19). As these suggestions make evident, and as Ryan Johnson rightly observes, “women’s tropical attire […] relegated them to the domestic sphere” (2009, 558).Footnote 4

Men’s portable wardrobe was, unsurprisingly, less fanciful, albeit not less plentiful. For a journey of two years, for instance, Heazle Parke recommends the following suit for the metropolitan male traveller: helmet, night-cap and soft cap, colonial belt, four pairs of shooting boots, three pairs of Veldtschoons, spare laces, two pairs of leather leggings, six suits of silk and wool pyjamas, two waterproof coats, three pairs of woollen knickerbockers, half-dozen calico drawers, six pairs of knitted stockings, six pairs of socks, two pairs of tennis suits, one dozen silk and wool shirts, six silk vests, and three pairs of silk handkerchiefs (1893, 154–156). These and other items were, according to James Cantlie, co-founding editor of the Journal of Tropical Medicine, to enable the “modern man of the north […] to conquer the exigencies of tropical life” (quoted in Johnson 2009, 531). Indeed, Julia Wells contends, “[t]he protection of white settler bodies and minds against the tropical climate was a central concern in Britain’s African territories” (2016, 68).Footnote 5 In fact, as these cluttering lists of commodities suggest, the exploration of Africa’s rich natural resources required the protective aura of domestic materiality—a portable cocoon, a mobile cordon sanitaire. Importantly, domestic commodities thus participated in a circular process as they enabled exploration and exploitation of natural materials, which were then turned into exotic goods for export. They were part of the self-perpetuating monster of capitalism, a hydra of commodities breeding further commodities ad infinitum, a never-ending process oblivious to the finiteness of natural resources.

The commodities, of course, were not only supposed to protect against diseases but also did the symbolic work of stressing white superiority and distinguishing Europeans from indigenous societies, not to mention saving them, at least imaginatively, from the ever-present crippling dangers of degeneration and atavism. The first part of this project—protection against diseases—was chiefly a protection against the alien, fiendish climate, “a naturally unhealthy”, “enemy territory” prone to weaken the constitution of the European body (Ratschiller 2018, 121). In popular guidebooks to the tropics, two issues dominate the discussion: the types of fabrics and their role in the process of climatic adaptation, and the quality of the fabrics and their salubriousness. In this context, the chief consideration of guidebook authors, medical practitioners, and colonial outfitters was not germs and how to avoid these but rather the influence of such major factors as heat, sun, humidity, and abrupt changes of temperature and the role of clothing in regulating body temperature, protecting against the sun, and enabling adequate perspiration.Footnote 6 The fabric itself also had to fulfil a series of requirements:

[I]t should be porous and absorbent, to admit air freely to the surface of the body, and to soak up perspiration, otherwise the wearer lives in a constant steam bath, of which the garments form the walls; it should dry quickly, for the moisture of saturated garments conducts heat readily, and the wearer will be overheated while walking in the sun, and may take a chill when sitting in the shade; it should not be irritating to the skin; it should be thick enough for protection against the sun; sufficiently light in weight for comfort, and yet warm enough to guard the wearer against the risk of chill. (Bostock 1913, 18–19)

Unfortunately, such a multifunctional fabric did not exist. “[U]ntil the manufacturers succeed in producing a mixed fabric to fulfil all requirements”, Leonard Bostock recommended “mixing fabrics in point of time, if not in material” (1913, 20). In his work on The Influence of Clothing on Health, Frederic Treves expressed a similar opinion (1886, 41). He identified wool, cotton, and linen as best suited for climatic changes, if not the most sanitary. Whereas wool was considered a good isolator, cotton and linen were said to be good transmitters and because of that not well suited for changing temperatures (39). In contrast, James Horton highlighted the superiority of cotton, claiming that “from its slowness of conducting heat, [it] is admirably adapted for the tropics” (1874, 639).Footnote 7 As these two statements make clear, and as Johnson rightly contends, there existed a variety of opinions on the subject.

Of course, each manufacturer had a “unique” idea of what was healthy (Johnson 2009, 538–539). Mostly, “colonial outfitters” were in favour of all three fabrics along with stocking other desirables like lace or ribbons and frilled dresses together with hats decorated by various wonders of taxidermy. Others exerted themselves to develop adequate fabrics. Solano, for instance, was a patented material that was supposed to protect against sun radiation, the so-called actinic rays (Bostock 1913, 21–22). In the preface to Health Culture, German zoologist, anthropologist, and physician Gustav Jaeger promoted his sanitary woollen clothing as particularly suitable to any climate imaginable: “The Company which represents my System in the British Empire has had the honour of supplying to eminent Travellers and Explorers outfits of clothing and bedding for use under every possible climatic condition […]. This affords striking evidence in favour of my contention that the Sanitary Woollen clothing is eminently adapted for wearing in hot countries as well as in cold, and, a fortiori, in our changeable climates” (1907, n. pag). Indeed, as the letters from “traveller[s] in the tropics” (n. pag) that Jaeger “cited” in his works make abundantly clear, woollen clothing was more than suitable for explorers. It did not only help their bodies adapt to the climate but also turned them into the specimens of heroic masculinity that were so often associated with the empire (Johnson 2009).Footnote 8

Unlike specialised “East India and Tropical Outfitters”, Thomas Burberry advertised his garments, particularly the patented gabardine, as suitable not only for the tropics but for any kind of extreme weather. His “Gabardine Weatherproof Tropical Kit” promised to “[insure] comfort and security in every kind of weather & climate” and to “prevent ill-effects arising from exposure to heavy rain, mist, or dew” (1913, 285). What is more, the advertisement stressed that “Gabardine is invaluable for bush or jungle sport, as even exotic thorns are powerless to penetrate its flexible yet leatherlike texture” (285). Like in many other Burberry advertisements, the promoted fabric was conceived of both as armour and cocoon—preventing from the ill influence of the climate and providing home-like comfort. This, of course, went hand in hand with the conception and presentation of travelling bodies of white settlers in the tropics.

There lurks, in this presentation of Gabardine, another argument that was also present in guidebooks for the travellers to the tropics—an argument that became chiefly visible in recommendations concerning the provenance of the fabrics that were to be purchased. If economy was an issue, female travellers were advised to take with them home-made fabrics and patterns and, if need be, commission local tailors to refresh their stock. Hunt and Kenny stress the improvements brought by new trends in commodity retail, which made travellers independent of local workforce or material (1883b, 9–10). Leaving one’s measures “with a good and reliable dressmaker” and “The Pattern and Parcel Posts” were signalled as viable, and cheaper, alternatives (10). While they consider fabrics like suede more suitable for the tropics than the familiar wool, Hunt and Kenny recommend that female travellers take with them home-made fabrics to replenish their stock of undergarments (19). In this context, the quality of British fabrics is hailed as superior.

What especially speaks for the “British” fabric is its alleged “purity”. This quality was ostensibly ensured by refusing to add substances to the material and using new technologies in its manufacture. Famously, Lewis Tomalin, who patented Dr. Jaeger’s Sanitary Clothing System, advertised his products in the following way: “The JAEGER Company maintain a Scientific Staff and a Laboratory fitted with every requisite for testing chemically and microscopically the purity of their Woollen yarns and materials. Which outer Firm incurs this labour and cost in order to protect the Public against imposition? It guarantees Pure Wool […]. It represents a successful strand against the Dishonesty and Trickery of Adulteration” (Jaeger 1883, 15). This emphatic insistence on purity echoes the substance adulteration debate that became prominent in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, especially in the context of food, drink, and drugs (Rowlinson 1982; Rioux 2019) but also in the context of other materials. In contrast to this self-praise, J. T. Arlidge, Consulting Physician to the North Staffordshire Infirmary, Stoke-on-Trent, writing about occupational diseases in cloth factories, drew attention to the inferiority of many fabrics due to addition of China clay. Because of this “mischievous adulteration”, “[t]he buyers of the most inferior cloths—chiefly the ignorant dwellers in eastern lands—actually buy in weight much more china clay than cotton; and I am assured by the clay merchants in the potteries, that far more china clay is consumed in weighting cotton cloth than in the manufacture of earthenware and china” (1893, 65). Tomalin’s company is promoted not only through self-distancing from such practices but also by a juxtaposition to any “outer Firm”. This is surprising considering that Tomalin built it on the system of Jaeger, who himself commissioned the German firm Wilhelm Benger Söhne to produce clothing according to his principles from 1879 onwards. Jaeger did not only allow Tomalin to use his name but also gave him the exclusive rights to use Jaeger patents and trade with the British Empire (Clark and de la Haye 2009).Footnote 9

General concerns regarding the type and quality of fabrics suitable for accommodating the European body to the changing temperatures in the tropics were accompanied by prescriptions regarding its treatment, which for Wells fall into the category of “moral management” (2016, 85). Indeed, even the best quality of home-made fabrics did not guarantee that the body would stay clean throughout the journey. Like everything else, it was liable to contamination. In order to avoid illness from swarms of “parasites” and germs lurking on the surface of every object, the authors of tropical guidebooks recommended exposing fabrics to high temperatures, boiling them, or using disinfectants. Bostock (1913, 34–36) and Heazle Parke (1893, 163–165) include state-of-the-arts sections on germ theory and chapters on disinfection, urging travellers to disinfect not only the surfaces but also their clothes as one preventive measure. Hunt and Kenny also provide advice on the type of disinfecting agents (1883a, 163–164). This advice highlights the co-existence of aforementioned scientific paradigms. On the one hand, the influence of miasmic effluvia and climatic factors could be alleviated and European bodies shielded with the use of clothing. On the other hand, to stay salubrious, clothing had to be produced with care, without the use of various adulterants, and regularly freed from ever-present germs.

In accordance with the rhetoric which pathologised the “tropics” and symbolically transformed domestic commodities into both allegedly impenetrable armours and mobile domestic spaces, tropical clothing appeared to constitute another shield against the dangers of the hot climates but also provided a cocoon of comfort. However, the recurring insistence on home-made fabrics and the conviction of its higher quality carried with themselves further overtones. While they turned home-woven wool, cotton, and linen into guarantors of British health abroad, they at the same time occluded the colonial (and international) networks of trade that lay at the core of the domestic production of these fabrics. Last but not least, they ignored the (domestic) health conditions that resulted precisely from this exchange.

Agents of Disease: Intercontinental and Domestic Ecologies

In The Social Life of Things, Appadurai calls for a reading of objects in “their forms, their uses, their trajectories” (2013, 5). The life cycle of tropical clothing thus has to include at least two other nodes: the sites of cultivation of raw materials and the sites of domestic production of clothing. Only in this way can the function of tropical clothing within larger geographies of health and health provision be established. In this context, a number of issues must be taken into consideration. Firstly, the colonies, metropolitan areas, and other involved countries must be seen as co-constitutive and intertwined analytical fields (Cooper and Stoler 1997; Hall 2002; Stoler 2002; Hall and Rose 2006; Stoler et al. 2007). Secondly, as already mentioned, the networks they inspired must be regarded as full of tensions, continuous negotiations, and uneven distributions of power that had to do with, for instance, various types of local appropriation practices and cultures of knowledge, which are both simultaneously intertwined and multiple, and therefore should be read in terms of “multi-sited histories”. Thirdly, the scientific and lay knowledge created in these processes formed an entangled web of everchanging forces (Vaughan, 1991; Prakash 1999; Anderson 2006). Materiality, and especially commodities, played an important role in this web (Thomas 1991; van Binsbergen 2005). Within this context, both tropical clothing and the fabrics that they were made of gained in importance not only as portable cordons sanitaires, sites of symbolic construction of national, imperial, and indigenous cultures and ideologies but also as travelling incarnations of these entanglements. In order for this to become transparent, they must be conceived of not as “objects without” but as “objects with history”, i.e. objects whose geographical provenance remains a visible site of its identification (Chakrabarti 2010).

Out of all the fabrics discussed earlier, cotton has not only been regarded (albeit slightly prematurely) as “the first modern commodity” (Riello 2016, 141) but also as “essential for the emergence of modern economic growth” (Olmstead and Rhode 2018, 1), as Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2015), Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (2013), and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told (2014) have exemplarily shown. Giorgio Riello offers a more nuanced thesis arguing that “cotton was the first ‘transcontinental’ manufactured product whose commodity chain brought together capital, labour, land, technologies and consumers in different continents” (2016, 136). He further argues that “the ‘modernity’ of cotton did not just lay in its capacity to restructure global trade” but also in the way that it “reshaped consumption” (137). While the straightforward narrative of the birth of capitalism, and the significance of cotton manufacturers for its transcontinental shape, has been contested (Olmstead and Rhode 2018; Vries 2017), it is undeniable that cotton, like wool, linen, jute, and hemp, was a commodity whose production, distribution, and consumption necessitated a series of international and intercontinental networks. These networks included the cultivation and retail of cotton, the manufacture of fabrics and clothing, their marketing, as well as the secondary networks that spanned the circulation of the by-products (e.g. second-hand shops, manufacture of shoddy). These systems, of course, developed over time and were formed not only by Britain’s imperial expansion but also, with the advent of industrialisation, by an increasing mechanisation of labour, changing institutionalisation of trade, and ongoing transformations of the market (Riello 2016, 146–147).

Each node in these networks was associated with specific health risks. Sanitary conditions on US-American plantations, the prime producer of the raw material for the UK market (in 1906, it constituted 80 per cent of all the imports; Helm 1907, 76), were far from satisfactory, so that the working slave population was exposed to various health hazards. Sharla Fett (2002) has shown that under slavery, the doctor-slave-owner triangle rendered the slave voiceless and their health position precarious. While an expansion of health facilities could be observed, little regulation of sanitary facilities was responsible for the prevalence of worms, diarrhoea, as well as typhoid fever. Improper nutrition and excessive labour weakened the slaves’ constitutions and made them susceptible to communicative diseases. An expensive article, the slave’s body was often also exploited after death for various didactic purposes, thus testifying to the existence of “post-mortem or anatomical racism” (Kenny 2013, 38; see also Savitt 1978; Fett 2002). Ships and retail brought with themselves other risks. Out of all these intertwined spaces, British textile mills were particular material and symbolic sites that draw attention to the international and intercontinental networks of dependence created by cotton trade and to the geographies of health and disease that were thus produced. Unlike other institutions participating in the life cycle of tropical clothing, textile mills and factories were distinguished by their specific artificial climate, which differentiated them from other sites of production and circulation and brought them—at least conceptually—into proximity with tropical climates. What was perceived as a kind of cocoon that helped European bodies adapt to tropical climates was in fact responsible for creating artificial—unhealthy—tropics at home.

Interestingly enough, as Sue Bowden and Geoffrey Tweedale ascertain, “[c]otton manufacture [was] rarely considered a dangerous occupation” (2002, 577). Nonetheless, it is important to point out the health hazards that textile manufacture in general, and cotton manufacture in particular, constituted to factory workers. As by the end of the century, textile industry was one of the major sources of exported goods next to iron, steel, and railway machinery, the concomitant impact on workers’ health was considerable.Footnote 10 At the same time, the working conditions at home—already at the beginning of the century—were so dire that they had to be regulated in a series of Factory Acts (from the Cotton Mills and Factories Act in 1819 to the Factory and Workshop Act in 1901). The chief factor behind many chronic ailments of textile factory workers was the unregulated use of steam and the materials used in the production process. Although steam engines and boilers were used to mechanise various industrial processes, what is often forgotten is that steam was also used for ventilation (Janković 2010, 69–91) and the creation of “artificial humidity” in textile factories for the fibres to remain flexible (Lander 1914, 10). Despite the proliferation of textile factories in regions with climates most favourable for the manufacturing procedures (e.g. the Midlands), gradual introduction of steam to the processes of production further regulated moisture, humidity, and temperature in the mills. In his work on Recent Cotton Mill Construction and Engineering (1894), engineer Joseph Nasmith, for instance, recommended the use of a “drosophore”, a humidifying apparatus, to optimise the conditions of textile production: “The value of humidity in a textile factory is that it preserves the natural moisture in the fibre being treated, and enables it, as far as possible, to maintain its original condition. […] On the other hand it is equally necessary that the temperature of working should be high, in order to soften and render flexible the natural coating of way surrounding the fibre” (102–103). With the implementation of the steam engine, textile mills and factories became (artificial) tropical sites within domestic geographies of textile production.Footnote 11 Janet Greenlees argues that the various “local boundaries of public health made the textile mills of some towns healthier places in which to work than elsewhere” (2013, 674). Despite that, the reports of local medical health officers, like the public discourse, continued to address the health hazards attributable to steaming and the use of particular materials in various stages of cloth production (675). Although not as present in popular consciousness as these factors, the growing technologisation of textile manufacture was said to account for accidents which were the primary source of damage to health. Arlidge listed, next to various dangers of sedentary labour and operations on the machines leading to accidents, “heat of the workrooms, neglect of ventilation, rebreathed air, unnecessary consumption of gas” (1893, 141) as most hazardous. In the public discourse, local health agendas continued to be dominated by an emphasis on contagious and respiratory diseases, which were believed to be caused by the hot, humid environment of the factories (Greenlees 2013, 675). Heat, humidity, and the neglect of ventilation led to the general weakening of the workers’ health. This weakening of workers’ constitutions, along with unsuitable clothing, was seen as the first step towards illness. Arlidge noted that “the neglect of proper clothing, unnecessary exposure to cold by passing from heated rooms into the outer air, improper food, dissipation and unhealthy homes” (1893, 62) could lead to major diseases such as tuberculosis. What astounds in this comparison of natural and artificial tropics is not necessarily their metaphorical similarity; rather, what becomes visible is that the similarity of the material conditions in these spaces contrasted sharply with the provision of health that they were meant to effectuate. It was only in the late 1920s that artificial atmospheric conditions were proven to be of little effect on the health of factory workers (Greenlees 2013, 676).

Next to the artificially created tropic-like heat and humidity that was seen as enfeebling the workers’ bodies, the raw materials themselves endangered their health. More specifically, the inhalation of what was enigmatically called “factory dust”—and could mundanely be described as a variety of particles, be it of cotton and other fibres or of substances added in the course of industrial production—was conducive to ill health. In fact, these particles were the actual cause of respiratory diseases (Bowden and Tweedale 2002). All the raw materials used in textile manufacture were hazardous to human health. “Viewed in the ascending order from the least injurious”, noted Arlidge, “we have, silk, wool, cotton, flax, jute, and hemp” (1893, 62). The manufacture of cotton fabric, with cotton itself positioned somewhere in the middle of this hierarchy, was most problematic for two groups of workers: women responsible for the “earliest stages of sorting, mixing, and scotching”, who often suffered from “peculiar bronchitis and asthma of cotton workers”, and the so-called “‘strippers’ and ‘grinders’—men who cleaned and sharpened the steel teeth of the carding machine”—“a class particularly subjected by their work to the inhalation of dust, and among whom a high ration of chest disease prevail[ed]” (64). In fact, late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century medicine recognised, and named, “byssinosis”, a particular chronic, occupational disease resulting from exposure to cotton and flux dust (Bowden and Tweedale 2002, 561–562). By the late nineteenth century, medical officers increasingly linked cases of death from phthisis to textile manufacture (562). Thus, the fabrics that were specifically produced to screen the middle and upper classes from illnesses in the tropics were the ones that shrouded the domestic working class with a climate of infection and death. The fabrics that cocooned travellers in warmth and gave them the space to respite and inhale, in their microscopic variants, cocooned and suffocated the organs of textile workers.

This danger is poignantly articulated by Bessie Higgins, a character from Elisabeth Gaskell’s North and South, who, when asked about the cause of her illness, explains: “I began to work in a carding-room soon after and the fluff got into my lungs, and poisoned me. […] Little bits, as fly off fro’ the cotton, when they’re carding it, and fill the air till it looks all fine white dust. They say it winds round the lungs, and tightens them up. Anyhow, there’s many a one as works in a carding-room, that falls into a waste, coughing and spitting blood, because they’re just poisoned by the fluff” (2008, 102). As the novel records, avant la lettre, what today would pertain to environmental health humanities, it also signals, but does not explore, the imperial geographies of health and disease sketched in this chapter.

This imaginary instance of poisonous particles that nest in a worker’s chest and poison her were not really visible under the microscope.Footnote 12 Although, according to Elijah Helm, under the microscope, “a cotton fibre has the appearance of a twisted flattened ribbon” (1907, 95), postmortem dissections of workers’ lungs showed neither fluff nor ribbons but expanding fibrosis. Edward H. Greenhow, who reported on the occupational diseases in mills, thus describes the flax-dresser’s lungs: “Sections taken from the apex of the lung were almost of a black colour, and were seen under the microscope to be intersected by fibrous bands containing black pigment within their substance. The walls of the air-cells were thickened, and some of the cells contained granular exudation without oil. Masses of black pigment of irregular size and shape were studded over the field in great abundance” (1868, 8). In this account, the white fluff metamorphoses into black pigment. Through juxtaposition, it offers an invaluable image of the way the tropics invade the most intimate of spaces—the workers’ lungs.

Other particles that medical officers wrote about were mineral agents that were added in the production to ensure the longevity and robustness of the fabric. In this context, Arlidge especially points to the processes of cloth “sizing”: “In former years”, he writes, “the materials used for sizing were of innocent quality, consisting of fermented flour and tallow; but these have almost everywhere been replaced by a compound of china clay and certain mineral salts, among which are chlorides of zinc, magnesium and calcium, with a good proportion of sulphate of magnesia. These salts were added to the dressing, primarily with the view of preventing the formation of mildew on the cotton cloth, especially where it had to travel long distances and to hot countries” (1893, 69). What transpires from these considerations is that industrial modernity did not only contribute to the domestication of artificial tropics at home. In creating those spaces, it exposed workers to unfavourable climatic conditions along with highly injurious particles that greatly impacted their health—a form of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) inflicted on their bodies.

Conclusion: Health, Commodities, and Global Networks of Dependence

Reading tropical clothing as particular objects—commodities—with their own trajectories and biographies and with reference to the two major nodes of their international existence, as this chapter has done, throws light on a series of complexities. The first one refers to the importation of what was considered as the imaginary space of tropics. With their unregulated use of steam, textile mills and factories became veritable tropical sites within domestic geographies of work. Within the nexus of these domestic and foreign “tropical” spaces, fabrics morphed into fibrosis. What was hailed as the adaptive cocoon, enabling the traveller to survive in the tropics, became extremely dangerous to the body of the worker. The cocoons in the factory—the fluff—transformed the surface of the workers’ lungs into scarred tissue, thus, in the worst case, causing death by suffocation: white fluff turned into black pigment.

At the same time, tropical clothing, especially the discussion of adequate fabrics, intensified a discourse of national purity. With the emphasis on the quality of the fabrics made in Britain, the imperial nexus of trade—its economics and, simultaneously, its various processes of exploitation, were occluded—became invisible and, with it, the various nodes of disease production in the vast geographies of colonial health. What becomes evident in this context is the complexity of objects in global networks of dependence. The metamorphosing colonial outfits are a material and symbolic proof of the Janus-faced character of Victorian consumption: the commodity culture that promised the health necessary to the colonial project simultaneously consumed the bodies of the working classes (and slaves). The fabric of the empire was built on the inflamed tissue of worker’s lungs.

A discussion of Victorian travelling objects that draws attention to their various trajectories and the nodes of their journeys allows for a cultural study of the Victorian era that brings together health and environmental humanities with material studies. It helps shed light on various yet unexplored networks of exploitation that were spurred by industrial capitalism. Those networks, albeit reshuffled, continue to exist today as the worldwide web of textile production, which lays at the core of our fast-fashion industry. If the Victorian mill workers suffocated for the sake of the colonial project, the workers of Bangladeshi and other factories outsourced to the “third world” suffocate not for the sake of alleged protection in particular climates but for a mere whim of fashion. In this context, we should not forget that the worldwide web of textile production is one of the major polluting industries. It is here that the impact of traveling objects—the clothing and fabrics—becomes most conspicuous: in the artificial climates that we have been producing for centuries and in their impact on our health.