Conclusion

By its very definition, colonial society defined itself against a foil: that of the colonised. The greatest efforts were often directed towards distancing the colonised: linguistically by limiting their access to the language of the coloniser, physically by instituting segregated urban spaces, culinarily, sartorially and in other ways.

As we have seen, distance could also be achieved by means of physical elevation at the hill station, social elevation at the club or by building elaborate arguments to disconnect colonial water therapies from non-European ones. Yet even in the strictest colonial pre-apartheids, such distancing proved illusory. Poor whites and metis children, to give only two examples, blurred categories and threatened the colonial order. Moreover, women’s clubs proved quite receptive to Indian members, and Vietnamese women soon wore garments that had once been reserved for the colonisers. This increased blurring of colonial boundaries triggered racial edginess and unease in a wide range of settler cultures. Dane Kennedy mentions an unemployed European in Nairobi begging in 1934 for ‘any employment to keep me white’.⁶⁴ Class was undoubtedly being not only performed, but also cast in some of the sites we have examined here. Hence why Ann Stoler has asked: ‘Were European bourgeois norms developed in contrast to a phantom colonized Other, and can we talk about common European bourgeois imaginings of empire at all?’⁶⁵ Class was not the only consideration, however. Frances Gouda suggests that in the Dutch East Indies colonial whiteness constitutes a ‘myth’ designed to obfuscate and conceal the reality of colonial metissage and to serve colonial masculinity.⁶⁶

In the final analysis, it seems as futile to disentangle issues of health and leisure in a colonial context as it does to attempt to answer the question of ‘pretext or prophylaxis’.

In the colonies, as elsewhere, they were deeply intertwined. The topics of colonial sociability, power and leisure can thus prove particularly amorphous and challenging. Indeed, had space allowed, this chapter could have branched into a number of other directions—the voyage home aboard the colonial passenger liner, Masonic and other networks, business and leisure (banks were known to own cottages at hill stations), the question of servants and domestics, modern tourism at Java or Victoria Falls, even the lure of the beach, which came to supplant the hill station in the twentieth century.

Notes

1 Georges Groslier, Le retour à l'argile (Paris, 1996 [1928]), p. 30.

2 Patricia Lorcin, Historicizing Colonial Nostalgia: European Women's Narratives of Algeria and Kenya, 1900-Present (London, 2012), p. 51.

3 Rebecca Rogers, ‘Telling Stories about the Colonies: British and French Women in Algeria in the Nineteenth Century', Gender and History, Vol. 21, No. 1 (April 2009), pp. 39-59.

4 Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884--1945 (Durham, NC, 2001), pp. 58, 133.

5 Catherine Jacques and Valerie Piette, ‘L'Union des Femmes Coloniales (1923-1940)', in Anne Hugon (ed.), Histoire des femmes en situation coloniale (Paris, 2004), pp. 95-117.

6 Marguerite Duras, The Sea Wall, Herma Briffaut (trans.) (New York, 1986), p. 17.

7 A. d'Anthouard, Mes souvenirs, Cochinchine 1881--1885 (Brioude, 1927), pp. 15-16.

8 C. Vray, Mes campagnes: par une femme (Paris, 1897), pp. 2-3. On the pseudonym, see: http:// catalogue.bnf.fr/servlet/biblio?idNoeud=1& id = 31609118& sn1 = 0& sn2 = 0& host = catalogue.

9 Eric Jennings, Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina (Berkeley, 2011), pp. 74-75.

10 Thomas Dodman, ‘Un pays pour la colonie: mourir de nostalgie en Algerie fran^aise, 18301880', Annales, Histoire, Sciences Sociales (2011), pp. 743-784 (Bugeaud quote on p. 755).

11 Dane Kennedy, ‘Diagnosing the Colonial Dilemma: Tropical Neurasthenia and the Alienated Briton', in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy (eds), Decentring Empire: Britain, India and the Transcolonial World (New Delhi, 2005), pp.

157-181.

12 Georges Treille, Hygiène coloniale (Paris, 1899), p. iii.

13 Jean Paulhan, Lettres de Madagascar, 1907--1910 (Paris, 2007), p. 145.

14 Stephen Frenkel and John Western, ‘Pretext or Prophylaxis? Racial Segregation and Malarial Mosquitos in a British Tropical Colony: Sierra Leone', Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 78, No. 2 (June 1988), pp. 211-228.

15 Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne, 2002), p. 82.

16 Paulhan, Lettres de Madagascar, p. 415.

17 Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1995), p. 171.

18 Aline Demay, ‘Tourisme et colonisation en Indochine 1898-1939', PhD dissertation, University of Paris Pantheon Sorbonne and Universite de Montreal, 2011, pp. 44-45.

19 Adolphe Armand, Medecine et hygiene des pays chauds et specialement de l’Algerie et des colonies (Paris, 1859), p. 296.

20 Robert Aiken, Imperial Belvederes: The Hill Stations of Malaya (Oxford, 1994), p. 11.

21 Robert Barman, Citizen Emperor: Pedro II and the Making of Brazil, 1825--91 (Palo Alto, 1999), p. 114.

22 Hans Pols, ‘Notes from Batavia, the Europeans’ Graveyard: The Nineteenth-Century Debate on Acclimatization in the Dutch East Indies’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 67, No. 1 (2011), p. 131.

23 Eric Jennings, ‘Le club des hauteurs: savoirs, reseaux et stations d’altitude coloniaux’, in Helene Blais, Florence Deprest and Pierre Singaravelou (eds), Territoires imperiaux: une histoire spatiale du fait colonial (Paris, 2011), pp. 297-316.

24 Joseph Fayrer, ‘On the Hill Stations of India as Health Resorts’, The British Medical Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2,058 (9 June 1900), pp. 1,393-1,397.

25 Archibald Harrison, Indochina, a Sportsman's Opportunity (Plymouth, 1933), p. 26.

26 Frances Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900--1942 (Amsterdam, 1995), p. 12.

27 Eric Jennings, Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology and French Colonial Spas (Durham, NC, 2006), pp.

149-151; Eric Jennings, Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina, pp. 228-230.

28 P. Maurand, Une richesse ignoree: les forets de pins a deux feuilles du Lang-Bian (Hanoi, 1938), p. 3.

29 L.S., ‘Les stations d’altitude de l’Indochine: Bana’, Indochine, hebdomadaire illustre (23 September 1943), p. 15.

30 Robert Vannell, ‘Le Bokor, son avenir’, Indochine, hebdomadaire illustre (2 December 1943), p. 24.

31 Dane Kennedy, Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 105, 109, 111. Eric Jennings, Imperial Heights, passim.

32 Aiken, Imperial Belvederes, pp. 58-61.

33 University of Toronto Fisher Rare Book Library, Alice Kipling’s clippings from Simla Season, 1892.

34 Ibid., entry for 3 September 1892.

35 The Christian and Missionary Alliance Archives, Colorado Springs, USA. R. Jackson file, Dalat, 30 June 1954.

36 French Colonial Archives, Aix-en-Provence, GGI 54086.

37 Gorges Boris, ‘Vacances aux Nilgiris’, Echos missionnaires (February 1942), pp. 13-16.

38 Bulletin de l’Academie de Medecine, 1838-1839, Vol. 3, pp. 886 and 896.

39 Bulletin de l’Academie de Medecine, 1844-1845, Vol. 10, pp. 1,001-1,007.

40 Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, 1800--1900 (Berkeley, 2011), chap. 8.

41 L. Ville, ‘Notice sur les eaux thermales de Hammam-Melouan’, Revue Maritime et Coloniale, Vol. 10 (1864), p. 661.

42 ‘Pour les fonctionnaires en conge’, L’Avenir du Tonkin (1 August 1902), p. 1.

43 George Orwell, Burmese Days (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 17, 22.

44 Benjamin B. Cohen, ‘Networks of Sociability: Women’s Clubs in Colonial and Postcolonial India’, Frontiers:A Journal of Women’s Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2009), pp. 169-195.

45 Frenkel and Western, ‘Pretext or Prophylaxis? Racial Segregation and Malarial Mosquitos in a British Tropical Colony: Sierra Leone’, p. 222.

46 Orwell, Burmese Days, p. 37.

47 Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Britishness, Clubbability and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India’, The Journal of British Studies, Vol.

40, No. 4 (October 2001), pp. 489-521.

48 Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996), pp. 111-112, 125-130.

49 M. Frenee, Guide des colonies franyaises: Madagascar (Paris, 1931), p. 51.

50 Vray, Mes campagnes: par une femme, p. 227.

51 Vu Trong Phung, Dumb Luck, Peter Zinoman (ed.) and Nguyen Nguyet Cam and Peter Zinoman (trans.) (Ann Arbor, 2002), pp. 37, 61, 91.

52 Judith Henchy, ‘Vietnamese New Women and the Fashioning of Modernity’, in Kathryn Robson and Jennifer Yee (eds), France and Indochina: Cultural Representations (Lanham, 2005), p. 135.

53 Erica Peters, Appetites and Aspirations in Vietnam: Food and Dink in the Long Nineteenth Century (Lanham,

2012), p. 153.

54 Eric Jennings, Curing the Colonizers, p. 60.

55 Glasgow University Archives, records of the L. Sterne and Co. refrigeration manufacturers, file 6, ledger 1 concluding in December 1901.

56 Advertisement in Extreme Asie: Revue Illustree indochinoise (February 1934).

57 John MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester,

1988), pp. 43 and 180.

58 French Colonial Archives, Aix-en-Provence, GGI 19044 and GGI 15539.

59 Ibid., GGI 15535.

60 Journal Officiel de l'Indochine franyaise (9 December 1916), p. 1,904.

61 MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, p. 308.

62 Mary Procida, Married to the Empire: Gender, Politics and Imperialism in India, 1883--1947 (Manchester,

2002), p. 6.

63 MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, p. 22.

64 Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890--1939 (Durham, NC, 1987), p. 168.

65 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC, 1995), p. 100.

66 Frances Gouda, ‘Genre, metissage et transactions coloniales aux Indes neerlandaises, 1900-1942', Clio: Histoire, femmes et societes, Vol. 33 (2011), p. 41.

Conclusion

More on the topic Conclusion: