Between the late 1930s and early 1950s, British colonial administrations in Singapore and India turned to hygiene and public health as instruments of stability in a period of war and reconstruction. This paper argues that hygiene operated as a techno-political language through which empire governed everyday life. It examines how colonial officials translated scientific ideals of cleanliness into policy, pedagogy, and consumption, and how these practices linked care, morality, and discipline within broader systems of rule. Drawing on comparative archival and discourse analysis, the study analyzes public health directives, nursing manuals, advertisements, and bureaucratic correspondence to trace how hygiene functioned as both governance and ideology. India, as the administrative center of the British Empire, institutionalized hygiene through bureaucracy and medical training; Singapore, as a port city of circulation and publicity, turned these ideals into mass-mediated commodities and civic spectacle. By comparing these sites, the project highlights the flexibility of imperial governance and the moral economy that sustained it. The paper advances four interpretive claims: that hygiene served as governance, care as control, science as moral rhetoric, and everyday goods as infrastructures of power. It examines how the circulation of domestic commodities and the moral regulation of nursing labor together naturalized family order as an extension of imperial policy. The project aims to bridge the critical gap between histories of medicine, labor, and governance, showing how colonial moralities of science continue to shape public health governance, gendered care economies, and scientific authority in the postcolonial world.

Authors:
Danni Tan, University of Chicago, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Danni Tan is an M.A. student at the University of Chicago studying science and technology in Asia. Her current work examines Japanese and Indian cybernetic imaginaries and how technologies of care, surveillance, and governance are represented and contested in contemporary media.

Connect on Linkedin
http://linkedin.com/in/dannitan

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