Dirt and Disease in the Urban Anglophone Caribbean
Juanita De Barros

This paper examines sanitary sciences in a colonial city in the post-slavery Caribbean and demonstrates that elite and popular notions of pollution configured disputes between local elites and marginal urban groups. Focussing on Georgetown, British Guiana, this paper explores conceptions of pollution in Georgetown, from approximately 1890 to 1930. It considers the manner in which these conceptions were manipulated by both the city's elites and a section of the subaltern classes and the readiness with which the latter could ignore "scientific" ideas of external and elite origin that did not fit local visions of economic survival. These conceptions were encapsulated in colonial public health laws, and the legislation itself was particularly employed against a particular group, Indo-Guianese itinerant milk vendors. Though articulating a purportedly science-based concern about the public health risks to consumers of adulterated milk, members of British Guiana's political and intellectual elite in fact seemed motivated more by a concern with racial difference. For their part, Georgetown's milk sellers broke the law repeatedly and willingly, flouting the sanitary regulations organizing the milk industry, demonstrating a determination to control this marginal economic activity as they saw fit and, in the process, suggesting an alternative vision of order.