« Language and conquest: Jessica Louise Hall, ‘The language of conquest: The role of linguistic weaponisation in the establishment of settler colonial states’, The NORPAK Review, 1, 1, 2026, pp. 5-23
Settler colonialism and its logic: Alison Bedford, ‘Settler Colonial Logics: A framework for tracing the ideological currents of European colonisation of the Pacific’, SocArXiv, 2026 »

High settlers: Christopher Cowellm ‘The Height of Health: Sections, Sanatoria, and Settler Colonialism in Northern India, 1815-42’, Architectural History, 69, 1, 2026

09Oct26

Abstract: This article untangles a set of early nineteenth-century histories of military expansion by the British East India Company into the Himalayas. It uses shifting approaches in graphical representation to address the curiously slow development of hill stations in these landscapes, alongside medical experiments by Europeans in a radical testing of altitude, bodily effects and racial acclimatisation. It then considers how such medical practices helped disguise nascent actions of white settler colonialism and the usefulness of such actions in anchoring territory. Historians have recognised a two-phase development in a number of the most significant colonial hill stations across the Himalayas, as they moved from military medical sanatoria to seats of civilian authority and retreat. However, scant attention has been paid to how the first phase of sanatorium construction came about, how conceptually blunt yet seductive theories of health and climate shaped site selection and station design, and what these decisions reveal about a broader essentialising of race and security within British India at this time. For expansion to happen, a cognitive shift in the vertical had first to take place, one rooted in sectional rather than planar thinking. This upward expansion into India produced not only a series of altitudinous urban networks linking various medico-climatic experiments, leading, belatedly, to the construction of hill stations, but also a different way of envisioning race and separation, exposing deep-seated economic and security fears of the Company based on miscegenation.


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