Smallpox vaccination and the limits of governing through contagion in the Straits Settlements, 1868–1926

• Published date: 01 July 2023
• Author: Jack Jin Gary Lee,Lynette J. Chua
• Date: 01 July 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12221

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Smallpox vaccination and the limits of governing

through contagion in the Straits Settlements,

1868–1926

Jack Jin Gary Lee

1

|Lynette J. Chua

2

1

New School for Social Research, New York,

New York, USA

2

National University of Singapore, Singapore,

Singapore

Correspondence

Jack Jin Gary Lee, New School for Social

Research, 79 Fifth Avenue, 9th floor, New

York, NY 10003, USA.

Email: jackjin.lee@newschool.edu

Funding information

Singapore Ministry of Education Academic

Research Fund Tier 1, Grant/Award Number:

A-8000923-00-00; Centre for Asian Legal

Studies, National University of Singapore;

Special Pocket Research Grant, Yale-NUS

College

Abstract

Vaccination involves the encounter of nonhuman

biological matter and human bodies, recalibrating our

susceptibility to illness and death. This boundary-

crossing act has been caught in conflicting webs of moral

significance, including the normalizing frameworksof

public health governance and its corresponding forms of

resistance. Such tensions and dynamics were a feature of

smallpox vaccination - the first modern, systematic

state-driven project to build population immunity.

Focusing on smallpox vaccination in the British-ruled

Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang, and Malacca)

between 1868 and 1926, we examine the recurrent fea-

tures of contentions over vaccination from the tentative

beginnings of the 1868 Vaccination Ordinance to the

systematic extension of vaccination in the 20th cen-

tury. Engaging science and technology studies of non-

human agency and social theories on security, we

argue that such contentions demonstrate the limits of

a power formation we call governing through conta-

gion (GTC). GTC centralizes law and other technolo-

gies to normalize public health measures that combat

contagious diseases, while dysconnecting populations

by its strategies of control. Our history of smallpox

vaccination reveals: (i) GTC relies on the interconnec-

tedness of human and nonhuman actors in protecting

populations against viral threats; law is essential but

does not necessarily drive vaccination or other strate-

gies of control and (ii) resistance to GTC, in which

law plays an integral role, reinforces inequalities and

differentiated treatment, what we term endemic inter/

dysconnectedness.

DOI: 10.1111/lapo.12221

©2023 University of Denver and Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Law & Policy. 2023;45:331–352. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/lapo 331

1|INTRODUCTION

Deriving its name from vacca or “cow”in Latin, vaccine is a modern public health instrument

in the making of physically fit, economically productive bodies. As nonhuman biological matter

that we put into our bodies to alter our levels of immunity, vaccines recalibrate our relation-

ships with pathogens that cause diseases like smallpox, COVID-19, and mpox. Vaccines possess

the capacity to turn around public health governance, especially laws regulating border con-

trols, travel, and other movements across public and private spaces, a phenomenon that we pal-

pably experience in the relentless COVID-19 pandemic. Vaccines also compel us to confront

plural notions of right and wrong. Contestations over access to vaccines and vaccine mandates

highlight issues related to existing inequalities and differentiated treatments of populations by

class, race, geography, and other lines of social division.

At the heart of these contentions sits vaccination’s boundary-crossing act between human

and nonhumans. More than other strategies to control contagious diseases, vaccination creates

interconnections between humans, nonhumans, and objects. This cast of characters include sci-

entists, health officials, medical professionals, biological matter that constitute the vaccine, and

vaccination technology itself. Vaccination, therefore, is fraught with the ever-present possibility

of failure, whether due to malpractice, corruption, uncooperativeness, ineptitude, or break-

down. The multiple possibilities of failure forge a critical counterpoint to concerns with the

expansion of legal technologies in public health governance and morally charged debates over

vaccination. Compare impositions of “lockdown,”on the one hand, and the rhetoric of consent

and employment of incentives in vaccination campaigns during COVID-19,

1

on the other; even

in colonial contexts where the state’s authority was arguably unfettered, officials balked at mak-

ing vaccination compulsory throughout their jurisdiction (see below). Such striking contrasts

provoke questions about vaccination’s impact on public health governance and the projection

of state power.

To explore these issues, we analyze news and official colonial archives relating to smallpox

vaccination between 1868 and 1926 in the British Crown Colony of the Straits Settlements,

particularly its administrative center of Singapore.

2

Prevalent in the 1800s, smallpox is now a

distant memory, but recent surges of mpox—caused by a virus related to smallpox’s—has

reignited interest in smallpox vaccines (British Broadcasting Corporation, 2022). Smallpox

vaccination was the first modern, systematic attempt by governments to immunize their

populations (Blume & Baylac-Paouly, 2021, pp. 2–3). In the 1800s, the predominant method

was to use cowpox virus: hence the derivation of “vaccine”from the Latin word for “cow.”

The Straits Settlements, the governing arrangements of which shaped modern Singapore

and Malaysia, is a “least likely”case (Levy, 2008, p. 12) to study the introduction, administra-

tion, and institutionalization of vaccination. We would least expect state power to be self-

constrained in a directly ruled colony where executive authority, unencumbered by legislative

opposition or judicial review, was the primary instrument of governance. Yet, the colonial

government took a gradualist approach to smallpox vaccination. Simultaneously, the Straits

Settlements is an ideal-typical prototype, an exemplary paradigm in the Kuhnian sense

(Biernacki, 2012, p. 147), to theorize the dynamics between the state, its subjects, and other

actors. Similar to other colonized societies in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, the Straits Settle-

ments was a “plural society”(Furnivall, 1948). British rulers established institutions and gover-

nance practices according to racial divisions and hierarchy (Kuper & Smith, 1969; Lee, 2015;

Smith, 1965), notwithstanding their bewilderment at classifying Malays, migrant and creole

Chinese and Indians, and a small minority of European settler elites (Hirschman, 1987). The

case of smallpox, therefore, sheds light on the effects of rule by racial difference on vaccination

specifically and public health governance generally.

We analyze smallpox vaccination in the Straits Settlements through the theoretical frame-

work of “governing through contagion”(GTC). In an earlier article where we first examined

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