In nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial Bengal, ‘scientific’ or ‘clean midwifery’ and child healthcare were racialised, gendered, classed and/or caste-ridden and amalgamated with the ideas of rescuing ‘civilising missions’ and the upliftment of ‘ignorant’ Indian mothers, midwives and wet nurses. The main aim here is to decolonise the colonising cult of ‘scientific’ motherhood and the recurring stereotypes from midwifery and mothercraft literature in colonial India. It uses the great concern around infant mortality as an entry point into ‘scientific’ motherhood which involved regularity, discipline and precision in childcare by the clock under medical supervision, also promoted as mothercraft and central to the early twentieth century global infant welfare movement. In the process, it explores transnational connections with most influential mothercraft expert New Zealand physician Frederic Truby King’s childcare advice emphasising on the significance of ‘regularity of habits’ of mother and baby as indispensable to the rejuvenation of community, ‘racial’ and national health and virility. Located within the rubric of social history of medicine, this paper specifically interrogates the idea of colonial modernity by studying the global movement of ideas and materialities related to ‘scientific’ midwifery and motherhood primarily advice about sanitising childbirth and disciplined mothering by the clock, baby and health week exhibitions comprised of mothercraft lectures, posters, demonstrations and model exhibits; and imported baby foods and their promotional literature – as these took shape not just in the metropoles but also in colonies like India.

The agency and various roles of indigenous peoples during European expansion around the globe have been the subject of considerable discussion in the historiography of empires. Particularly, the focus on communication within and across empires has brought to the fore concepts such as ‘mediators’ and ‘go-betweens’ to further deepen our understanding of interactions between Europeans and the people they encountered. Such a focus also raises important questions about what impact indigenous voices had and even could have in different contexts.

Examining alleged Māori voices that appeared in early-nineteenth-century British texts concerning the possibility of the British Empire colonising New Zealand, I discuss what role indigenous agency played in these debates about colonisation, and how processes of global communication forced indigenous opinions to fit into the mold of European arguments and ethnography. In the decades before the official British colonisation of New Zealand, there were discussions in and around British colonial administration about whether and how New Zealand could be colonised under the British Crown. In these discussions, seeming Māori views were quoted to promote British colonial plans. However, the portrayed Māori agency was mediated through British channels to provide arguments about supposed Māori willingness for British colonisation, thereby justifying imperial expansion. I argue that due to processes of global communication that I have identified, Māori voices could be presented in European texts in such ways that they appeared to support any number of views, which often diverged greatly from the original Māori sources.

New Zealand geologist and mining engineer Gordon John Williams started his career in the early 1930’s, working on the tin-tungsten-gold deposits of Stewart Island. He studied at the School of Mines, University of Otago, Dunedin, in 1936. He then embarked on a career working for colonial geological surveys in Tanganyika (Karagwe tinfields) and Gold Coast (Ghana). South African geologist Alexander Logie du Toit (1878-1948) was Consulting Geologist for De Beers diamond exploration company, with extensive operations in Tanganyika, where he met Williams in Dodoma. Williams returned from Africa to take up a position as Dean of the Otago School of Mines in 1944, until 1965. In 1965 Williams edited an important volume entitled “Economic Geology of New Zealand”, and then left to establish a Department of Mineral Resources in Tehran, Iran, after which he retired in 1973. In 1944, Gordon Williams and his wife Eve wrote to Alexander du Toit and his wife Evelyn from Prestea, Gold Coast, prior to their departure for Dunedin. Du Toit and Williams then exchanged several letters until 1947 giving important details concerning the search for strategic minerals such as uranium on the West Coast of South Island, New Zealand, and concerning personalia that they both knew in the Geological Survey of Tanganyika, where big changes were taking place at the end of the Second World War. Their correspondence gives some personal insights from the edges of a crumbling British Empire, which was to lose its African colonies within the next 15 years.