Crossing colonial boundaries: health and the responses of “colonial mediators” to the crisis of the 1930s in the French and British Caribbean

This paper explores the responses of two Caribbean men, the Jamaican Harold Moody and the French Guyanese Félix Eboué, to the economic and political crisis in the Caribbean in the 1930s, focusing on their views about health and colonial medical systems. It examines some of the international and Caribbean experiences that shaped their views and careers. Despite their differences (Moody was a medical doctor who lived in the UK for much of his life, where he lobbied for Afro-Caribbean rights, and Eboué was a colonial administrator and governor in Guadeloupe), they placed concerns about bodily health at the center of their views of colonial life, civilization, and metropolitan obligations. Both maintained that imperial powers had a moral and pragmatic obligation to improve colonial conditions through reforming health and medical services. As did many of their contemporaries, they saw good health and access to medical care as representing modernity and as necessary for economic development.