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Creating welfare, nursing empire: colonial nursing and the National Health Service
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Babikian, Catherine. Creating welfare, nursing empire: colonial nursing and the National Health Service. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-n4mj-dg27

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TitleCreating welfare, nursing empire: colonial nursing and the National Health Service
NameBabikian, Catherine (author); Koven, Seth (chair); Schoen, Johanna (internal member); Davis, Belinda (internal member); Bailkin, Jordanna (outside member); Rutgers University; School of Graduate Studies
Date Created2021
Other Date2021-05 (degree)
SubjectHistory, History, Great Britain. National Health Service
Extent1 online resource (viii, 330 pages) : illustrations
DescriptionThis dissertation tells the story of how and why Caribbean, African, and Southeast Asian women quite literally nursed the British National Health Service (NHS) and its mostly white patients from its launch in 1948 through the late 1970s. These women were initially brought to Britain as part of a development project to train highly skilled nursing leaders for British colonies. But Britain’s hunger for nurses, at a time of severe nursing shortages worldwide, turned the development project into a pipeline of low-cost labor for the NHS. In hospital wards across the country, Black and brown nurses cared for the sick bodies of white British citizens. Their labor made the modern British welfare state and its promise of “social citizenship” possible. Yet their recruitment and employment in British hospitals contributed to the long-term impoverishment of health care resources in their own countries.

Moving from the colonial prehistory of nurse migration to its postcolonial consequences, “Creating Welfare, Nursing Empire” offers a new reading of where, how, and when Britain’s empire—under new strain after the Second World War—ended. It draws on over a dozen archives across Britain to narrate this story from a series of vantage points across the British Empire: the halls of Parliament and the floors of hospitals; local communities across Britain; colonial nursing schools in the Caribbean, Africa, and Southeast Asia; and elite professional nursing organizations in Jamaica and Nigeria that came of age on the eve of independence and faced severe “skill drains” in nursing. Well past the official moment of imperial handover, this dissertation demonstrates, recruitment overseas produced new forms of inequality in the hospitals of the NHS and the health care systems of former British colonies.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
Persistent URLhttps://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-n4mj-dg27
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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