LanguageTerm (authority = ISO 639-3:2007); (type = text)
English
Abstract (type = abstract)
This 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.
Subject (authority = RUETD)
Topic
History
Subject (authority = local)
Topic
History
RelatedItem (type = host)
TitleInfo
Title
Rutgers University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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