- Defining Prostitution and Redefining Women’s Roles: The Colonial State and Society in Early 19th Century India Wald, Erica. 2009. Defining Prostitution and Redefining Women’s Roles: The Colonial State and Society in Early 19th Century India. History Compass, 7(6), pp. 1470-1483.
Dr Erica Wald
Erica's research intersects the fields of social, colonial, medical and military history, with a focus on South Asia.
Staff details
Erica's current research project, Everyday Empire: Social Life, Spare Time and Rule, seeks to answer the question of how unofficial activities- social lives- shaped the British empire.
She is also involved in an ongoing collaboration which focuses on the history of the body in colonial Asia. She is co-editing, Bodies Beyond Binaries in Colonial Asia (Leiden: 2024).
Her earlier work explored the emergence of social and imperial mind-sets and highlighted a colonial-decision making fuelled by a fear of the ‘lower orders’ (in particular, the army’s own European soldiers), sexual deviation, disease and mutiny. It shows how the measures employed by the state to deal with ‘vice’-driven health threats - high rates of venereal disease and alcohol-related illness- had wide-ranging and often surprising consequences, not simply for the army itself, but for India and the empire more broadly.
Academic qualifications
- PhD, History, Trinity College, University of Cambridge 2009
- MSc Politics of Empire and Post Imperialism, London School of Economics and Political Science 2000
- BA History and Government, Smith College 1998
Research interests
Social History of Medicine
Social History of Alcohol & Drugs
Leisure & 'Timepass' in South Asia
Social History of the Military
*East India Company armies
Featured publications
2014: Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780-1868. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
2019: Reading Social Spaces: the life of the Bombay Theatre, 1770-1843. In: Prashant Kidambi; Manjiri Kamat and Rachel Dwyer, eds. Bombay
2017: At Ease, Soldier: Social Life in the Cantonment. In: Kaushik Roy and Gavin Rand, eds. Culture, Conflict and the Military in Colonial South Asia. Abing
Grants and awards
'Chasing the Ardent Spirit': Locating Caste in Medical Discourses on Alcohol in Colonial South India
Dr Tarangini Sriraman, Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship
Publications and research outputs
Book
- Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780-1868 Wald, Erica. 2014. Vice in the Barracks: Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780-1868. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137270986
Edited Book
- Bodies Beyond Binaries in Colonial and Postcolonial Asia Imy, Kate; Segura-Garcia, Teresa; Valdameri, Elena and Wald, Erica, eds. 2024. Bodies Beyond Binaries in Colonial and Postcolonial Asia. Leiden: Leiden University Press. ISBN 9789087284558
Book Section
- Pigsticking: the ‘Noble’ Indian Boar and Colonial Constructions of Elite Masculinity Wald, Erica. 2024. Pigsticking: the ‘Noble’ Indian Boar and Colonial Constructions of Elite Masculinity. In: Kate Imy; Teresa Segura-Garcia; Elena Valdameri and Erica Wald, eds. Bodies Beyond Binaries in Colonial and Postcolonial Asia. Leiden: Leiden University Press, pp. 245-262. ISBN 9789087284558
- Reading Social Spaces: the life of the Bombay Theatre, 1770-1843 Wald, Erica. 2019. Reading Social Spaces: the life of the Bombay Theatre, 1770-1843. In: Prashant Kidambi; Manjiri Kamat and Rachel Dwyer, eds. Bombay before Mumbai: Essays in Honour of Jim Masselos. London: Hurst Publishers, pp. 99-116. ISBN 9781787381483
- At Ease, Soldier: Social Life in the Cantonment Wald, Erica. 2017. At Ease, Soldier: Social Life in the Cantonment. In: Kaushik Roy and Gavin Rand, eds. Culture, Conflict and the Military in Colonial South Asia. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 85-103. ISBN 9781138206724
Article
- Governing the Bottle: Alcohol, Race and Class in Nineteenth-Century India Wald, Erica. 2018. Governing the Bottle: Alcohol, Race and Class in Nineteenth-Century India. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 46(3), pp. 397-417. ISSN 0308-6534
- Health, Discipline and Appropriate Behaviour : the Body of the Soldier and Space of the Cantonment Wald, Erica. 2012. Health, Discipline and Appropriate Behaviour : the Body of the Soldier and Space of the Cantonment. Modern Asian Studies, 46(4), pp. 815-856. ISSN 0026-749X
- 'From Begums to Bibis to Abandoned Females and Idle Women: Sexual Relationships, Venereal Disease and the Redefinition of Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century India Wald, Erica. 2009. 'From Begums to Bibis to Abandoned Females and Idle Women: Sexual Relationships, Venereal Disease and the Redefinition of Prostitution in Early Nineteenth-Century India. Indian Economic Social History Review, 46(1), pp. 5-25. ISSN 0019-4646
Research projects
Everyday Empire: Social Life, Spare Time and Rule in Colonial India
