This dissertation, The Making of the Jamaican National Body: Colonialism and Public Health, 1918--1944 examines how the development of public health, aided by the intervention of the Rockefeller Foundation, intersected with the birth of nationalism in Jamaica between 1918 and 1944. It demonstrates that a modern public health program based in western biomedicine, racial categorization and colonial modes of behavior were vital to claims of fitness for self-rule by Jamaican nationalists. In the late 1930s the demand for greater representation in government was accompanied by the scrutiny of the sexual behaviors and personal hygiene of the Afro-Jamaican masses.

I analyze how disease and reproduction played a central role in the competing constructions of Afro-Jamaican bodies by colonial elites and ambitious middle class nationalists. The failures of the colonial state to provide even the most basic health services to its subjects provided fodder for anti-colonial critiques and were bolstered by the significant contributions of the American philanthropic efforts of the Rockefeller Foundation. In contrast, white colonial elites viewed the presence of widespread disease in the majority Afro-Jamaican population as evidence of their backwardness and unpreparedness for self-governance. Both of these competing groups borrowed the legitimacy of science and medicine to substantiate their claims about the black masses that reinforced racial and class hierarchies with roots in the era of plantation slavery.

My analysis of the connections between public health and nationalism in Jamaica is critical to understanding how race and health were intertwined in the final years of British control. I use Jamaica as an important case study that exemplifies how colonial and local patterns of racial hierarchy were deeply embedded in the public health interventions begun in 1918 by the Rockefeller Foundation and expanded in the 1930s to include campaigns against venereal disease and over-population by the Jamaican middle class. This dissertation connects the histories of colonial power, international philanthropy and nationalism through the bodies of Afro-Jamaicans.