How did British officers live in the scorching heat of India?
archive.ph
archive.ph
Hence was much of the answer focusses on “going native” with “mughal dress”, local building styles, etc.
So, how did they adapt the face of apparent resistance to abandoning all of their normal customs kept up elsewhere.
That is how they spent their summers.
As for the British officers of the time, I assume a key factor was having people (slaves and/or other subordinates) to order to do work while they stayed out of the direct sun as much as possible, in their relatively luxuriant accommodations.
But yeah, the article says as much:
> Finally, the British had servants. Even common British soldiers had servants. Most of the work the British did in India was mental - writing and reading reports, making decisions, giving orders. They spent a lot of time sitting down in the shade. Nearly all of the physical work that supported British lives in India was done by Indians. Intense physical exertion, in fact, could be deadly; if a British regiment had to perform a forced march, for instance, there was a real likelihood that at least a few of the men would die.
It's a weird question. "How does one survive in the heat?" "Well, one just has servants to do all the work." Uh what?
Melanin really doesn't have anything to do with it. If it leads to a suggestion that it was somehow appropriate for the British rulers of India to have Indians do all the manual labor, because somehow Indians were "better" at it (while the British were "better" at ruling, naturally), well, of course not. The division of labor in British colonial India had nothing to do with biology, literally nothing.
I don't think skin color has much of an impact when withstand heat, as sweat is a much stronger temperature regulator. If it's humid heat, it becomes a matter of circulatory efficiency, body mass and plain endurance, as sweat can't evaporate and actually makes it worse.
Source: grew up in tropical coastal region.
[1] https://m.tribuneindia.com/news/archive/snow-pits-to-breathe...
https://slate.com/technology/2013/08/gin-and-tonic-kept-the-...
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It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N’N-T’N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian ‘chinanto/mnigs’ which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan ‘tzjin-anthony-ks’ which kill cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.
Fun tidbit:
> But contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t all one sided. It’s believed that one Native American disease did slip on to the European ships and sailed onward to Europe doing some major damage in the process. That disease was syphilis.
Infectious diseases often arise when humans live in large groups with their animals from which a lot of the diseases originate.
Another uneducated guess is that this is why your pet <insert species name here> doesn't often get sick - they have much less contact with other <insert species name here>s than you do with other humans, contributing to less and slower spread of disease.
Please could a pathologist jump in and enlighten me?
Not a bad guess, but completely wrong. The cities of Mesoamerica or the Andes or the Mississippian culture of North America would have dwarfed most European cities, before they were ravaged by disease.
The best explanation I have seen is that almost all domesticable animals in the New World were exterminated early, and so there wasn't anywhere near the cross-species disease potential in the Americas. Old Worlders had domesticated horses, goats, sheep, pigs, cows, a wide array of fowl, camels, dogs, cats, etc, etc. In the Americas, there were turkeys, ducks, llamas & alpacas, and guinea pigs - and not all of those in any one place.
East-west contact within Eurasia of course did bring some serious diseases to the West, to which people had no resistance. Plague in the 14thC, cholera in the 19th. (Did any similar diseases arrive in the East? I can't think of any.)
First, Europeans lived in appalling filth. The sanitary details are well documented elsewhere, the most telling point being that cities of Western Europe only gained population by migration, not internal growth, so bad were the epidemics. It was a millennium-long germ warfare lab.
Second, Europeans and Asians lived alongside livestock such as pigs and fowl, and also rats, all notorious breeders of diseases that humans can catch. The interplay of illnesses between humans and animals fed the epidemics.
If you look at the long term history, there was widespread and massive instances of migrations too.
This is similar to the British occupying any other large population center / former power in the old world. They won't probably be able to wipe the whole culture out.
The decimation of the Americas was largely due to the fact that the ships that arrived brought with them germs to which the natives had no defences at all.
This topic is covered extensively in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.
I wonder if there’s a follow-up article on how the nazis kept their uniforms so tidy considering how many ditches and mass graves they stood around.
It's not that the author defended them or said anything positive about them (except maybe "I've been there and can relate"). Nothing I read here surprised me, really. And it's not that he didn't mention that the burden was basically shouldered by the people there.
`Greed` got to them before `Envy`, driven by `Pride`