imperial disease

English

Noun

imperial disease (plural imperial diseases)

1. A disease that arises from colonial exploration and causes significant harm to an empire, especially the British Empire.
   • 1931, United Empire - Volume 22, page 112:

     He served with distinction in both the South African War and the Great War, and during the last eight years he was Director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, whose concern is with “Imperial diseases,” as he called them, as well as the more domestic.

   • 1933, Great Britain Colonial Office, Colonial Reports - Annual - Issues 1613-1633, page 10:

     More insidious than malaria in its general manifestations, ankylostomiasis did not, at first, attract public attention, and it is feared that even now the leading classes do not quite realise its social and economical importance — yet, reviewing the disease in Health Problems of the Empire, the late Sir Andrew Balfour writes : — " Ankylostomiasis is perhaps the Imperial disease par excellence, for even Malaria does not, day in and day out, produce such heavy economic loss ".

   • 2008, Barnett Singer, John Langdon, Cultured Force: Makers and Defenders of the French Colonial Empire, →ISBN:

     One should not think that the French won any final victory over "imperial diseases" in this era. A variety of respiratory illnesses, yellow fever, dysentery, and above all, malaria still killed regularly.

2. (by extension) A failing to which an empire is prone.
   • 1991, Anthony Verrier, Francis Younghusband and the great game, page 10:

     ...in July 1807 we may discern the growth of a singular British imperial disease: Russophobia.

   • 1994, Marc Raeff, Political ideas and institutions in imperial Russia, page 217:

     The basic administrative and judicial framework, however, was that of the Instructions to the Economic Administration (or ekonomicheskii ustav) which suffered from the usual Russian imperial disease: over-bureaucratization and mistrust of local authorities.

   • 2002, McDougal Littell, The Language of Literature, →ISBN:

     Certainly both superpowers suffer from the imperial diseases once so noteworthy among the Romans, the British and the French: arrogance and myopia.

3. A communicable disease that is spread to indigenous people by conquering imperial forces.
   • 1994, The Southern Historian - Volumes 15-16, page 158:

     Despite these and other strengths, however, the Iroquois became weakened throughout the seventeenth and into the early eighteenth centuries as they faced several ordeals: “first came massive depopulation from imperial diseases; next, a slide into economic dependence on trade with Europeans; then ensnarement in the imperial struggles of powerful French and English colonial neighbors; finally, direct incursions on Iroquois territory and sovereignty” (p. 2).

   • 2013, Zeinab Abul-Magd, Imagined Empires: A History of Revolt in Egypt, →ISBN, page 39:

     As Upper Egypt was now an integrated part of the empire's political and commercial system, Mamluk ships gained access to the south—facilitated by their wars on Upper Egyptian soil—and they carried imperial diseases with them.