Melting luxury: ice in colonial tropics
The article examines the problems of corporeality and materiality in the colonial context of British India in the 19 th - early 20 th centuries. The orientalist idea of the asymmetry of the bodies of the colonialists and the colonized ones emphasized the physical superiority of the former in relation to the latter and served as one of the justifications for the legitimacy of foreign power in the Indian subcontinent. This made the comfort and physical well-being of the British in the colony not only their personal need, but also part of the public order of things. However, according to colonial narratives, finding themselves in difficult temperature conditions, the British suffered from migraines, dizziness, heat stroke, prickly heat, lichen, insect bites, classic tropical diseases - fever / malaria, cholera, dysentery, and high mortality. As a result, they became the object of care and control from the state, subordinating their bodies to its goals, namely, the need to be healthy, strong, vigorous, beautiful to maintain a decent image and viable to exercise power in unusual climatic conditions. The focus is on ways to bring tropically traumatized British bodies to a state of physical norm, in particular cooling and ice-making technologies. Ice in a hot climate was not a natural phenomenon, but a technological product that required the mobilization of large finances and manpower, sophisticated marketing policies, as well as complex infrastructure and technical innovations. Thus, ice became a visual marker not only of the wealth of foreign rulers, but also of their belonging to the culture of modernity with its characteristic internationalization of commercial, economic and intellectual ties.