Asylum provision and the East India Company in the nineteenth century.

Studies on the history of medicine and psychiatry in former British colonies have multiplied in recent years.1 The relevance of medicine and psychiatry in Britain to the development of colonial medicine and psychiatry within various Anglo-Saxon colonial settings has been firmly established.2 Yet the existence of any reverse impact is less certain. Although historians who specialize on developments in Britain have welcomed and favourably reviewed publications on colonial medicine and psychiatry, they do not on the whole engage to any great extent with the main themes of research in colonial medicine. Historians of colonial medicine and psychiatry therefore appear to be working in relation to, yet placed on the periphery of, mainstream Anglo-Saxon history of medicine and psychiatry. Apart from the fact that research on the colonies is a relatively young discipline, there may be more compelling, if controversial, reasons for this. Historians of colonial medicine and psychiatry tend to focus on the European impact on the outside world and on how the colonial enterprise furthered the expansion of Western scientific knowledge. It is only recently, and largely due to the challenge of social science and literature-based theories of post-colonialism and subaltern studies, that this focus has been widened to look also at