Historical and theoretical analysis of colonial healthcare.

Abstract

This paper explains the phenomenon of colonial healthcare through a synthesis of Foucault’s conception of Biopower and a traditional and contemporary lens of World-systems theory. A historical and theoretical hybrid analysis of historical and contemporary colonial healthcare systems provide a well-rounded interdisciplinary illustration of how colonial healthcare affected Moroccan and Puerto Rican indigenous populations' determinants of health as well as aspects of their political trajectories into the 20th and 21st centuries. The theoretical and historical findings convey how working-class populations under the scope of colonial and neocolonial rule experienced suboptimal care in their respective systems. Rather than attempting to improve the living conditions of indigenous populations, colonial and neocolonial healthcare was a form of population control and maintained the colonial social hierarchy of the underlying racist ideologies used to justify perfunctory health services. The findings also conclude that colonial and neocolonial healthcare was an attempt to incorporate these peripheral zones into the world economy via contractualization, or the transfer of property rights, which majorly altered the course of these regions’ socio-economic and political institutional realities.