Prison, plantation, and peninsula: colonial knowledge and experimental technique in the post-war Bataan Rice Enrichment Project, 1910–1950

Abstract

ABSTRACT The 1946 Bataan Rice Enrichment Project illuminates the intimate connections between Euro-American empire, scientific nationalism, and post-war demonstration in the Philippines. The project was conducted by former American colonial chemist turned philanthropist Robert R. Williams, who sought to prove the efficacy of synthetic-thiamine fortified rice in the fight against beriberi. Yet by willfully exposing half of Bataan’s food scarce residents to beriberi, Williams effectively recreated the prisons and asylums that Euro-American researchers had used as living laboratories to induce beriberi in unwilling subjects. These ‘carceral laboratories’ were highly contested by the people imprisoned within and by nationalist Philippine physicians who understood deficiency disease as a symptom of colonialism. Returning the carceral laboratory to the making of nutritional science explains the post-war Philippine rejection of mandatory rice fortification and is a reminder that the Asian countryside was a creation of colonial modernity and a contested space long before the Cold War.