Race, Religion, and the Conscientious Objector to Smallpox Vaccination in Britain and Natal

The late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century invention of a new kind of legal person—the conscientious objector to compulsory smallpox vaccination—emerged out of networks of activists and discourses that bound together Britain with its colonial empire. Through a contrapuntal reading of debates over the so-called conscience clause in England and Wales’s 1898 Vaccination Act and Natal’s 1906 Vaccination Act, this essay foregrounds the nexus of race, anti-Blackness and religion in ensuring that, in practice, conscientious objection was an exclusively white European right. In southern Africa, debates about conscience and smallpox vaccination unfolded against and were deeply marked by the backdrop of widespread African armed resistance to payment of the Poll Tax and white anxieties about African superstitions and religious practices.