Based on over 3000 institutional records, Coleborne's study will have wider relevance outside of the history of medicine and psychiatry. It has a global perspective but focuses on specific destinations, and in so doing, contributes in an innovative way to global history and the history of human migration.

Introduction: Insanity, identity and empire1. Insanity in the ‘age of mobility’: Melbourne and Auckland, 1850s–80s2. Immigrants, mental health and social institutions: Melbourne and Auckland, 1850s–90s3. Passing through: narrating patient identities in the colonial hospitals for the insane, 1873–19104. White men and weak masculinity: men in the public asylums, 1860s–1900s5. Insanity and white femininity: women in the public asylums, 1860s–1900s6. The ‘Others’: inscribing difference in colonial institutional settingsConclusionBibliographyIndex

This book examines the formation of colonial social identities inside the institutions for the insane in Australia and New Zealand. It looks at insanity in the context of migration to the colonies by focusing on two urban, public hospitals for the insane in Victoria, Australia, and Auckland, New Zealand, between 1873 and 1910. During this period, there was a significant amount of migration from Britain and other parts of the world to both destinations, as part of a widespread Anglo-settler ‘explosion’. This was also the period in which social institutional networks were developed across the colonies. These social institutions included health, medical and welfare institutions, all of which were modelled on British imperial institutional spaces and with imperial sensibilities. Of particular interest to students and historians of colonialism, imperialism and medicine at undergraduate and postgraduate level, the book examines the creation of an institutional language of gender and race in two nineteenth-century colonial institutional sites. It will also appeal to the many historians of insanity and its institutions, given that these sites were part of an imperial network of solutions to the problem of ‘madness’ which followed Europeans to new places of settlement.

'Cathy Coleborne has written a splendid book, one that is especially welcome for its comparative focus, and for its efforts to give us a sense of mental patients' lives in two colonial societies. This is a meticulously researched monograph that is crisply written and full of wonderful details, the whole forming a splendid addition to the burgeoning literature on the history of colonial psychiatry.'Andrew Scull, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Science Studies, University of California, San Diego'Coleborne [has] added important dimensions to the history of insanity in Australia and New Zealand, but even more significant is the depth of insight these works offer historians of immigration. They deserve a wide readership.'Stephen Garton, University of Sydney, Australian Historical Studies47, no. 2‘Historians are yet to explore the discursive stretch of madness throughout the British Empire, writes Coleborne. This expansive monograph, bringing together scholarly fields to examine madness thematically at two settler sites of empire, is an important step towards this.’James Dunk, University of Sydney‘Insanity, Identity and Empire draws on and extends Coleborne’s previously published works about institutional confinement.’ Ann Westmore, University of Melbourne , Health and History 18/2‘The book adds to a growing body of historical literature on disability and madness and, in particular, research on migration, disability, and madness.’Natalie Spagnuolo, York University, Toronto, H-Disability (January 2018)