Most critics agree that gender plays a role, but differ about whether gender supports the colonial ideals or replaces them as English and Welsh cultures interact in the poem.
Those are the broad outlines of a play that shows post-colonial ideals poisoned by tribal conflicts, predatory international bankers and the competing interests of the Soviet Union and US.
Of course such a "call and response" relationship was only ever an imperial ideal: colonial populations, and ambitious (or culturally acute) researchers and practitioners in both locations, resisted their roles.
This pretty colonial town is probably the ideal gateway to Kerala, as it compresses in a tiny space the region's ancient history - spices, Judaism, fishing and trading - with that of the later Dutch, Portugese and British settlements.
But the British colonial rulers saw this as an ideal place to cultivate rice and help feed their empire.
For instance, the Ugandan penal code, which outlaws prostitution, is based on the British colonial penal code, which embraced Victorian ideals of female chastity.
They argue that in fact it furthers a neo-colonial imposition of Western ideals and norms onto non-Western cultures [ 33, 34].
Its multiethnic citizenry was already trying hard to reconcile the bitter legacy of Dutch colonial rule with a faith in Dutch democratic ideals.
And in 1922 historian Samuel Eliot Morison, emphasizing fishing's vital role in the colonial economy, wrote that "Puritan Massachusetts derived her ideals from a sacred book; her wealth and power from the sacred cod".
Manton depicts an uneasy retreat from historical and ideal visions of the healthy post-colonial city and the public good, as the sanitary functions of environmental health workers are displaced amid urban politics and the elaboration of a coercive rent-seeking apparatus of 'inspection'inspection
