All disabled people have the right to freedom from exploitation, violence, and abuse (CRPD Article 16) and the right to health without discrimination (Article 25). War and colonialism produced mass disability, reshaped how societies understood disabled people, and imposed new systems of control across continents. This page centers disabled people's expertise, prioritizes Global South perspectives, and treats disabled people as actors within colonial systems—not merely as victims. It draws on Indigenous scholarship, disability historians, and survivor accounts.
Colonial and wartime disability frameworks still influence global disability stereotypes, mental health policy, immigration rules, poverty and unemployment rates, racialized disability disparities, international development programs, institutionalization systems, and global health priorities. Understanding this history helps explain why disability justice must be anti-colonial, anti-racist, and globally informed.
Between 1500 and 1960, war and colonial expansion:
This period explains why modern disability systems differ dramatically across regions and why Global South communities often reject Western disability frameworks.
From early modern warfare onward, empire-building relied on gunpowder weapons, naval expansion, standing armies, and mass conscription. These produced injuries such as amputations, blindness and deafness from explosions, severe burns, chronic pain and joint damage, and traumatic brain injuries.
Most disabled soldiers received little support. Many became itinerant workers or were forced into poorhouses.
In some societies, disabled veterans were honored. In others, they were seen as burdens or reminders of war's cost. This tension shaped later pension systems and the unequal value placed on "deserving" versus "undeserving" disabled people.
European colonial powers—Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and later the United States—spread new disability ideologies across Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas.
Colonial administrations replaced community-based disability practices with European models, classified colonized peoples as "primitive," "childlike," or "mentally inferior," built hospitals, asylums, and leper colonies to segregate populations, used disability as evidence for racial hierarchy, criminalized Indigenous healing, kinship roles, and care systems, extracted medical data and bodies for scientific research, and spread infectious disease through forced labor, settlement, and war.
Colonial disability systems were not designed for care—they were designed for labor control, population management, racial hierarchy, religious conversion, and surveillance. These systems often replaced robust Indigenous frameworks where disabled people had established social roles and community integration.
Across colonies, forced labor disabled millions.
Atlantic slavery: Enslaved Africans were disabled through brutality, overwork, malnutrition, and torture. Disabled enslaved people were often killed or sold cheaply.
Plantations in the Caribbean, Brazil, and the American South: Sugar, cotton, and tobacco production caused chronic injury and early death.
Mining in South Africa, Congo, Bolivia: Collapse, chemical poisoning, lung disease, and amputations were common.
Rubber production in the Congo and Amazon: Forced labor, mutilation, and starvation led to mass death and widespread disability.
Indentured labor systems: Workers from India, China, and the Pacific Islands were disabled under brutal conditions.
Colonial records rarely counted disability. People were simply labeled unfit, expendable, or "worn out."
Mission schools punished disabled children or excluded them, suppressed sign languages and Indigenous languages, promoted "normality" and obedience as moral virtues, and treated disability as a spiritual or moral failing.
Colonial governments built institutions that mirrored European models: psychiatric hospitals, leper colonies, Deaf or blind schools run by missionaries, and work camps for "undesirables."
These institutions enforced racial and disability hierarchies. Many disabled people were confined indefinitely.
Colonial expansion intensified epidemics and famine, which disabled entire communities.
These crises disproportionately harmed children, Indigenous communities, people in forced labor systems, and people already targeted by colonial repression.
Military conflict created large disabled veteran populations, many of whom pushed for recognition and rights.
Veterans organized for pensions, healthcare, rehabilitation, work protections, accessible housing, and public recognition. These early advocacy efforts influenced later disability rights movements—even though most excluded civilians, women, and colonized peoples.
World War I introduced widespread recognition of shell shock, war neurosis, and trauma-related mental health conditions.
Though often treated as weakness or cowardice, this era laid the groundwork for recognition of psychiatric disability. Treatments remained coercive, but survivors created early communities and narratives of resistance.
Colonial and wartime medicine frequently used disabled, poor, or colonized people as test subjects.
Many victims were disabled people institutionalized against their will.
Despite repression, disabled people resisted colonial and wartime systems in many ways:
This resistance shaped later liberation movements across the world.
This page centers disabled people's expertise and is informed by disabled-led organizing globally. For questions or to suggest additions, see How to Contribute.