Mediterranean quarantines, 1750–1914

Space, identity and power

John Chircop, Francisco Javier Martinez, John Chircop, Francisco Javier Martinez

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781526115546
• eBook ISBN: 9781526115577
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Mediterranean quarantines investigates how quarantine, the centuries-old practice of collective defence against epidemics, experienced significant transformations from the eighteenth century in the Mediterranean Sea, its original birthplace. The new epidemics of cholera and the development of bacteriology and hygiene, European colonial expansion, the intensification of commercial interchanges, the technological revolution in maritime and land transportation and the modernisation policies in Islamic countries were among the main factors behind such transformations. The book focuses on case studies on the European and Islamic shores of the Mediterranean showing the multidimensional nature of quarantine, the intimate links that sanitary administrations and institutions had with the territorial organisation of states, international trade, political regimes and the construction of national, colonial and professional identities

III
Power

8
Quarantine, sanitisation, colonialism and the construction of the ‘contagious Arab’ in the Mediterranean, 1830s–1900

John Chircop

Introduction

This chapter seeks to investigate quarantines – their set-up and sanitisation procedures – much as others have discussed other medical/hygienist institutions, in terms of their links with contemporary structures of power, mainly in connection with Western European colonial expansion in the southern and eastern littoral of the Mediterranean during the nineteenth century. As the growing volume of literature on the comparative history of colonial medicine demonstrates, Western biomedicine and sanitation were employed as ‘tools of Empire’ – to use Daniel Headrick's phrase¹ – as instruments to ‘civilize’ and control the ‘indigenous body’.² Thus, it is increasingly being argued that the export of Western medicine and hygienist ventures – scientific discourse, practices – and hence the establishment of quarantine systems on the lazaretto model, was intimately embedded in and went hand in hand with informal colonial penetration and direct imperial acquisitions³ of non-European lands, in the process corroborating Western European assertions of cultural–scientific superiority over ‘native peoples’.⁴

Attentive to new insights emerging from recent literature, and engaging with the theoretical debates, this chapter focuses on the transfer of Western medical/hygienist theories and the related sanitary instruments and practices – in this case the quarantine lazaretto system – to various city ports in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean during the nineteenth century. It consequently seeks to make evident the extent to which the conveyance of this Western sanitary technology and set of practices – presented to the local populations as beneficial instruments of modernity – facilitated colonial incursions in the political economies of these countries, most of which – apart from Morocco – were under Ottoman rule. In order to explore such issues, I shall focus on the several sanitary councils (also known as quarantine boards) created in the main regional ports. Although a thoroughly researched study still needs to be undertaken, this chapter uses the literature available to explore these sanitary councils as spaces of negotiation facilitating the transfer of contemporary epidemiological and medical knowledge – and the role they played in the construction of lazaretto establishments.

These sanitary councils have not received much scholarly attention in the historical literature, yet they were the earliest permanent sites of discussion on international sanitation – made up of resident European consuls, doctors and sanitary advisors in conversation with native physicians, public health and local state functionaries – and they preceded the first 1851 ISC by several years. By contrast, the history of the eleven ISCs until 1903 – also the subject of this chapter – has been dealt with by quite a number of scholars. Most studies shed light on the influence which these ISCs had on the shaping of interstate public health diplomacy⁵ and how it came to exacerbate the ‘South–North health divide’.⁶ Other established scholarly works, such as Peter Baldwin's study of contagion and the state in Europe, make use of the ISC records to illustrate the strategies adopted by the modern European states to prevent the spread of epidemics as well as to investigate the intricate social and political consequences that these left on the evolution of their public health infrastructures.⁷ For the purpose of this chapter, this historical literature helps to provide the wider contexts in which each ISC was convened, assisting in our understanding of the complex interests involved in the European countries' design and operation of the network of lazarettos in the Mediterranean and beyond.

By the time that the first ISC was convened, Western European trade, political hegemony and colonial projects were being bolstered by technological advances in transport and communication technology. Inducing an unprecedented acceleration in movement, they simultaneously spurred the rapid diffusion of epidemics by accelerating the transmission of disease from one regional corner to another and between continents, as happened with cholera in 1831–32. By exploring this wider context, and particularly indicating the various geo-strategic and colonial interests of the European powers in the Mediterranean region and how these were reflected in the proceedings of the ISCs, we can approach the operations of the lazarettos from a different perspective. This allows us to put at the centre of analysis the experiences of ‘Arab’ peoples themselves – often the focus of hygienist strategies including the lazarettos. By investigating the institutional architecture of these quarantine-lazarettos,⁸ this study seeks to show their double role as preventive public health institutions but also, and more intriguingly, as devices for social control and colonisation. Focusing on specific quarantine practices – especially the disinfection of the body – which came to be rigorously conducted in these lazarettos, will make more visible the ways and the extent to which ‘Muslim-Arabs’, as local residents or/and as hajjis (pilgrims), were restrained, disinfected and put under surveillance: procedures which were also employed to reconstruct and publicly legitimise in contemporary discourse the stereotype⁹ of the ‘Muslim-Arab’ as ‘threatening ‘contagious bodies’ – these being essential features of the colonising process then underway.

Contraction of time and space: situating the International Sanitary Conferences

The first ISC was convened in Paris in 1851, at a time of rapid innovation in transport and communication technology – steamships, railways and the laying of the cable telegraph – which brought about an unprecedented shrinking of time and space. Intensification of speed was harnessed and used¹⁰ by the European industrial powers, starting with Britain and France, to assist their colonial penetration of North Africa and the eastern Ottoman domains, which would eventually lead to their formal imperial acquisition.¹¹ This ushered in an era marked by velocity in human mobility, travel and exchange, by greater geographical interconnectivity¹² through which the various zones of the Mediterranean came to be incorporated in the emerging world economy.¹³

The complementary transition made from sail to steamships radically shortened travel time; for instance, the journey from Marseilles to Constantinople was reduced from six weeks to six days.¹⁴ European steamships came to override traditional shipping routes, multiplying their interport linkages, criss-crossing from the west to the east of the region and beyond.¹⁵ Actually, by 1846, British and French steamships had already forged direct and faster connections with the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.¹⁶ Subsequently, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 radically cut travel time further and condensed the spatial expanses between Europe, the East and India. The voyages from London to Bombay around the Cape of Good Hope, which covered 10,667 nautical miles, and to Hong Kong which travelled a distance of 13,180 nautical miles, were now being made across the Mediterranean and via the Suez Canal, cutting the nautical mileage to 6,274 and 9,799 miles respectively.¹⁷ This continued to raise the volume of shipping and intensify the magnitude of human movement in all its forms:¹⁸ from mass migration, particularly from southern Europe to the Maghreb and the Levant, to the rapid deployment of colonial troops to all corners of the region, to the numbers of Muslim pilgrims – markedly from British India – on their journey to M...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction Mediterranean quarantine disclosed: space, identity and power
• I Space
• II Identity
• III Power
• Index