Between 1894 and 1959, a wave of plague outbreaks spread across the globe, striking major cities and harbours as well as rural areas in all inhabited continents. 1 The disease killed approximately twelve million people and established long-lasting endemic foci of the disease in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. What came to be known as the third plague pandemic led to one of the most extensive studies on any infectious disease at the turn of the century. This undertaking was disproportionate to the total number of deaths, when compared to those incurred in the afflicted areas by other diseases, such as malaria. Rather than sheer numbers, what fuelled research in the particular disease was its exceptionally high fatality case rate: approximately 60% for bubonic and 100% for pneumonic plague. Equally important were the economic burden and the civil disorder resulting from the outbreaks.
On a symbolic level, a crucial role must also be attributed to the notion that the pandemic soon came to be understood as caused by the same pathogen as the great mortality of the Middle Ages, known since the early nineteenth century as the Black Death. 2 Fears that the new pandemic signalled the return of the Black Death clad it in a legendary and terrifying aura. This âimaginary of menaceâ also informed and amplified medical and governmental approaches to individual outbreaks, large or small. 3 Plague was thus rendered an object of knowledge under the bane of its perceived ability to wipe out humanity. This approach was medical as well as lay, with plague panic across cities and villages necessitating the study of the disease as a means to public health as well as public order. 4 Plague research, one of the most prolific epidemiological operations of the half-century, was hence intricately linked to the mythic image of plague as the prototype of all human pandemics. This mythic, governmental, and scientific entanglement created the conditions for problematising the third plague pandemic and its regional and local manifestations in unprecedented ways.
For the first time in history, scientists had the technical tools (microscopes, cameras), the political means (postâBerlin Conference colonialism), and the conceptual framework (germ theory) that allowed them to conduct extensive and multifaceted research on an unfolding global pandemic. This public health crisis and the governmental and medical responses it elicited have not escaped the attention of historians. In the past three decades, scholars have studied the history of modern plague in Hong Kong, India, Manchuria, San Francisco, Senegal, and other important foci of plague at the time, contributing to an important corpus on the pandemic. Some of the principal themes of this research have been the colonial encounter dynamics of the pandemic, its impact on the global economy and international trade, and its implications for immigration and race relations. 5 And yet, in our case, it would not be altogether accurate to claim that âthe historiography of colonial science has tended to be more concerned with its political nature rather than the activities of scientists and the history of scientific experiment and inventionâ. 6
Parallel to, and in dialogue with, studies of the geopolitical and social history of the pandemic, another scholarly strand has focused on the study of plague epistemology. This has been an outcrop of what Graeme Gooday has called the fascination with âthe laboratory in the history of scienceâ; a critical approach flourishing since the late 1970s, which has left a definitive mark in studies of modern plague. 7 Whilst stimulating research on the production of plague-related knowledge, this focus on the laboratory has also created a distortion in our understanding of the development of plague epistemology. This book is an attempt to redress this bias by providing an alternative perspective on how knowledge about plague was produced in the context of the third pandemic.
In particular, this book aims to demonstrate that well after the laboratory identification of the bacterial agent of plague, medical researchers engaged in ways of knowing the disease that not only were field rather than laboratory based, but also drew on a methodological and epistemological tradition that has largely escaped the attention of modern plague historians: ethnography. Examining plague research on the Chinese-Russian frontier between the eruption of the first recorded outbreaks of the disease in the region and the great Manchurian plague epidemics of 1910â11 and 1920â21, this book explores the role of ethnographic research and ethnographic imagination in the configuration of plague.
Plague, a Biological Sketch
When not synonymous, as it often is, with just any sort of plight or calamity, plague is commonly imagined today as an infectious disease that disappeared with the dawn of the industrial age. This narrative ignores the fact that the third plague pandemic, the first of the particular disease to assume truly global proportions, took place in the last half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, roughly between 1894 and 1959. It also overlooks the fact that outbreaks of bubonic and pneumonic plague continue to occur across the world, affecting up to two thousand individuals per annum. 8 To give but a snippet of this epidemiological picture, in the second half of 2014 plague outbreaks were reported in China, the USA, Bolivia, Peru, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Madagascar.
And yet, after the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the end of the third plague pandemic in 1959 little research was conducted on the disease outside the Soviet Union and American-occupied Vietnam. Only following the 2001 anthrax mail-attacks in the USA did plague research witness an unexpected renaissance. Classified as a Grade-A biological-threat agent, in scope of its potential employment as a bioweapon by terrorists or enemy states, plague has since become the object of intense scientific study. 9 The intensification of plague research has shed new light on the molecular biology as well as the ecology of the disease, including the field of retrospective diagnosis of human remains through the application of ancient DNA methods. In recent years this has led to important historical breakthroughs as well as to new historical approaches of plague, advocating a closer cooperation between the humanities and the life sciences. 10 In terms of introducing plague to what I assume is largely a nonâlife sciences audience, it should be noted that this synopsis reflects the current understanding of the disease, which is likely to be significantly revised and advanced soon after the publication of this book. 11
Plague is a zoonotic disease caused by a Gram-negative rod-shaped coccobacillus, known today as Yersinia pestis and in the past as Pasteurella pestis. The anaerobic bacillus is carried by a wide range of wild and domestic mammals and birds (of which more than 203 rodent species) as well as by a number of insects; not only or principally, as often portrayed, by the black rat (Rattus rattus) and its flea (Xenopsylla cheopis). Whilst it is usually thought that plague maintains itself in so-called enzootic cycles which erupt into epizootics, or mass die-off events, at irregular intervals, research in the last fifteen years has suggested that âthe evidence for separate enzootic and epizootic cycles is often unconvincing, and epizootics might simply represent periods of greatly increased transmission among the same host and fleas that support Y. pestis during interepizootic periodsâ. 12 Nonetheless, considerable efforts continue to be made to understand the cause of what is traditionally seen as epizootics of plague amongst different host populations, as this is the mechanism through which, more often than not, plague spreads between species, including humans. Whilst host abundance is typically considered to be a key driver, climatic factors (including climate change), host diversity, and host resistance, as well as anthropogenic factors such as land use change, are increasingly considered as affecting enzootic/epizootic processes. 13 At the same time, hitherto considered an arcane field of Soviet plague science, the study of the landscape ecology of the disease is also coming into the mainstream of plague research today. 14
An important question regarding the transmission and maintenance of plague relates to the role of and interrelation between different animal and flea species. In the course of the third plague pandemic it was the black rat and its flea that played the central role in the transmission of the disease to humans. As a result, research focused mainly on how plague was maintained within commensal rat populations, and on how it thereof spread to humans. 15 By contrast, contemporary research is more interested in the role played by wild animals and their vectors. Studies of sylvatic plague (that is, plague amongst non-commensal animals) hence focus on the âlong-term maintenance of natural transmission cyclesâ in natural foci of the disease. 16 Whereas recent studies have rekindled scientific interest in questions of the survival of plague in the soil and in soil protozoa, as wel...