MESA 2019 Abstract Quarantines, Public Health, and State-Society Relations in the Ottoman-Russian Black Sea Region, Late 18th-early 19th Centuries Drawing upon Ottoman, Russian, Ukrainian, and Bulgarian archival sources and set against the background of an increase in commercial and population exchange between the Ottoman and Russian Empires following the signing of the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, my paper will detail the Russian state’s response, in the form of quarantine construction and public health initiatives, to outbreaks of plague and cholera in the Russian Empire’s newly acquired lands along the northern Black Sea littoral. Focusing on Russian public health initiatives in its newly-established province of Novorossiya and in the important imperial port city of Odessa, the paper will link migration management and public health initiatives to broader social control measures along the Russian Empire’s contested Black Sea borderlands. While quarantines are primarily constructed in an effort to combat the spread of disease and, from an historiographical standpoint, are generally discussed within this context, my paper will argue that in southern Russia during the period in question quarantines rapidly evolved into all-purpose border posts where trade goods were inspected, customs collected, currency exchanged, criminals and fugitives surveilled, intelligence gathered, and migrants and refugees registered and provided with travel documents. As part of this analysis of the transformation of quarantines into a form of border infrastructure, this paper will explore the connections between quarantine lines and territorial sovereignty along the hardening border between the Ottoman and Russian empires in the transition from the early modern to modern periods. The Black Sea region from 1768-1829 has traditionally been characterized as a theater of warfare and imperial competition. Indeed, during this period, the Ottoman and Russian Empires engaged in four armed conflicts for supremacy in the Balkans, Caucasus, and on the Black Sea itself. Focusing in on the local and provincial level, my research reveals that Ottoman and Russian state officials, in a cross-frontier form of engagement engaged in a considerable amount of communication, coordination, and cooperation to control migratory movements and check the spread of epidemic diseases in the Ottoman-Russian borderlands in the Black Sea region in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.