Cholera has been dealt with in the Mediterranean extensively as a disease that changed how port cities traded with each other for two thousand years (Barbieri, 2018). More recently, newer studies have scrutinized the role of quarantine across Europe, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century as a colonial technology of imperial surveillance and biopower that slowed down trade and subsequently receded in the face of sanitary reform (Opera, 2020; Mukharji 2012; Tagliaczzo, 2014; Maglen 2002; Low, 2020). In contrast, recent nineteenth-century legal histories have emphasized the use of quarantine as a site of local modernity; one that was not yet mended to British colonialism (Fahmy, 2018). This paper returns to earlier claims surrounding quarantine as a biopolitical technology. It does so by undertaking a history of quarantine measures in Mehmet Ali’s early years of rule (1831-3) in the Mediterranean. Looking at Mehmet Ali’s quarantine measures in Candia (Crete) and the Levant, it seeks to connect these far-flung territories back into histories of the Mediterranean and maritime aspects of quarantine, (Greene, 2010; Khuri-Makdisi, 2014). In so doing it adopts a material history of quarantine and explores microcosmic aspects of quarantine such as conditions of nourishment, sanitation and the cost of board inside these quarantine houses. Thus this paper contributes to strands of biomedical and legal historiography that deal with quarantine to offer a different intervention. Namely, this intervention demonstrates how individuals inside these quarantine facilities faced new jurisprudential and bodily challenges: from avoiding infection from those quarantined with them, finding affordable food, keeping their cargo safe, to burying their loved ones according to Sharia jurisprudence. By picking the early years of Mehmet Ali’s rule — an understudied epoch in Egyptian and Mediterranean history — and focusing on the bodily challenges that quarantine produced, this paper contributes to the ‘material’ and ‘biomedical’ turn in the study of Egyptian history, (Jakes, 2015). In particular, it offers a material history of quarantine measures from the point of view of Mediterranean merchants who used Candia as a transiting station and port of disembarkation.