In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, terror of plague and cholera and the rapid communications allowed by rail and steamship technologies motivated European states to debate sanitary measures and to seek cooperative quarantine arrangements with a newfound urgency. As scientists connected cholera and plague to contaminated water and flea-bitten rats, far-flung and heterogeneous empires jostled for control over profitable trade-routes while scrutinizing and critiquing the efforts of other imperial powers to halt the spread of disease into Europe. In this global context, sanitation and disease took on political importance in the Persian Gulf region as quarantine stations became a focal point of imperial and local political rivalries. This presentation explores how debates over the scientific importance and efficacy of quarantine stations in preventing the spread of disease contributed to ambiguity in zones of spatial and jurisdictional sovereignty, imperial commercial rivalries, and efforts by indigenous rulers to institutionalize their claims to power over local populations. How did the relative economic and political importance of various Gulf port cities shape British quarantine efforts, the placement of quarantine stations, and the spatial and architectural relationships of these stations to the existing built environment? Sanitation reports, British imperial archives, published oral histories, photographs, and maps of Gulf quarantine stations from the early twentieth century show that quarantine enforcement was chaotic and ineffective from a medical point of view during this period. At the same time, global discourse and political pressure to establish these institutions in the Persian Gulf provided local elites with a new venue to assert sovereign claims both to imperial authorities and to diverse populations. As an early effort to institutionalize public health, quarantine stations inserted economic and ethnic hierarchies into the built environment. The inconsistencies and ambiguities of the local sanitation systems, however, allowed quarantined passengers, indigenous elites, and rival states ample opportunity to contest the political and social demands of the emerging relationship between public health and state power.