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.

Pandemic cholera had a complex and transformative impact on medicine, the science of sanitation and hygiene, and broader sociopolitical developments in Iran during the Qajar era. This paper will show how cholera changed Iranian perspectives on governance, unmasked social and political vulnerabilities, and caused enduring institutional changes during this critical time in the country’s development. Specifically, this paper will explain the role of the 1889-1892 cholera epidemics in cementing the role of Shi‘ite clerics against Western encroachment and government exploitation. It will also shed light on how the 1904 cholera outbreak shifted popular perspectives in favor of the germ theory of diseases and the central government’s sanitary responsibilities to its people. Using a number of Persian language period newspapers, this paper will show how the popularity of microbialism gave rise to the anti-establishment rhetoric of the Constitutional Revolution and ensuing changes in Iran's vaccination culture.

The life of the institutionalized Ottoman mental patients was interrupted in a dramatic way twice between the 1870s and the 1890s due to outbreaks of contagious diseases. While the first—mysterious and contained—disease resulted in a major patient transfer and abandoning of the state insane asylum (Süleymaniye), the second one, the cholera outbreak of 1893, was dealt with differently. The new state asylum (Topta??) was identified as one of the first locations of the 1893 outbreak. In fact, some claimed that it was the recent arrival of a mental patient that started this particular outbreak in Istanbul. After many discussions about relocating patients to a remote area, the administration decided to deal with the outbreak where it started. This paper will look at the intersection of madness and contagious disease as it relates to concerns of public health in the Ottoman capital. I will primarily focus on the planned and actual responses of the Ottoman and asylum administration by analyzing the spatial dimensions of the outbreak and the responses inside and outside the asylum.

This paper inquires into the social and environmental context of a national movement in Qajar Iran that is known as the Tobacco Protest. The presentation engages with the literature on the Ottoman Empire and several other parts of the world, and reads through different classes of newly published and unpublished archival sources in order to illustrate that germs and epidemics were an important factor in the making of popular movements and revolutions in the nineteenth-century Middle East. This talk demonstrates that Iran faced a major public health crisis in 1890-92, a period that was particularly important for the formation and manifestation of the first instance of coordinated nationwide public dissent in the modern history of the country. The contention here is that in these years vast segments of Persian society, especially the poor and the underclass population, struggled perhaps more than ever before with threats and dire consequences of germs and epidemics. This was so because a considerable number of common maladies joined some new contagions to paralyze the everyday life of average people in just about all parts of the Qajar state. This widespread public health crisis added much to the suffering of the groups who had long been affected adversely by the economic and political transformations of the country over the course of the nineteenth century. Meanwhile, the response on the part of the Persian government appeared insufficient and did not fully address the main causes of the crisis. Instead, government response laid bare the characteristic inefficiency of the central administration in dealing with major forces that undermined the daily life of average people over the course of the previous years and decades. The problems that the state officials had in containing epidemics symbolized the kind of ineffectiveness that characterized their dealing with other recurrent social ills—such as poverty, food scarcity, extortion, and abuse of power by certain elements within the Qajar state—that frustrated so many different classes of the population throughout the previous years and decades. In this environment, the public health crisis became the symbolic marker of a nation in decline and many started to make new demands on the government even as the nationwide agitations related to the Tobacco Protest unfolded. In brief, then, the public health crisis of 1890–92 precipitated or provided additional justification for the agitations of the Tobacco Protest.