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2 results

  • 5 - A European System

  • from Part II - Lazarettos, Health Boards, and the Building of a Biopolity
  • Alex Chase-Levenson, University of Pennsylvania
  • Book:
    The Yellow Flag
    Published online:
    27 March 2020
    Print publication:
    16 April 2020, pp 123-154

  • Summary

    This chapter reveals circuits of exchange among boards of health and European consuls serving in the Middle East that fashioned a European biopolity centered upon quarantine practice. It argues that, contrary to scholarship that has depicted quarantine prior to the 1850s as an improvised and irregular precursor to a late-century regime of international health, reciprocal correspondence among boards of health fostered a system that was durable and adaptable. The centerpiece of the chapter focuses on the events surrounding the passage of the 1825 Quarantine Act in Britain, in which an attempt to liberalize quarantine regulations led to a Continent-wide quarantine against British shipping. The spectacle only concluded when the Privy Council backed down. Rather than demonstrating British ambivalence, however, the reaction of the government in London shows how seriously politicians and advocates regarded membership in what one MP called the “family compact” of quarantine.

The Yellow Flag
  • Quarantine and the British Mediterranean World, 1780–1860
  • Alex Chase-Levenson
  • Published online:
    27 March 2020
    Print publication:
    16 April 2020
  • Until the middle of the nineteenth century, quarantine laws in all Western European nations mandated the detention of every inbound trader, traveller, soldier, sailor, merchant, missionary, letter, and trade good arriving from the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Most of these quarantines occurred in large, ominous fortresses in Mediterranean port cities. Alex Chase-Levenson examines Britain's engagement with this Mediterranean border regime from multiple angles. He explores how quarantine practice laid the foundations for the state provision of public health and constituted an early example of European integration. Situated at the intersection of political, cultural, diplomatic, and medical history, The Yellow Flag captures the texture of quarantine as an experience, its power as an administrative precedent, and its novelty as an example of a continental border built from the ground up by low-level bureaucrats.