At the mouth of the Tiber river lies Ostia, Rome’s port town. Legend has it that Ostia was founded as Rome’s first citizen colony (a colonia civium Romanorum) back in the 600s BC, but the archaeological evidence dates the first structured settlement, which was protected by a wall of tufa blocks, to the 300s BC.1

Soon the settlement outgrew the small castrum (as the area surrounded by the early wall is called today) and both private and public buildings spread out in every direction. The Roman Late Republic (c. 133–31 BC) brought hardship on several occasions. During the first four decades of the last century BC, the inhabitants of Ostia suffered both from troops involved in civil warfare and from a raid by daring pirates from the eastern Mediterranean.2 The town was unable to protect itself adequately, since it lacked a proper town wall.

Chapter 5 examines how the Great Plague Scare unfolded in the entangled colonial empires of France and Spain. Despite their intertwined histories in the early-eighteenth-century Atlantic, few works in the English language have focused on Franco-Spanish colonial relations. The chapter describes the orders coming from the metropoles for dealing with the threat of plague and analyzes how those on the ground ultimately responded. In the end, it answers the question, what was different in the colonies? It opens in Fort Royal, Martinique, where a major scandal unfolded when a French vessel arrived from the Languedocien port of Sète. What I call the “Sète affair” offers the opportunity to examine the “spirit of sedition” that endured in the French Antilles well before the Age of Revolution. The chapter then transitions to plague-time violence and Franco-Spanish relations in the Caribbean and demonstrates that the demands of the metropole were not always in line with the needs or wants of the people in the overseas colonies. On the surface, disaster centralism during the Plague of Provence seemed to extend from Europe to the colonies, but on the ground, local needs and economic concerns often outweighed the demands of a far-flung ruler.

Chapter 3 looks at the port city of London, where the Plague of Provence caused waves of fear, opposition, and intellectual inquiry. Taking place against the backdrop of the recent South Sea Bubble, the epidemic became a major topic of discussion among politicians, journalists, scholars, physicians, grocers, and merchants as they protested perceived infringements on their civil liberties, or debated the nature of contagion and the usefulness of quarantine. In 1720, just as plague cases emerged in the south of France, the bursting of the South Sea Bubble unleashed a wave of anxiety and suspicion. Passionate attacks against the perceived injustices of the Crown as it attempted to enact quarantines and impede illicit commerce were filled with accusations that government authorities and “South Sea scheme men” meant to take away the inviolable rights of the people under the pretext of a foreign plague. Meanwhile, debates between contagionists and anti-contagionists about the transmission of infectious disease also erupted with special force in the wake of the 1720 plague. This chapter explores these reactions within the larger historical context of early-eighteenth-century politics and diplomacy and considers the various factors that came into play as England designed its new public health policy.