This chapter examines Gaza’s socio-spatial organization and the demographic features of its population. It presents Gaza’s main urban features during the late Ottoman period, including divisions into neighborhoods, main landmarks and thoroughfares. It then offers an in-depth portrayal of Gazan society, including data on economy and lifestyles, social hierarchies, marriage patterns, migration and health, based on a detailed analysis of the Ottoman census of 1905 and surviving court records (1857–1861), in light of evidence from the literature, maps and images.

The gold rush in the 1890s and the discovery of oil in 1920 prompted the Canadian government to negotiate treaties 8 and 11 with the Dene and Gwich’in. With the arrival of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, these treaties formalized colonial control over the Yukon and Northwest Territories. Medicine, hospitals, and healthcare were promised as part of treaty negotiations, but the infrastructure of care erected in this period was underfunded and racially contingent, prioritizing settlers and sojourners. Sanitary infrastructure appeared as a necessary response to the surge of newcomers in search of gold in the Yukon. Otherwise, healthcare for Indigenous northerners was designed around the objectives of the Christian missions upon whom the government depended to deliver its treaty promises.

The most widespread evidence for parasite infection in medieval Europe is for species spread by poor sanitation, such as whipworm, roundworm, and the protozoa Entamoeba histolytica and Giardia duodenalis, likely related to the common use of human faeces as a crop fertilizer. The prevalence of infection by intestinal helminths has been shown to be at least a quarter to a third of the medieval population, with a broad north–south divide in the dominant types of parasite. While species spread by poor sanitation were present throughout the continent, in northern Europe where eating raw, smoked, dried, or pickled fish was common, fish tapeworm resulted. The use of dogs by farmers put them at risk of infection by Echinococcus granulosus as shown by calcified hydatid cysts. Human fleas and body lice helped spread the Black Death pandemic from the fourteenth century onwards. Medical practitioners thought intestinal worms were formed due to an excess of phlegm (one of the four bodily humours), while ectoparasites were formed due to putrefying humours, sweat, and grime. Delousing combs were widely used to remove head lice, while the wealthy in Italy applied mercury ointments to their hair.

Despite major investment in sanitation infrastructure, intestinal parasites spread by faecal contamination of food and water were a particular problem everywhere in the Roman world. Similarly, ectoparasites such as lice and fleas were common despite the Roman enthusiasm for washing in communal bathhouses and the use of delousing combs. However, some parasites seem to be much more regional in their distribution, likely due to climate variations. Fish and Taenia tapeworms, spread by eating raw or undercooked fish, pork, or beef were more common in northern Europe than southern Europe, possibly due to the fact that the hot climate in the south made raw fish and meat go off faster than in the cooler north. In contrast, malaria seems to have been much more common in the Mediterranean region than in northern Europe, as the warm climate of the south created breeding sites for the Anophales mosquito, which transmitted the parasite. Roman period medical texts by Galen and other physicians showed awareness of a number of parasites and tried to explain them in the context of the humoral theory. Treatment involved trying to rebalance the humours in order to return the individual to health.

This chapter imagines an ordinary day in the life of a female monastic community in twelfth-century Germany. The chapter, like the monastic day, is organized around the celebration of the monastic liturgy of the hours. Between the liturgical hours in the oratory, the nuns attend to their daily business in the cloister, chapter house, lavatory, refectory, and workshops. The flow and activities of this monastic day are based primarily on the Rule of St. Benedict, the customary of Hirsau, and Hildegard of Bingen’s own commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict, as well as on archaeological and bioarchaeological evidence that reflects medieval monastic lifeways.

The chapter provides a broader comparative view of the League’s environmental concerns. The main aim of the discussion in this chapter it to weave these different initiatives (which are described separately in each chapter) into a coherent and broad regime, ones that has a common ground, continuity, and certain dynamics. As each chapter explains the role played by central theories, ideas, conflicting interests, environmental challenges, and scientific or professional concerns, this chapter puts them together and explain some of the differences and common patterns. Moreover, this analysis also revises the League’s different endeavors from contemporary environmental perspectives, and assesses their relevance to current dilemmas where nature protection conflicts with human needs.

Each of the chapters explores a different dimension of the League’s environmental policy. They focus on the environmental impacts of pollution of the sea by oil, the growing whaling industry and endangered whales, rural hygiene and sanitation problems in the periphery, and timber production and fears of spreading deforestation. There may well be other interwar concerns that also involved environmental perspectives. However, I present a sweeping legal-historical overview of several of the central environmental challenges that the interwar world faced, in order to understand the notions behind the League’s leadership and to explain its shortcomings and achievements.

The chapter explores the League’s “rural hygiene” campaign. During its work on different reflections of sanitary problems that put local, national, and global public health at risk, the League invested substantial scientific, comparative, and professional effort while it was considering possible policies with which these dangers could be faced. These suggested policies, articulated in terms of international law, focused on the eradication of a variety of environmental-sanitary risks and spreading diseases, which the League believed to be plaguing the countryside in Eastern Europe and across the “Far East”. Among the international community’s concerns were the need to protect water resources from human and nonhuman pollution, to treat refuse, to fight spreading diseases in rural areas, to limit fly breeding, to control rats and pests, and more. Citing these concerns as threats to local and international communities, the League conceptualized agricultural peripheries as a rural frontier from which humanity could better protect itself, using various means of sanitary engineering, special medical services, and political awareness.

This chapter tracks two main events that took up much of the League’s attention. First, it assembled the European Conference on Rural Hygiene (1931) and, later, parallel to its main agenda, the Intergovernmental Conference of Far Eastern Countries on Rural Hygiene, held at Bandoeng, Java in August 1937.

Chapter 4 discusses the evolution of the urban space of Jeddah in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century on the basis of maps, photographs, and documents. It shows the impact of the Ottoman modernisation efforts regarding the urban fabric. Thus, the economic lifelines of the city, such as the ports and markets, were regularly cleaned and expanded. New buildings also reflected the increase of the state functions of administration and health. The latter issue was given particular attention in the light of concerns over epidemics, most notably cholera. Another major and related concern was the provision of sufficient and clean drinking water. Urban growth is also seen in the evolution and growth of suburbs which were closely linked to the city.

Chapter six investigates the economic bases of Jeddah, trade and pilgrimage. A brief overview of major trends in trade and transport is followed by a more detailed discussion of the merchants of Jeddah and their internal organisation. The political role of the merchants and their relation to the respective ruling powers forms another topic. The chapter then turns to the pilgrimage, starting by investigating the pilgrims’ guides and the way in which they organised reception, accommodation and transport for pilgrims. Given the attempts of Western powers to limit what were perceived health and political threats emanating from the pilgrimage, the ways in which such organisation played out locally through the consulates is touched upon, notably in as far it affected local water and health provision. Finally, the chapter turns to the Bedouin, a population usually residing outside of the city walls but indispensable to trade and pilgrimage and constituting a vital link between the city, its suburbs and surroundings.