Contagion, Controversy, and British Mediterranean Power

The question of whether anticontagionism truly came to dominate elite British medical and political opinion by the mid-nineteenth century has seen a surprisingly extensive historiography. In this paper, I move beyond the debate over whether anticontagionists or contagionists held the upper hand at a given time, and argue that the British government responded to elements of both ideologies. The first effect of this synthesis was to encourage the state to accept an ever-greater sense of responsibility for its citizens’ medical welfare. Second, partisans on both sides of the contagion debates favored arguments that pushed for international coordination on sanitary measures; if the skeptical traveller Charles Meryon compared quarantine to passports and said both were abominable restrictions on free movement across borders, the chief anxiety of the contagionist doctor Augustus Bozzi Granville was that a diminution of British quarantine would isolate Britain from European norms by causing it to be considered an “infected country.”

Ostensibly liberal Britannia has been described as a reluctant quarantining power. I will argue, however, that both of the impulses described above (towards greater state involvement in sanitary matters and towards international sanitary cooperation), meant that British officials—from colonial administrators, to consuls, to merchants serving on foreign boards of health—fully immersed themselves in the operation of Mediterranean quarantine. My broad aim is to demonstrate that the contagion debate, the practice of quarantine, and the nature of British networks in the Mediterranean cannot be considered in isolation.