The Intent and Application of the 1838 Ottoman Maritime Quarantine Reform

Scholars have frequently cast the 1838 Ottoman maritime quarantine reform as accomplished at the behest of Britain and France, the most influential European powers in the Eastern Mediterranean. This paper, by contrast, will emphasize Ottoman initiative and show that Ottoman officials often appropriated the system for their own purposes. Certainly, Western European concerns about the lack of an Ottoman policy against epidemic disease resulted in the original imposition of quarantine against ships coming from Ottoman domains. In part, the Ottoman reforms were designed as a response to such concerns, and also to the lingering threat of plague and new danger of cholera.

Nevertheless, maritime quarantine frequently had an economic function as well as a medical one. Indeed, Ottoman reformers saw the quarantine as an effective pretext for the state to control and tax imports and exports. This brought them into occasional conflict with the same European powers who ostensibly instigated Ottoman reforms. In particular, Hamdan Bin El-Merhum Osman Hoca (1773-1840), advocated for quarantine by arguing that it could protect the Empire's sovereignty by more efficiently regulating its trade. Hamdan’s insistence that the quarantine remain under Ottoman control would frustrate those foreign powers who sought to use outbreaks of disease in the Empire as a justification for greater influence in the region.

Once established, Ottoman quarantine faced substantial criticism from both French and British anticontagionists. These critics suggested that medical conditions could only improve with better local administration and that quarantine was ineffective. Though such anticontagionist figures are often cast within the European tradition as reformers and liberals, this paper will demonstrate that the Ottoman officials who opposed them in major conferences of the late nineteenth century were among the leading reformists in the Empire (including the seasoned diplomat Turhan Paşa and the renowned intellectual and quarantine official Ahmed Midhat).