Cholera, Knowledge, and Shari‘a in the 19th-Century Mediterranean and the Levant

Cholera has been dealt with in the Mediterranean extensively as a disease that changed how port cities traded with each other for two thousand years (Barbieri, 2018). More recently, newer studies have scrutinized the role of quarantine across Europe, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century as a colonial technology of imperial surveillance and biopower that slowed down trade and subsequently receded in the face of sanitary reform (Opera, 2020; Mukharji 2012; Tagliaczzo, 2014; Maglen 2002; Low, 2020). In contrast, recent nineteenth-century legal histories have emphasized the use of quarantine as a site of local modernity; one that was not yet tied to British colonialism (Fahmy, 2018).

Adopting the global turn (Conrad, 2016) to histories of Science and Technology (Poskett, 2022), this paper returns to earlier claims surrounding quarantine as a biopolitical technology. Looking at an alternative archive of quarantine overseas away from mainland Egypt, it queries Mehmet Ali’s quarantine stations in Candia (Crete) and the Levant in the 1830s. Thus it connects these far-flung territories and writes them back into histories of the Mediterranean rather than those of the Middle East (Greene, 2010; Khuri-Makdisi, 2014).

In so doing it adopts a material and intellectual history of quarantine that explores the epistemological and archival politics of quarantine histories. By looking at how Ottoman-Egyptians buried their loved ones, and observed burial rites in these newly conquered territories, this paper presents a different history of cholera, one that was used to discipline and control newly conquered populations while disciplining them into submission.