From quarantine against cholera in the 1830s Levant, the surveillance of ships calling port at Crete, the rise of pesticides in twentieth-century Egypt, to the use of penicillin in Cold War Iraq and cinematic productions of doctors in Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s 1950s Egypt, this panel looks at how social and political technologies of containment define and redefine the relationship between individuals and these technologies.

Although influenced by local geographies, the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries featured global patterns that shaped, codified and standardized the widespread perception of environmental, biological, and moral threats. Such threats propelled socio-political policies and galvanized technologies of fumigation and containment, such as DDT (Mitchell, 2002). Different technologies were mobilized to counter real or perceived threats while also having the unintended consequence of containing the human body. Policies of prescription, isolation, and protectionism emerged as responses to biomedical threats, shedding light on the complexities of socio-political, medico-legal, cultural, and environmental regulations that regulated the movement of human bodies. Simultaneously, policies of containment and confinement illuminated the inconsistencies inherent in these policies, which were in turn exacerbated by middle-class anxieties surrounding morality, demographic patterns, and contamination. The rhetoric of containment extends beyond individual bodies, exposing state fragilities intensified by porous boundaries and the risk of exposure to real or representational pests and pestilence.

Utilizing Greek and Levantine sources, the first paper looks at how nineteenth-century Ottoman merchants disembarked from Crete under a regime of quarantine. Instituted in the 1830s, this regime was also being tested in the Levant by the same Ottoman governor ruling the island, but received more resistance. Shifting to the twentieth century, the second paper details the threat posed by locusts to Egypt’s crops. As more ships transited via the Suez Canal, these ‘pests’ also transited in Egypt, telling a global tale of environmental hazard through the eyes of “harmless grasshoppers, (Dolbee, 2023).” Moving to 1940s Iraq, the third paper historicizes how penicillin mediated Cold War politics as Armenian companies entered the Iraqi market under British eyes while Iraqi doctors attempted to fashion an alternative to British-backed companies. Finally, the last paper looks at the legacy that physicians left in 1950s Egypt through an exploration of films that cataloged the shifting societal perception of medicine and doctors in the era of decolonization. In sum, these papers provide a new History of Science and Technology Studies by utilizing new media, archival, transregional and Mediterranean sources for the study of the ‘Global Middle East’ (Schayegh, 2017).