A Snail’s Tale: Bilharzia and Medico-Environmental Transformations in Late Ottoman and British-Occupied Iraq

The study of bilharzia (schistosomiasis) in modern Iraq offers a granular perspective for examining the entanglements of scientific knowledge, ecological transformation, and colonial governance. As Iraq transitioned from Ottoman to British rule, the colonial imperative to reshape the hydraulic landscape, through irrigation schemes and water management projects, unwittingly facilitated the proliferation of the parasitic disease, embedding it within the region’s agricultural and socio-economic systems (Dolbee, 2023). This paper interrogates the scientific, bureaucratic, and environmental rationales that informed the recognition of bilharzia as a public health crisis and the attempted interventions to mitigate it. This paper draws upon the research of Iraqi parasitologists whose research emerged within the symbiosis of colonial medical frameworks, local ecological knowledge, and the movement of intermediary hosts, freshwater snails, across the Tigris-Euphrates riverine systems.

At once molecular, imperial and colonial, the history of bilharzia in late Ottoman and British Occupied Iraq demands a reexamination of disease as an intimate physiological affliction and an instrument of bodily discipline and landscape organization. Timothy Mitchell’s Rule of Experts (2002), drawing from Subaltern Studies (Ranajit Guha, 1983; Partha Chatterjee, 1993; and Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2000), provides a critical framework for understanding how colonial technocratic interventions, ostensibly aimed at eradicating disease, reinforced new regimes of authority and control, transforming nature into an object of governance. Like the peasant and the labourer, the freshwater snail is made to disappear in the logic of expertise, its agency diluted by scientific knowledge arbiters and infrastructural ambitions. Through this lens, the paper contributes to broader historiographies of medicine, environmental transformation, and non-human agency in the modern Middle East, illustrating how the tale of two snails, Biomphalaria and Bulinus Truncatus, unveils the history of disease control efforts and their entanglement with the political and material forces that shaped the history of modern Iraq.