Governing epidemics: Ottoman rule in Baghdad, 1840-1880

Thesis

Drawing on Ottoman and British archival sources, as well as underexplored primary materials –  including medical journals, provincial newspapers and outbreak investigation reports – this thesis examines the sanitary administration of Ottoman Baghdad and the governance of epidemics in the province between 1840-1880. It argues that during the Tanzimat, which is historiographically recognized as a period of Ottoman reform and modernization, quarantine administration constituted one of the earliest forms of Ottoman bureaucratic expansion in nineteenth-century Baghdad. Distinguishing between institutional medicine and the governance of epidemics, the thesis shows that the latter carried priority for the Ottoman state, which established a sanitary bureaucracy and infrastructure in the province as early as the 1840s.

A microhistorical lens on Khanaqin, a town on the Ottoman-Iranian border, demonstrates that quarantines in this early period served as instruments of sovereignty, security and customs control, despite persistent financial and security challenges. Adopting a transimperial approach, the thesis argues that the sanitary bureaucracy of the province constituted a space of connection, collaboration and competition among the Ottoman, British and Qajar empires. British, European and Ottoman physicians and administrators operated within a bureaucracy that exhibited institutional continuity throughout the Tanzimat and underpinned Ottoman claims to sanitary modernity in the global order that increasingly rested on notions of scientific objectivity, truth and trust.

Closely tied to the imperial centre, this bureaucracy employed epidemiological methods physician dispatches, outbreak investigations and statistical studies – that fed transimperial networks of medical knowledge. The thesis therefore situates the Ottoman Empire as a central actor in the history of modern epidemiology. Due to frequent outbreaks of cholera, as well as being the only urban centre after the 1850s where plague could be observed in the Ottoman Empire, it argues that Baghdad was one of the most important laboratories for epidemiological knowledge in the nineteenth-century Middle East. Combining historical sources with contemporary medical insights, the thesis shows that in the 1870s, Ottoman state expansion resulted in the emergence of plague in the mid-Euphrates with significant consequences for settlement, agriculture and inter-imperial relations.

Authors: Altinay, H

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-vg9d96n4x
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: plague; public health; Baghdad; quarantine; Ottoman Empire; Tanzimat; cholera; epidemics
• Subjects: Quarantine; Baghdad (Iraq)--History; Plague--History; History; Turkey--History--Ottoman Empire, 1288-1918