The Gulf and the extensive frontier region that lay between the Ottoman Empire and the successive Persian states that neighbored it were sites of immense human mobility and ecological diversity. These vast terrains were not only a crossroads of lucrative trade routes that attracted merchants from all over the world;Footnote 1 they were also important transit points for Muslim pilgrimage caravans headed to the Hijaz and the Shiʿi shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala.Footnote 2 Geographically, the region is home to the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, their tributaries, and the marshes into which they flow, as the twin rivers join to form the Shatt al-ʿArab, which discharges into the Gulf.Footnote 3 At various points in time, the movement of so many people, as well as their goods, ideas, and beliefs, carried the potential to create geopolitical complications for the Ottoman Empire and other states vying for influence in the region, especially when competing economic interests and rival claims to spiritual legitimacy came into play.Footnote 4 Moreover, the region's unique ecological challenges often threatened to unravel the stability of Ottoman rule, especially during times of scarcity and state–tribal conflicts featuring ill-conceived tactics of hydraulic warfare.Footnote 5 The combination of these factors also played a role in making the region particularly susceptible to epidemics, whether these were caused by geographically specific reasons or the regular movement of goods and people across vast distances. And by the 19th century, when the consequences of such epidemics were exacerbated both by the increased speed of human mobility and the region's fragile hydraulic infrastructure, this reality incentivized the Ottoman state's increased intervention in the matter of disease prevention, often building on previous efforts and shaping Ottoman rule and understandings of sanitation in the Iraqi provinces and surrounding Gulf region in significant and previously unexplored ways.
Typically, the Ottoman Empire's efforts to assert itself along its landed frontier shared with the Qajar state and the Gulf are framed in terms of a series of geopolitical struggles that emerged over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries. There is, of course, good reason for this. The delineation of the Ottoman–Qajar frontier into a fixed boundary, for instance, began, in part, as a British- and Russian-backed effort in the 1840s to prevent further Ottoman–Qajar territorial disputes that proved harmful to British and Russian interests.Footnote 6 Moreover, by the 1860s, after centuries without any meaningful political involvement in the Gulf, the Ottomans began to increase their naval presence in the region, launching a campaign in 1871 to occupy portions of Eastern Arabia in an effort to undermine British influence and unlock the region's agricultural potential for imperial revenue raising.Footnote 7 Additionally, during the opening decade of 20th century, the Ottomans were unable to resist the urge to occupy portions of northwestern Iran by appealing to the Kurdish inhabitants’ Sunni identity and reviving claims that the region was actually Ottoman territory.Footnote 8 And yet, though these developments were undeniably important and offer examples of the Ottoman Empire's willingness to experiment with new forms of empire building along its peripheries,Footnote 9 they are only part of an intricate story involving Ottoman state-building and expansionist efforts in the Iraqi provinces and the Gulf during the late Ottoman period.
Equally important for understanding this process is the broader epidemiological context in which it unfolded—a context embodied by the cholera and plague pandemics of the 19th and early 20th centuries and one whose implications for the study of late Ottoman history have only been thoroughly examined in other regions of the Ottoman Empire,Footnote 10 a few noteworthy exceptions notwithstanding.Footnote 11 As this article demonstrates, the severity of these pandemics—a severity brought about, in large part, by a combination of ecological challenges and technological advances that greatly increased the speed of human mobility—made Ottoman disease-prevention efforts an integral component of Ottoman state-building and expansionist efforts in Iraq and the Gulf during the 19th and early 20th centuries. At various points during this period, the suspicion that pilgrims, merchants, and other passers-by from Qajar Iran and British India were the unwitting importers of cholera and plague into the Ottoman Empire not only informed Ottoman efforts to control the movement of people through the use of quarantines; it also led the Ottoman state to coordinate its efforts to direct international politics in the matter of disease prevention. Significantly, these very developments also gave rise to concerted Ottoman efforts to understand the relationship between ecology and epidemic diseases in the Iraqi provinces in geographically specific ways, especially in the face of repeated outbreaks of cholera and, at times, malaria—a development that might be better understood as the Ottoman sate's attempt to make the region and its susceptibility to epidemics “legible,” to borrow James C. Scott's influential term.Footnote 12 Although the Ottomans may not have always succeeded in their attempts to control the movement of people, convince European powers of the efficacy of their sanitary policies, or conquer the microbes responsible for the several epidemics that occurred in the empire's Iraqi provinces, “unfulfilled goals and unfinished plans,” as Mostafa Minawi reminds us in a different though applicable context, can be just as revealing as a focus on “final outcomes.”Footnote 13 By turning our attention to Ottoman disease-prevention efforts in the Iraqi provinces and the Gulf, we are able not only to move beyond a framework that privileges geopolitical motives for explaining Ottoman state building and expansion in the empire's eastern and southernmost peripheries, but also to appreciate just how important these regions themselves were to the development of Ottoman conceptions of public health during the late Ottoman period.
THE ORIGINS OF A CRISIS: CHOLERA AND THE PERSISTENCE OF PLAGUE
Epidemics, whether of plague or otherwise, were recurring features of life in the Ottoman Empire even before the19th century.Footnote 14 The eastern frontier regions of the empire were not immune to this reality. Following the Ottoman conquest of Baghdad and Basra during the 16th century, for example, a new channel for plague to flow between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf was opened, a development that appears to have contributed to plague outbreaks in Basra and Baghdad, respectively, as early as 1578 and 1596.Footnote 15 Visitations of plague were frequent enough that, in his history of Baghdad, the Mosuli chronicler Yasin al-ʿUmari (1774–1820) recorded no less than three major outbreaks in the city during the period of Ottoman rule before the 19th century.Footnote 16 Moreover, in addition to plague, malarial fevers associated with severe flooding, especially near Basra, were regularly reported by Europeans who traveled through Iraq before the 19th century,Footnote 17 adding yet another layer of complexity to the region's disease profile.
The arrival of cholera to the Gulf further complicated this picture. Originating in India in 1817, the first cholera pandemic, which lasted until 1824, manifested itself in various parts of the world due to the spread of European colonial and military power and the frequency and increased speed of human mobility in the early 19th century.Footnote 18 By 1821, these factors helped bring cholera to the Gulf, where East India Company officials watched in horror as the disease ravaged places such as Bahrain, Qeshm near the Strait of Hormuz, and Bushire.Footnote 19 By the time cholera reached Basra later that year, its appearance caused such alarm that several locals reportedly fled to the surrounding desert regions.Footnote 20 Flight, of course, was not an uncommon response for Ottoman subjects in such situations.Footnote 21 After all, the disease's effects during this outbreak were devastating: without specifically mentioning cholera by name, for example, the chronicler ʿUthman al-Basri noted that, in the summer of 1821, the people of Basra were severely afflicted by “a great epidemic and general misfortunate” (min wabaʾ ʿaẓīm wa-balāʾ ʿamīm) that caused an estimated 10,000 deaths in Basra and its surroundings.Footnote 22 For his part, the chronicler Resul Kerkuklü Efendi (d. 1826) estimated the death toll at Basra to have been upwards of 15,000,Footnote 23 describing cholera as being not only of Indian origin, but also “a strange, severe disease—its like unseen and its name unheard of” (misl i nadide ve ismi naşanide bir maraz-ı şedid-i acib ve a zar-ı canfiga r-ı garib).Footnote 24 Even the Scottish traveler James Fraser (1783–1856), who witnessed the cholera outbreak at Basra, would go on to claim that local Ottoman authorities “all fled without taking any precaution for preserving the internal peace of the city, or making a single attempt to check the progress of the distemper, still less to administer assistance or comfort to those afflicted by it.”Footnote 25
The severity of cholera and a general unfamiliarity with its method of transmission at this time may have given observers such as Fraser the mistaken impression that Ottoman authorities were not responding to the crisis in Basra. However, given what we know about not only the lengths to which the Ottoman state went to adopt regulations in response to epidemic diseases such as plague, but also the formation of an Ottoman system of health administration as early as the mid-16th century,Footnote 26 it is highly unlikely that Ottoman authorities would have avoided intervening in such a crisis. Moreover, as previous studies have shown, during the early 19th century, disease prevention at the provincial level was typically the responsibility of Ottoman governors.Footnote 27 In that regard, a letter to British Indian officials from the Ottoman governor of Baghdad, Davud Paşa, under whose authority Basra remained, appears to demonstrate Davud's desire to intervene in the cholera crisis at Basra, despite not knowing the best course of action.Footnote 28 Specifically, Davud explained that, because “the Almighty preserver of Mankind has entrusted to [him] the care and protection of his creatures,” he had become “anxious” over the people of Basra, many of whom perished on account of the “Cholera Morbus now prevailing throughout Hindoostan” following its appearance in the Gulf and Basra. In his letter, Davud would go on to request medical assistance from British Indian officials, for he had become aware that “English Physicians had discovered a remedy for this complaint,” which, as he had come to learn, “was conjectured” to have been “produced by the corruption of the air and water and intensity of heat.”Footnote 29 Davud's letter displays a willingness to intervene in the cholera crisis; but it also hints at uncertainty over how to address the problem of cholera—an uncertainty not altogether surprising when one considers that, up to this point, cholera had been a completely unfamiliar disease in Ottoman territory. Thus, though cholera eventually did reach Baghdad in 1821,Footnote 30 it is unlikely that it did so due to a lack of initiative on Davud's part. On the contrary, just as Davud's appeal for British medical assistance might reasonably be attributed to the “British prestige” that Stephen H. Longrigg claimed was “very marked” among Davud and his predecessors during the era of Georgian mamluk rule in Baghdad,Footnote 31 it is just as reasonable to assume that Davud simply felt more comfortable appealing to authorities in closer proximity to the center of crisis, rather than Ottoman authorities in the imperial capital of Istanbul,Footnote 32 a city that would not experience its first cholera outbreak until 1831, amid the second cholera pandemic (1829–51).Footnote 33
Meanwhile, the much more familiar sanitary threat of plague would continue to ravage parts of Iraq, a development likely associated with the final stages of the Second Plague Pandemic, which appears to have continued into the 19th century.Footnote 34 In 1828, for instance, reports that plague had appeared in the town of Baghdad and its surroundings led the East India Company's political agent at Basra to “suggest the propriety of subjecting the native shipping to quarantine of greater or less duration, there being unquestionably a more dangerous and less controulable [sic] source of contagion than ships under British Pass and Colour.”Footnote 35 Three years later, in 1831, during an Ottoman expedition to replace Davud Paşa as governor of Baghdad, plague appeared once again, causing the deaths of several of Davud's soldiers and supporters and scaring people from surrounding towns into fleeing in such numbers that the year's harvest went to waste.Footnote 36 The situation had scarcely improved by 1832, when famine, caused by a recent locust attack and peasant flight from the spread of plague, appeared in Baghdad and its surroundings.Footnote 37 In fact, the effects of plague were so devastating that the French consul at Baghdad reported that the daily death toll was upwards of two hundred people, shops were left deserted, and commerce was at a complete standstill.Footnote 38
In sum, although the Ottoman Empire's Iraqi provinces had a long and complicated history of dealing with epidemics, their disease profile was significantly altered with the appearance of cholera in the 1820s. Moreover, the persistence of plague in the region was a harsh reminder of the disease's disruptive potential. In view of this potential, British officials were ready to subject Ottoman subjects to quarantines, as evidenced by the example of plague's appearance in Baghdad in 1828. The Ottomans, as it turned out, were prepared to use quarantines in much the same way, though by the time they decided to do so, Britain—the European state with the most immediate interests in Iraq and the Gulf—was not so willing to support this move.
LEVELING BLAME: DEBATING QUARANTINE ON A GLOBAL STAGE
The Ottoman Empire's adoption of quarantines in 1838 came at a critical juncture for the empire: it was facing not only sanitary threats such as cholera and plague,Footnote 39 but also an economic threat in the form of the influx of cheap European textiles following the abolition of state monopolies and introduction of low tariffs as a result of the Anglo-Turkish Convention (1838).Footnote 40 For Ottoman reformers, quarantines, which could be used both to keep diseases at bay and to circumvent existing free trade agreements, seemed to offer a potential solution to this two-pronged threat.Footnote 41 However, recognizing the harm that Ottoman quarantines could pose to European commercial interests, European states (and Britain in particular) quickly moved to internationalize the Ottoman Empire's quarantine operations in what became known as the Constantinople Superior Health Council.Footnote 42 For the remainder of the 19th century, European states would use their influence over this international oversight body to question the efficacy of Ottoman quarantines and urge the Ottomans to devote their efforts to improving the quality of health within the empire through a series of sanitary reforms.Footnote 43 Nevertheless, starting in the 1830s the Ottoman Empire expanded its quarantine operations empire-wide.Footnote 44 By the time these developments began shaping Ottoman quarantine operations in Basra in 1849, the British consul at Baghdad wrote a panicked critique to the British ambassador in Istanbul, arguing that existing Ottoman quarantine regulations were “singularly ill adapted to the Indian seas,” could not be effectively enforced at many Gulf ports, “would most seriously impede commerce,” and appeared unnecessary because “plague is unknown in the India Seas, except when it may happen to be brought down from the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea.”Footnote 45 The Ottomans, as we shall now see, viewed things very differently.
More than anything else, it was repeated outbreaks of cholera, rather than plague, in the empire's Iraqi provinces that accounted for the Ottoman Empire's initial use of quarantines along its landed frontier shared with the Qajar state and, later, in the Gulf. Informing this decision was the Ottoman state's perception that Qajar and British subjects were responsible for importing cholera into the empire's Iraqi provinces. For example, during the second cholera pandemic (1829–51) alone, the Iraqi provinces experienced cholera outbreaks in 1846,Footnote 46 1847,Footnote 47 and 1851,Footnote 48 making the task of identifying cholera's source of origin and method of transmission of critical importance. In that regard, the Ottomans appear to have placed their initial suspicions on Qajar subjects, enforcing quarantine regulations in the Qajar town of Kermanshah in 1846 after the appearance of cholera in Iran.Footnote 49 By 1848, when cholera reappeared in Iran, the Ottoman government took steps to establish a vast network of quarantine stations along the Ottoman–Qajar border.Footnote 50 That year, the Ottoman sultan even issued a decree announcing the establishment of this network on account of there being “presently no quarantine in the environs of Iraq, despite its numerous benefits being well-known and great attention and care having been taken toward implementing sanitary measures in accordance to established ordinances in every region of my well-protected domains” (menafi-i adidesi meşhud ve müsbet olan tahaffuz usulunun memalik-i mahrusamın her tarafında nizamat-ı mukarreresi üzere icrasına dikkat ve itina olunmakta ise de havali-i Irakiye'de elyevm karantina olmadığından).Footnote 51 By 1851, when delegates from several European states and the Ottoman Empire convened in Paris for the inaugural international sanitary conference, which was focused on the standardization of quarantine measures in Europe and the Ottoman Empire,Footnote 52 the Ottomans took the opportunity to make the case for establishing a network of quarantines that would extend from the shores of the Black Sea all the way down to Basra at the head of the Gulf.Footnote 53 A certain Dr. Bartoletti, who was a member of the Ottoman delegation, argued that this network of quarantines could be used to inspect the large Shiʿi pilgrimage caravans that entered Ottoman territory through the emerging Ottoman–Qajar land border. He would go on to argue that the Ottomans could expand their quarantine operations into the Red Sea for the purposes of inspecting individuals arriving from British India, which he labeled as “the principal home and undeniable source of the scourge,” based on his suspicion that it was British Indian Muslims who were importing cholera into Ottoman territory through the Red Sea.Footnote 54
Armed with such suspicions against Qajar and British Indian subjects, the Ottoman Empire began expanding its quarantine operations along the Ottoman–Qajar land border and into the Gulf. After all, given that the Iraqi provinces would continue to be ravaged by cholera outbreaks during the remainder of the 1850s, the global crisis of cholera had come too close to home for the Ottomans’ own comfort.Footnote 55 By 1860, in light of repeated outbreaks in the Iraqi provinces that were suspected to have been of Qajar or Indian origins, the Ottoman Empire pushed for stricter enforcement of quarantine measures along the Ottoman–Qajar border and in the Gulf.Footnote 56 Moreover, as fears that cholera would reach Europe increased after a particularly violent outbreak in the Hijaz in 1865, identifying the exact origins of cholera became a matter of great importance to European states, the Ottoman Empire, and the Qajar state alike, leading to the international sanitary conference of 1866, which conclusively identified British India as the chief exporter of cholera.Footnote 57
Although the role of the 1866 conference in reforming the Ottomans’ quarantine operations in the Red Sea region has correctly been noted,Footnote 58 it should also be recognized for having brought attention to the necessity of standardizing quarantine measures along the Ottoman–Qajar border and in the Gulf region. At the conference, the Ottoman delegation claimed that Shiʿi pilgrims traveling from Qajar territory to the Shiʿi shrine cities in Iraq were importing cholera into the Ottoman Empire—a claim that the Qajar delegation rejected by arguing that Indian pilgrims entering Ottoman territory through the Gulf were importing the disease.Footnote 59 The Qajar delegation also rejected a proposal that called on the Qajar government and the Imam of Muscat to cooperate in preventing cholera from entering the Gulf, arguing that the Qajar state could act on its own.Footnote 60 Moreover, when the Qajar delegation proposed the establishment of an international commission to oversee Ottoman quarantine operations along the emerging Ottoman–Qajar border, the Ottoman delegation rejected the proposal, pointing out that it possessed the necessary means to oversee its own quarantine operations in the region.Footnote 61 Significantly, the Ottoman delegation even proposed extending its quarantine operations further into the Gulf by inspecting vessels at Faw at the head of the Gulf.Footnote 62 For the Ottoman Empire, then, cholera's repeated appearance in the Iraqi provinces and the question of the efficacy of quarantines in general provided an opportunity for it not only to reaffirm sovereignty over emerging state borders but also to carve out a position for itself to achieve greater influence in Gulf affairs.
As the Ottoman Empire positioned itself to play a greater role in defining the emerging quarantine regime in the Gulf, it began targeting British Indian vessels much more aggressively. This was particularly the case during the fifth cholera pandemic (1881–95). In 1881, for example, when reports of a cholera outbreak in Bombay and Surat reached the Ottoman Empire, the Ottomans imposed a quarantine of ten days at Basra for all arrivals from India, despite British protests that the low number of cholera-related deaths did not justify the imposition of such strict quarantine measures.Footnote 63 By the start of the following year, British officials began strategizing how best to challenge Ottoman quarantine regulations, arguing that the Ottoman government's designation of Bombay as a “contaminated place” was unjustified under existing international sanitary agreements. That British merchants often viewed Ottoman quarantine fees as arbitrary and excessive only strengthened British efforts to challenge such quarantine measures in the Gulf.Footnote 64 These challenges proved to be in vain, however, when in 1883 the Ottoman government imposed a quarantine of twenty days at Basra after reports of a cholera outbreak in Bombay began circulating.Footnote 65 The Ottomans also enforced these strict quarantine measures despite the fact that individuals often arrived at Basra with clean bills of health as the threat of cholera in Bombay began to subside.Footnote 66 The Ottomans continued to target British Indian vessels repeatedly in 1884,Footnote 67 1887,Footnote 68 and 1888.Footnote 69
For Britain, whose interests in the Gulf had largely been focused on protecting British shipping from piracy and incorporating semiautonomous Arab leaders into its India-based empire,Footnote 70 Ottoman quarantines naturally appeared, at best, as an unexpected challenge to British influence and, at worst, as nothing more than thinly veiled attempts to increase Ottoman influence in the Gulf. Although this may have been the overall effect of the Ottomans’ use of quarantines in the Gulf, political motivations in themselves do not explain the Ottomans’ persistent quarantine policy during the 19th century. The broader epidemiological context in which these quarantine regulations emerged, both along the Ottoman–Qajar land border and in the Gulf, was equally important, as demonstrated by the Ottoman state's responses to specific sanitary threats that it perceived to be coming from abroad during the many cholera pandemics of the 19th century. As we shall soon see, however, quarantines were just one tool in the Ottoman state's arsenal against epidemic diseases in the empire's Iraqi provinces. Just as important would be emerging knowledge about the role of these provinces’ ecology in the spread of epidemic diseases.
BEYOND QUARANTINES: ECOLOGY AND SANITARY REFORM IN THE IRAQI PROVINCES
The Ottoman Empire's shift away from a strategy of disease prevention focused on containing the movement of people through quarantines and toward an “infectionist” or “anticontagionist” view that identified local and environmental conditions as the cause of plague and other epidemic diseases has been attributed to Ottoman health officials’ exposure to European medical advances of the 1890s.Footnote 71 Although the Ottomans’ exposure to such medical advances is undeniable, evidence from the empire's Iraqi provinces and elsewhere complicates this narrative and points to the importance of a “localized set of axes” on which Ottoman disease prevention efforts during the late 19th century actually unfolded.Footnote 72 Significantly, the Ottomans continued using quarantines while simultaneously adopting health measures informed by local ecological realities in the Iraqi provinces. The argument that the Ottoman Empire used quarantines for political reasons, such as undermining European commercial interests and controlling the movement of people, is an important one that rightly deters us from the rather simplistic conclusion that quarantines were not, in the final analysis, coercive tools emblematic of the emergence of the modern state.Footnote 73 However, just as European states viewed quarantines as a “wise precaution” during their earliest efforts to combat cholera and yellow fever at time when there was an absence of medical consensus,Footnote 74 it might also be helpful to conceptualize the Ottomans’ use of quarantines in much the same way: retaining them, while gradually phasing in new approaches based on their own observations and conclusions about Iraq's ecology and susceptibility to epidemic diseases.
The possible connection between ecology and epidemic diseases was one with which Ottoman officials were well aware.Footnote 75 In the empire's Iraqi provinces, even as early as the 1840s and 1850s, when the Ottomans began carrying out geographical surveys of its landed frontier shared with the Qajar state, Ottoman officials such as Mehmed Hurşid became aware of the possible connection between malarial fevers around Basra and the flooding of the lower Euphrates, a situation made worse by the river's faulty hydraulic infrastructure.Footnote 76 For his part, Midhat Paşa, the well-known governor of Baghdad, was also aware of the lower Euphrates’ susceptibility to malarial fevers.Footnote 77 Moreover, in 1889, during a particularly violent cholera outbreak in the lower Euphrates region, Ottoman health authorities noted that this latest outbreak of “Indian cholera” (Hindi kolera) was concentrated primarily in the marshes between the lower Euphrates and Tigris rivers,Footnote 78 thus incentivizing the Ottoman government to allocate state resources for the drainage of marshes (batakl ık) in the lower Euphrates region as a preventative measure against future outbreaks of cholera and “other diseases” (ilel ve emraz- ı saire).Footnote 79 In fact, the possibility that local environmental factors could be at fault during the 1889 outbreak was one that the Ottoman government took seriously: in the city of Baghdad itself, for example, the Ottoman government prohibited the killing of goats for meat and the drawing of water from the Tigris river to further check the spread of cholera, decisions that led the city's butchers and water carriers to go on strike.Footnote 80
The timing of these changing approaches to the problem of epidemic diseases in the empire's Iraqi provinces was also right. After all, regarding cholera, only six years prior, in 1883, the German bacteriologist Robert Koch had successfully confirmed the role of water in the disease's transmission.Footnote 81 Moreover, the Ottoman state appears to have been interested in gathering information about the relationship between ecology and disease in the Iraqi provinces. In 1883, for instance, a certain Dr. Şerifüddin bin Arif, who was a member of the Ottoman Medical Society (Cemiyet-i Tıbbiye-i Osmaniye), was appointed to the local health administration of Basra at the request of the Ottoman Ministries of Health and Interior.Footnote 82 During his two-year stay in Basra,Footnote 83 Arif made certain observations about Basra's ecology and outbreaks of disease, including a number of skin, nervous system, stomach, and intestinal illnesses, while maintaining that cholera was a disease of Indian origins.Footnote 84 He would later compile these observations in his final report, Basra Şehri Hakkında Topografya-ı Tıbbi (The Medical Topography of the City of Basra), published in 1891–92.Footnote 85 Similarly, among Ottoman salnames (almanacs) for the province of Basra, that from 1891–92 stands out for having an entire section on the topic of “Ekalim-i Harraya Hıfzısıhha” (Sanitation Pertaining to Hot Regions).Footnote 86 The section cites marshes and swamps as being “a cause of illness and detriment to health” (muris-i maraz ve muz ır ül-sıhhat) in flood-prone regions along famous rivers such as the Nile, Ganges, Mississippi, Euphrates, and Tigris.Footnote 87 It also notes that “some doctors” (hükemanın bazıları) have argued that putrefactions caused by stagnant waters can give rise to diseases such as plague, cholera, and yellow fever.Footnote 88
For Ottoman authorities, the imperative to make the Iraqi provinces’ disease profile more “legible” increased even more so during the 1890s as the threat of cholera continued. For example, in 1893, a particularly violent cholera epidemic occurred in the area between Basra and Baghdad.Footnote 89 By 1894, as the threat of cholera grew increasingly dire, the Ottoman government tasked Mehmed Şakir Bey, who was an Ottoman sanitary official at Haydarpaşa Hospital in Istanbul, to carry out a study on cholera and sanitary reform in the Iraqi provinces.Footnote 90 Given his role as the chief architect of many of the sanitary reforms introduced in the Hijaz during the 1890s, Mehmed Şakir was the ideal candidate for this job.Footnote 91 His final report, Hindistan K olerası ve Irak’ın Islahat-ı Sıhhiyesi (Indian Cholera and Sanitary Reform in Iraq), which was submitted in 1895, is notable for recommending several sanitary reforms in the Iraqi provinces, many of which called for improved water management. For the city of Basra proper, for example, Şakir noted how advances in the new field of bacteriology provided insights into the extent to which one of Basra's main supplies of drinking water, the ʿAshar River, was polluted by mud, vegetation, trash, and animal waste.Footnote 92 Like Ottoman officials before him, Şakir also noted how severe flooding and the presence of large marshes around Basra and along the lower Euphrates region contributed to the spread of fevers.Footnote 93 The city of Baghdad had similar problems: not only were the polluted waters of the Tigris entering the canals and wells from which the city's inhabitants obtained water, a problem that Şakir regarded as being “of careful attention from the viewpoint of contemporary medicine” (tababet-i ha zıra muvacehesinde fevkalhad mu‘tena addolunur),Footnote 94 the lack of a proper sewage system also put the city at risk of waterborne diseases.Footnote 95 And with respect to quarantines, Şakir even noted some of the difficulties of enforcing quarantine procedures in a place like Faw, where individuals could easily evade Ottoman health authorities by going to the nearby Qajar port city of Muhammara, which Şakir accused of having lax quarantine procedures.Footnote 96
Equipped with such knowledge, the Ottoman government was in better position to respond to future cholera outbreaks in the Iraqi provinces. While quarantines remained the Ottoman government's principal recourse during such outbreaks, other measures focused on disinfection and water management were also used. In 1899, for instance, the Ottoman government responded to an outbreak of cholera in Basra by prohibiting people from leaving the city, enforcing a quarantine period of ten days, burning contaminated materials, and carrying out disinfection procedures.Footnote 97 And in 1904, in response to the appearance of cholera in the vast area between the Iraqi provinces and Greater Syria, the Ottoman government tasked a certain Hamdi Aziz, who was affiliated with the Imperial College of Medicine, to head a special commission to investigate the problem of cholera in this region.Footnote 98 His final report, entitled Suriye Kıtʿasıyla Zor Sancağı ve Hıtta-ı İrakiye'de Kolera İstila’âtı, 1318 ila 1320 (The Ravages of Cholera in the Land of Syria, the Subprovince of Zor, and the Region of Iraq, 1318–1320), explained the most effective ways to implement quarantine procedures and establish sanitary cordons across large areas for the purposes of disinfection and made clear the Ottoman government's official position on the role of Qajar Iran and British India as exporters of cholera to Iraq during the 19th century.Footnote 99 At the same time, however, Aziz's report listed a number of recommendations for fighting cholera, some of which focused on water management, noting that all experts agreed that water was the principal means for the transmission of cholera microbes, making it that much more important to adopt measures that would ensure the availability of potable water.Footnote 100
In the end, the Ottomans used quarantines alongside emerging techniques for improving environmental management and local sanitary conditions. If the simultaneous use of these strategies appears contradictory today, it clearly did not to Ottoman health officials. Politics were surely at play in the Ottoman Empire's use of quarantines, as previous scholarship has demonstrated. However, also at play were legitimate sanitary threats, and at times, both considerations simultaneously informed the Ottoman Empire's use of quarantines. The Third Plague Pandemic, which was the last major global incident of plague, and the Ottoman response to it help demonstrate the extent to which this could be the case—a story to which we now turn.
PLAGUE AND THE OTTOMAN GULF
In 1897, at the height of what historians of medicine refer to as the Third Plague Pandemic, delegates from several European states, the United States, the Ottoman Empire, and the Qajar state in Iran convened in Venice for an international sanitary conference. Their goal was to develop sanitary measures that would halt the spread of plague, which, by 1894, had attained pandemic form once it reached Hong Kong from China's Yunnan Province, where signs of a new plague crisis first appeared in 1855.Footnote 101 By 1896, the disease had arrived in Bombay, where mortality rates, as well as the unsettling social, political, and economic effects associated with plague's appearance, quickly focused international efforts on the development of quarantine regulations and prophylactic measures that would help bring an end to the pandemic.Footnote 102 The fears informing such efforts were, of course, well-founded, given that recent technological advances in steamship and train travel greatly heightened the risk that pilgrims, merchants, and leisure travelers, among other passers-by, could spread diseases at tremendous speed.Footnote 103 For its part, the Ottoman Empire, which was tied to British India and the broader Indian Ocean world by extensive trade networks and pilgrimage routes, remained just as vulnerable to this latest sanitary threat as it had been to the many cholera pandemics that wreaked havoc in Ottoman territory and other parts of the world just a few decades earlier. Certainly aware of this reality, Koçoni Efendi, an Ottoman sanitary official and member of the Ottoman delegation to the Venice conference, communicated the Ottoman government's official position on the pandemic to his fellow delegates. Not only did he endorse the developing consensus regarding the pandemic's Chinese origins; he also emphasized that “the virulent and contagious character of the scourge are undeniable,” as evidenced by plague's effects in places such as Karachi and Gwadar now that it had arrived in British India. Koçoni Efendi also made clear that “the incessant commerce of our Persian Gulf ports with the contaminated countries exposes [the Ottoman Empire] to great and imminent dangers, and there is no doubt that the rigorous measures that will be taken by the Conference will have to protect Turkey [sic], as well as the neighboring countries [and] therefore Europe.”Footnote 104 Clearly, then, the Ottoman Empire, given its close proximity to the center of crisis, fashioned itself as a bulwark against the spread of plague to other parts of the world.
To be sure, the Ottomans did not wait for the convening of the Venice conference to respond to the threat of plague, which had appeared in Bombay in September 1896. By October of that year, Ottoman authorities had already informed the British consul at Baghdad that all vessels arriving from Bombay were to perform quarantine at Basra for a period of twenty days.Footnote 105 By December, the Ottoman government also extended quarantine measures to the neighboring Qajar state: all ships arriving at Basra from Gulf ports controlled by the Qajar government were to perform quarantine at Basra for a period of ten days. Moreover, because of the proximity of the Qajar port city of Muhammara to Basra, all individuals arriving from Muhammara, regardless of whether they arrived by land or river, were to be denied entry into the Ottoman Empire altogether.Footnote 106 By the end of 1896, the Ottoman government had also extended a mandatory ten-day quarantine at Basra on all ships arriving from Karachi on the basis of reports that plague had reached that city.Footnote 107
These immediate and stringent measures, which matched the panic created by plague's appearance in Bombay, would eventually give way to a more measured and focused Ottoman vision of how to prevent the spread of plague, a vison that the Ottoman Empire would articulate at the 1897 Venice conference. In the weeks leading up to the conference, memos from the office of the grand vizier explained the need for sending an Ottoman delegation to the conference as part of an effort “to prevent the spread into the [Ottoman Empire] and all of Europe of the plague which is in India,”Footnote 108 a clear indication of the Ottoman Empire's perception of itself as an important actor in the global effort to prevent the spread of plague. The Ottoman delegation went on to note that the sanitary measures that the Ottoman state had introduced in response to plague would be ineffective without the Qajars’ willingness to adopt similar measures in the Gulf.Footnote 109 Moreover, the Ottomans revived a previous proposal calling for the establishment of an Ottoman quarantine station at Faw, arguing that if plague-infested vessels were allowed to reach Basra, neighboring states and Russia would likely be contaminated by plague as well.Footnote 110 For its part, the British delegation, which since at least the 1880s had come to view any Ottoman attempt to establish a permanent presence at Faw as a threat to British commercial interests in the Gulf, argued that Faw was an unsuitable location for a quarantine station because it lacked potable water, firm soil, and sanitary conditions.Footnote 111 Unfortunately for the Ottomans’ efforts to define the Gulf's sanitary regime, the Venice conference's resulting convention made no mention of Faw, calling instead for a quarantine station “in the vicinity of Basra in a place to be determined.”Footnote 112 Nevertheless, despite this setback, the Ottoman delegation signed the 1897 convention ad referendum, meaning subject to the final approval of the Ottoman government itself.Footnote 113 Not until 1899 would the Ottoman Empire officially ratify the 1897 Venice convention.Footnote 114
However, in the intervening period, between the years 1897 and 1899, the Ottoman Empire took it upon itself to dictate sanitary policy in the Gulf on its own terms with little to no regard for British objections, suggesting an Ottoman effort to exercise greater influence in Gulf affairs. In April 1898, for example, British officials complained when a vessel from the Bombay and Persian Steam Navigation Company was detained at the quarantine station at Basra despite having arrived from Aden, which had been declared a “clean port,” and not having touched any Gulf ports on its way to Basra.Footnote 115 In another instance, British officials complained when quarantine officials at Basra carried out a sanitary inspection of a British vessel despite the vessel's surgeon having provided Ottoman authorities with a certificate detailing the number of individuals sick on board and the disease from which they were suffering.Footnote 116 In 1898, the Ottoman state increased its military presence near Basra in order to apprehend individuals from plague-infected locations who had evaded Ottoman quarantine measures by entering the Ottoman Empire overland through Kuwait.Footnote 117 In that same year, Ottoman officials also notified British officials that British Indian vessels with cases of plague or new casualties would be repelled from the port of Basra after landing their cargo.Footnote 118 And in 1899, Ottoman attempts to establish quarantine stations on the Arab coast of the Gulf were criticized by British officials.Footnote 119
As Frederick Anscombe rightly points out with respect to the Gulf, the Ottoman Empire was “the most important regional state in the pre-World War I period.”Footnote 120 The Ottomans’ ability to frustrate British interests in the Gulf during the initial years of the Third Plague Pandemic demonstrates the extent of that importance. Granted, international pressure in 1903 eventually forced the Ottoman Empire to abandon control of quarantine operations as far as the Strait of Hormuz and to begin cooperating instead with British-run quarantine stations in the Gulf.Footnote 121 Nevertheless, as late as 1911, Kasım İzzedin, an Ottoman health official in charge of overseeing Ottoman sanitary measures in the Gulf region, reflected on the spread of cholera and plague in the Gulf, noted the Ottoman Empire's vulnerability to these sanitary threats on account of its proximity to British India, and insisted on several reforms to the Ottoman Empire's existing sanitary regime in the Gulf, including the establishment of new Ottoman sanitation offices further into the Gulf in places such as Kuwait, Qatif, and Qatar.Footnote 122 To be sure, the previous decade had been one of intense geopolitical competition in the Gulf between France, Russia, Germany, Britain, and the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 123 But, given the history of epidemic diseases entering the Ottoman Empire through the Gulf during much of the 19th century, it is little wonder that the Ottoman state would continue to focus its efforts on defining the sanitary regime in the Gulf and exerting its influence in the region as it entered the 20th century. If anything, the geopolitical context only heightened the importance of achieving that task.
CONCLUSION
As this article has demonstrated, the cholera and plague pandemics of the 19th and early 20th centuries shaped Ottoman state-building and expansionist efforts in Iraq and the Gulf in significant ways. For Ottoman officials, these pandemics brought attention to the possible role of Qajar and British subjects in spreading cholera and plague, as well the relationship between Iraq's ecology and recurring outbreaks. These developments paved the way for the expansion of Ottoman health institutions, such as quarantines, and the emergence of new conceptions of public health in the region. Specifically, quarantines proved instrumental not only to the delineation of the Ottoman–Qajar border, but also to defining an emerging Ottoman role in shaping Gulf affairs. Moreover, the Ottomans’ use of quarantines and simultaneous efforts to develop sanitary policies informed by local ecological realities signal a localized and ad hoc approach to disease prevention that has been overlooked. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that environmental factors operating on global and regional scales were just as important as geopolitical factors in shaping Ottoman rule in Iraq and the Gulf during the late Ottoman period.
