Alex Chase-Levenson. The Yellow Flag: Quarantine and the British Mediterranean World, 1780–1860.

Abstract

It is commonly assumed that global public health was born in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was during this period when the world’s leading trading powers, meeting at a series of self-styled international sanitary conferences, agreed to abandon the crude quarantine practices first pioneered by Italian city-states in the fifteenth century and replace them with systems that were more discerning and precise—what Peter Baldwin has termed “neo-quarantinism.” Historians have shown how these new systems were practiced in all sorts of discriminatory ways, and much has been written about the global public health initiatives that blossomed in the twentieth century. But no account has fundamentally challenged this general trajectory of global-institutional development. This is the core contribution of Alex Chase-Levenson’s The Yellow Flag: Quarantine and the British Mediterranean World, 1780–1860, which excavates how, during the period roughly 1780 to 1840, the Mediterranean world witnessed the birth of a uniquely integrated system of quarantine designed to keep Western European nations safe from the danger of plague, which was still at large in the “Ottoman East.” It was a system that, in a way, modernized the premodern (30, 47). While it applied the indiscriminate quarantine principles of old, it was also characterized by the kind of coordination, rigor, and standardization we associate with bureaucratic modernity. Chase-Levenson calls it a system of “universal quarantine” for precisely this reason: quarantine was applied without exception to all ships hailing from the Middle East and North Africa, and to all passengers and cargo, according to widely shared norms of practice. In one flourish, he suggests it was “the largest transnational scheme for preventive medicine before the formation of the WHO” in 1948 (28).