Maritime Quarantine: The British Experience, c.1650-1900

Abstract

For centuries, quarantine was accepted across Europe as the only defence against the spread of plague. The disease, it was commonly held, was contagious: people and goods moving from infected locations were therefore detained until cleared to enter a port and nation unaffected. Booker's study of the ways in which this system operated under British law is comprehensive. He examines its economic, administrative and diplomatic aspects, starting with its earliest implementation in the sixteenth century and concluding with the repeal of all Quarantine Acts by Parliament in 1896. His 624 pages seem initially excessive and will deter the faint-hearted. As the complexities of the system are unravelled, however, readers may ask whether he could have done the topic justice in much less. Britain was spared a plague epidemic after the late seventeenth century. Nonetheless, experiences on the continent provided frequent reminders of the danger. Marseilles lost half of its 100,000 population to plague in 1720 with Toulon and neighbouring towns similarly devastated. More than 30,000 died at Messina in 1743. The disease claimed 80,000 lives in Moscow in 1771, and 4,572 just on the island of Malta in 1813. By the end of the eighteenth century, quarantine had to contend with a new health hazard. Fever killed 6,000 of Gibraltar's 16,000 inhabitants in 1804; in 1806 yellow fever in Spain was calculated to have claimed 100,000 in Cadiz alone. The threat was not just from the Mediterranean: trade with the Baltic, North America and the West Indies also carried risks. The rapid progress of cholera across Europe after 1829 made quarantine appear all the more essential. This proved to be a crucial test. True, yellow fever never entered Britain but the arrival of cholera at Sunderland in 1831 suggested to many observers that the system had failed.