Pandemics and the politics of difference: rewriting the history of internationalism through nineteenth-century cholera

Valeska Huber

doi:10.1017/s1740022820000236

Abstract

AbstractThis article revisits the origins of internationalism in the field of health and shows how the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century, much like the current coronavirus crisis, brought global differences such as social inequalities, political hierarchies, and scientific conflicts to the fore. Beyond drawing parallels between the cholera epidemics and the current crisis, the article argues for combining imperial and social histories in order to write richer and more grounded histories of internationalism. It explores this historiographical and methodological challenge by analysing the boardrooms of the international sanitary conferences, Middle Eastern quarantine stations catering for Mecca pilgrims, and ocean steamships aiming to move without delay during a worldwide health crisis.

Highlights

Cholera is a subject which concerns most immediately, our personal and national interests, but, it may be said without exaggeration, it concerns the whole human race.1The nineteenth-century cholera epidemics reaching Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas in different eruptions between the 1820s and the 1890s coincided with the bacteriological revolution and the popularization of knowledge about the vibrio cholerae microbe causing the disease.2 At the same time, cholera became linked to another ‘revolution’: in the last third of the nineteenth century, new means of transport and communication such as the steamship and the railwayDownloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core
This article revisits the origins of internationalism in the field of health and shows how the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century, much like the current coronavirus crisis, brought global differences such as social inequalities, political hierarchies, and scientific conflicts to the fore
396 Valeska Huber international measures taken against the cholera epidemics by visiting the boardrooms of the international sanitary conferences, the quarantine stations of the Red Sea administered by international boards and councils, and the steamships trying to pass unhindered between Asia and Europe

Summary

Introduction

Cholera is a subject which concerns most immediately, our personal and national interests, but, it may be said without exaggeration, it concerns the whole human race.1The nineteenth-century cholera epidemics reaching Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas in different eruptions between the 1820s and the 1890s coincided with the bacteriological revolution and the popularization of knowledge about the vibrio cholerae microbe causing the disease.2 At the same time, cholera became linked to another ‘revolution’: in the last third of the nineteenth century, new means of transport and communication such as the steamship and the railway. Abstract This article revisits the origins of internationalism in the field of health and shows how the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century, much like the current coronavirus crisis, brought global differences such as social inequalities, political hierarchies, and scientific conflicts to the fore.

Results

Conclusion