8 - Quarantine and Empire

Summary

Chapter 8 shows how British imperialism spread quarantine practice to new areas of the globe. We examine British responses to plague epidemics in Malta, Corfu, and India. I argue that British use of quarantine in these imperial contexts demonstrates how firmly inflected by Mediterranean practice the global response to epidemic disease had become, even as quarantine was implicated only in very specific contexts. Particular attention is paid to the way in which imperial medical practice in response to the plague (particularly in Northern India in the mid-nineteenth century) fused approaches from both the contagionists and the anticontagionists.