ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Science diplomacy at the dawn of global public health: the Conseil Sanitaire Maritime et Quarantinaire (CSMQ) in Alexandria

• In Event: Science Diplomacy: Cooperation, Competition and Crisis 1

English Abstract

My paper will deal with one of the earliest institutions that involved scientific cooperation and diplomacy among empires and European powers: the Conseil Sanitaire Maritime et Quarantinaire (CSMQ) in Alexandria. Founded in 1831, with a twin institution in Constantinople. In the 1880s, the CSMQ became increasingly relevant: within the CSMQ, European powers and the Ottoman Empire regulated the public health measures to be implemented in the Suez Canal, in order to stave off cholera and plague epidemics and protect European population and commercial interest. In the context of the International Health Conventions, in the decades between XIX and XX century, the CSMQ played a pivotal role in the medical policing of Egypt and the Arab Peninsula, especially in regard to the annual Hadji that gathered thousands of pilgrims from the Ottoman Empire, India and South East Asia. The CSMQ was thus central in exporting the Pasteurian revolution and in creating a de facto colonial system within the Ottoman Empire. Science diplomacy – on the basis of the new Pasteurian public health – was thus at work in trading money, power and security among European powers and the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, diplomatic efforts mediated by medical sciences were deployed in order to balance intra-European interests. By using Italian diplomatic Archives, I will address how science became a key instrument in negotiating norms and rules among nations and Empires, affecting the circulation of people and goods. Competition and cooperation among nations surfaced in the search for the human and/or bacteriological culprit of epidemics, in securing jobs for European nationals as public health officers, or in disputes about the value of quarantine in protecting from diseases. The CSMQ was thus a diplomatic space were science and power interacted, creating temporary and moving alliances between knowledge and politics.

Author

• Mauro Capocci, University of Pisa