Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901 (review)

Bubonic plague, often associated in the popular imagination with the fourteenth-century "Black Death," returned to the news in 2007 when news organizations reported the death of a capuchin monkey held at the Denver Zoo.¹ Journalistic accounts of the unfortunate primate's demise noted that bubonic plague frequently occurs in Colorado among prairie dogs, tree squirrels, and other wild animals. They did not, however, mention the fact that the permanent reservoirs of bubonic plague now found in the Rockies are the lingering legacy of a pandemic that encircled the globe at the end of the nineteenth century. The world-wide impact of that pandemic is the subject of this fine comparative history of bubonic plague.

This book focuses on the initial outbreak of the disease in ten diverse "plague ports" situated on five different continents between 1894 and 1901. These cities are paired roughly by geography but also by the date that plague first appeared: Hong Kong (1894) and Bombay/ Mumbai (1896), Alexandria (1899) and Porto (1899), Buenos Aires (1900) and Rio de Janeiro (1900), Honolulu (1899/1900) and San Francisco (1900/1901), and Sydney (1900) and Cape Town (1901). The history of plague in each of these seaports has already been written by others. Indeed, Echenberg relies heavily on the existing secondary literature to reconstruct the local history of the epidemic in each case. Nonetheless, his is the first monograph that attempts to move beyond national or regional boundaries to provide a history of the modern plague pandemic in transnational perspective.

As the author points out, turn-of-the-century plague was not only global in its effect; it also brought about similar reactions and responses in each of the cities that it touched. Echenberg's comparative approach, which stresses the commonality of experience during each epidemic— including the control measures established, the social and racial prejudices incited, the resistance attempted by subalterns, the achievements of local and international scientists in unraveling plague's epidemiological mysteries, and the creation of permanent plague reservoirs in such rural hinterlands as the Rocky Mountains—is thus a significant contribution to the history of the modern pandemic.

Although these comparative themes are threaded throughout each chapter and neatly summarized in the conclusion, the author misses an opportunity to highlight the intersections of power, culture, and science that connected these plague ports within a global web of late nineteenth-century imperialism and industrial capitalism. The commonality of experience in each city's encounter with bubonic plague was largely a product of the medicine of empire then being exported around the world by a transnational cadre of Western-trained scientific elites. Echenberg provides ample evidence of this process, but he fails to draw analytical conclusions about the interconnectivity of local responses to global plague.

The same investigators and public health officers—William Simpson, James Lowson, L. F. Barker, and others—followed the disease around the world as it made its circuit from one British (or, in the case of Honolulu, American) colonial port to another. Less peripatetic actors in cities not directly controlled by imperial powers invariably received their medical training at one or the other of the premier bacteriology institutes in Europe. Because the men in charge of managing the local epidemics shared certain assumptions about its origins and its epidemiology—that Asians and Africans, for example, were more susceptible to the infection than were Euro-Americans—they tended to utilize similar plague-control measures in each instance. The professional ties that linked the personnel involved and their shared scientific, medical, and political worldview—rooted in late nineteenth-century currents of thought—go a long way toward explaining why, for example, racially based cordon sanitaire were established in many of the cities where plague occurred. Echenberg addresses the theme of racial discrimination in each specific instance where it occurred, but he never pulls these disparate strands together to show the extent to which the globally circulating discourses of Social...