Plagues, Quaratines and Geopolitics in the Ottoman Empire
David W. Tschanz
Birsen Bulmuş
2012, Edinburgh UP, 978-0-74864-659-3, £70 hb.
Despite its somewhat ponderous title, this study is an exceptionally readable work that explains how, from the 1400s, internal and external forces drove Ottoman public health. Bulmuş exposes the complexity of how public health policy was made through the interactions of variously allied and opposing interests—factors that still pervade decision-making in the field today. Religious officials in the empire relied on Qur‘anic passages, while physicians relied on a mix of scholarship, beliefs and empirical facts; business leaders opposed measures that would hurt their bottom lines; and politicians tried not to offend anyone, while their interference was often resented by local citizens. In the end it was the sultan who had the final say, initiating reforms that by the early 19th century included sewage disposal, clean-water systems, quarantine of immigrants and better building codes. A comprehensive bibliography provides a wealth of further reading.
You may also be interested in...
The Alhambra at the Crossroads of History: Eastern and Western Visions in the Long Nineteenth Century.
The Alhambra at the Crossroads of History shows how the 13th-century Andalusi palace complex in Granada, modern Spain, generates often conflicting meanings at the same time—meanings actively constructed and sometimes misread. Edhem Eldem, an Istanbul-based history professor, traces its role in shaping social and cultural identities across imperial Europe, Arab North Africa and Ottoman Türkiye from the 18th to the early 20th centuries.
Memoir Paints World’s Biggest Game as Great Connector—Our Book Review
Tim Bascom transforms a lifetime of playing football across five continents into a meditation on belonging, arguing that the game’s great gift is not the goals but the wordless understanding it creates among people.