The Last Great Plague of Istanbul, 1812: An Overture to Biopolitics in the Ottoman Empire.

Abstract

Starting in 1812, a plague epidemic killed a third of the population in Istanbul and a third of the population of Izmir. It lasted at least until 1819 and killed some 500,000 people across the Balkans and the eastern and southern coasts of the Mediterranean, including Malta, Algiers, and Bucharest. Historians have neither examined what this epidemic meant for life in the Empire's capital, nor spelt out what it meant for the Empire's future. In fact, the magnitude of the epidemic has been largely missed in the few descriptive studies that exist, possibly due to the silence of Ottoman state archives on the topic of plague. Plague epidemics had until then been a common occurrence, but the extent of this outbreak made it among the deadliest in the capital's history. It also made Istanbul stand out in contrast to European cities, few of which had experienced major plague epidemics for generations. It furthermore sparked a flurry of Ottoman medical writings, including how to deal with epidemics. These writings, the increased social position of medical doctors in Ottoman politics, and the immediate experience of the epidemic itself are important for understanding how the Ottomans dealt with the cholera epidemic of 1831 and as a context for the introduction of quarantine in 1838. Beyond that, the epidemic came right before one of the most turbulent decades of the Empire, in which it witnessed the Greek revolt (1821) and abolition of Janissaries (1826), culminating in the brutal restoration of political power to the palace and the initiation of modernising structural reforms. The 1812 epidemic holds a key to understanding Ottoman death and reproduction in the nineteenth century.