International Sanitary Conferences from the Ottoman perspective (1851–1938)

The backdrop to the epidemics of the nineteenth century was the Industrial Revolution with the rapid increase of the urban population, unsanitary settlements in the vicinity of factories, long working hours and deterioration of living conditions for workers, malnutrition and the failure of nation-states to meet these challenges. The acceleration of transport due to the invention of steamships (1810) and the railway (1830) and the extension of international trade and pilgrimage via the Suez Channel (1869), as well as huge waves of migration from Europe to America led to the outbreak of the contagious diseases. Plague followed by other contagious diseases like cholera, typhus and tuberculosis were also exposed to Ottoman Land from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. In the first part of this era initiating the quarantine measures in Ottoman World was highly grueling because of protestations by the ulema (religious clergy) to whom diseases were the scourge of God on his unruly subjects. However with the pressure of the European powers, both quarantines and the other necessities enforced by them had been adminis-