1 Exploiting Cholera: Pandemics and Geopolitics during the Nineteenth Century. Reifying raw labour: identifying a reality through quarantine and precaution. Alexander L. Griffiths Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna ‘An epidemic has [broken] out in the bazaar, the disorder commencing with pain or uneasiness in different parts of the body, presently succeeded by giddiness of the head, sickness, vomiting, griping in the belly, and frequent stools. The countenance exhibits much anxiety, the body becomes emaciated, the pulse rapidly sinks, and the patient, if not speedily relieved with large doses of calomel, followed by one of opium, is carried off within four and twenty hours.’ 1 The pleasantries of cholera witnessed by Dr Tytler during the Bengal Epidemic on August 23 rd , 1817, fermented a global fear throughout the nineteenth century. 2 The epidemic was not contained within the “tropical” East yet dispersed across both the Pacific and the Atlantic. A recurring pandemic that, to date, has struck seven times. 3 Great efforts have been made to understand the pathogen and to fight the spread of infection and as knowledge improves, the death count resides. Much is owed to the ground-breaking work of John Snow who in 1854 deduced that cholera is transmitted through water and is not airborne, as previously believed. He recognised that dire sanitary conditions will allow the disease to fester and therefore induce concentrations of exaggerated outbreaks. 4 However, it was not until 1883, with the research of Robert Koch, that the causative agent of cholera was finally isolated. 5 As physiological knowledge increased, so did preventative and precautionary measures, both effective and ineffective measures, were put in place to restrict the virality of cholera. For the first time, modern public health surveillance was undertaken in an organised way and regulated by the International Sanitary Regulations (ISR). 6 The ISR Culminated in 1851 when 14 European nations held the world’s first Sanitary Conference, a predecessor of what is now recognised as the World Health Organisation. 7 Cholera, as Donato Gómez-Díaz rightly identifies, was more than just an illness during the nineteenth century as it was also a social and political pathogen. Following the esteemed work of Michel Foucault, biopolitics is a field that reappears throughout time and space. Health is a vehicle to disseminate and actualise political agendas; the diffusion of germs and subversive ideas go hand in hand. The cholera outbreaks were no exception. The contagion and anticontagion debate furrowed deep into British politics, running true to the division between the Whigs and Tories. 8 Health, which was now for the first-time public health, an exploitative platform to further political reforms or motifs. Yet, more interestingly, the ideology of health spilt not just into political rhetoric but into reality; cholera was very much a contagion which deeply impacted Being-in-the-World. For one, health became a determinate of status, especially after Snow’s findings, to be of ill -health and sickly was to be of lower social status, economically unable to lift oneself out of squalor. The ideological spillage further seeped into religious, and more specifically, moral realms, as “idleness”, “immorality” or “disruption” were regarded as causative agents. A useful bio-political tool when 1 Dr. Tytler, “MS. Proceeding of the Bengal Medical Board for 1817”,23 rd August 1817. Sourced C Macnamara, A history of Asiatic Cholera, London: Macmillan & Co., 1876. pp. 46 2 Jacob Steere-Williams, “cholera”, in Encyclopaedia of Pestilence, Pandemics, and Plagues: Volume 1, A-M, (ed.) Joseph P. Byrne, Westport: Greenwood Press, 2008. pp. 96 3 Ibid. 4 Roger I. Glass & Robert E. Black, “The Epidemiology of Cholera”, in Cholera, (eds.) Dhiman Barua & William B Greenough III, New York: Springer Science + Business Media, 1992. pp. 142 5 Kelley Lee, “The global dimensions of cholera”, in Global Change & Human Health, Vol. 2, No.1. 6-17. pp. 6 6 Ibid. pp. 7 7 Donato Gómez-Díaz, “Cholera: First Through Third Pandemics, 1816-1861”, in Encyclopaedia of Pestilence, Pandemics, and Plagues. pp. 104 8 Ibid.