| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Myron Echenberg. Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–1901. New York: New York University Press. 2007. Pp. xvi, 349. $48.00.
Bubonic plague began spreading from a long-standing endemic area of southwest China in the mid-nineteenth century. When the disease reached the south China coast in 1894, international sea traffic quickly carried it worldwide. MyronEchenberg presents a welcome synthesis of recent scholarship on what became the world's most recent plague pandemic.	1
Plague's diffusion has longbeen associated with sea transport, and Echenberg focuses his work around the experiences of ten port cities, on six continents, in the first decade of the pandemic: Hong Kong, Bombay, Alexandria, Porto (Portugal), Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Honolulu, San Francisco, Sydney, and Cape Town. He argues that the pandemic's interest derives in part from its coincidence with the emergence of new Western disease paradigms, and with the high tide of Western imperial power.	2
Despite both new laboratory-driven medical science and Western political and cultural presumption, traditional responses to epidemic menace remained very powerful in the early years of the pandemic. Responses to epidemics that long preceded the new microbiology—quarantines, isolation of the sick, cordons, destruction of "infected" property, broad-scale sanitation—maintained their hold to some extent in all the cities that Echenberg discusses. In some cases (such as Rio de Janeiro) a very heavy official hand applied those established remedies. The same governments showed more hesitation about adopting the new measures suggested by microbiology, such as rat eradication and the use of Waldemar Haffkine's plague vaccine. Yet even traditional official responses could result in dramatic reshaping of a city's social geography. In Rio de Janeiro the "dangerous classes" were effectively removed from some areas, while in Cape Town the epidemic accelerated the emerging policy of apartheid.	. . .

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