Quarantine and Trade: The Case of Beirut, 1831-1840

In 1834 Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman Pasha of Egypt and nineteenth-century modernizer, ordered that all seagoing vessels bound for Syria call at Beirut for quarantine inspection at the lazaretto he had established with the help of the European consuls. This research note argues that quarantine was not merely a sanitary measure but also a means for Egyptian and European trading partners to control trade routes. It was most notably a spatial marker that regimented the social geography of the eastern Mediterranean in accordance with the emerging economic rationality of free trade. Beirut's transformation from a provincial town to a major port city and its emergence as a gateway to Syria marked a shift from a loose network of trade centred on the main commercial and pilgrimage routes of the hinterland to a littoral economy increasingly oriented towards Europe. The note problematizes traditional Marxist approaches, arguing that capitalist expansion and state-sponsored modernization fall short of explaining how a highly flexible merchant class was able to adapt to changing trade patterns. These men used their positions as intermediaries between the European and Syrian markets to latch onto the benefits of free trade while at the same time developing a set of practices that lasted well into the second half of the twentieth century.