Events related to the historical plague in the eighteenth century have tended to be viewed from the standpoint of success. Western Europe declared victory over the threat of an epidemic that had bedeviled them since the mid -fourteenth century. Contemporaries understood the end of the illness's spread in Western European territories to mean that the pestilence had retreated to the East, which explained its presence in Russia and Poland. At the same time, there was a shift in relations with the Ottoman Empire, where the challenge of dealing with the epidemic remained. With the effective cessation of military conflicts, both sides began to express greater interest in the exchange of goods, knowledge and luxury items and in building a deeper appreciation and understanding of differences between their distinct cultures and religions. While the Russian tsarina Catherine II experienced the "plague" primarily as a result of warfare with the Ottomans and sought to counter it in the European fashion (quarantine, inclusion and exclusions), Western European travelers took a different view of the Ottoman and Levantine handling of the "plague." In those lands they traversed and traveled, they witnessed an approach to the epidemic that differed from the Western European methods with which they were familiar. This was not limited to the strikingly different concrete measures to prevent and control the spread of disease, but included alternate interpretations of these experiences against the backdrop of the cultural and religious assumptions held by the diverse populace. The observation and appreciation of these differences in their travelogues further contributed to the constitution of a Western European self. The perceived geographical shift of the epidemic and its effects, including the potential for conflict, to Europe's margins, which continued to be sites of both exchange and exclusion, and a newly emerged, distinctively Western European perspective on the threat of an epidemic that continued to exist beyond those margins effected a sort of deprovincializing of Europe, contributing conceptually to the imagination of a space that was self-contained and purged of an epidemic that had been brought firmly under control.
