EMPIRE, NATION, WW1,��AND THE ��1918 FLU PANDEMIC
EMPIRES COVERED MOST OF THE WORLD BEFORE 1950: 1800-1945 AGE OF EURO-AMERICAN IMPERIAL EXPANSION
�CHOLERA��THE FIRST GLOBAL PANDEMIC, 1817��
Meanwhile, the infection was transmitted to the Afghan and Nepalese soldiers fighting against British troops along India’s northern borders. Traversing the overland route, cholera arrived in Burma (Myanmar) and Thailand. Almost simultaneously, it was seaborne to Sumatra, Java, the Philippines, China, Japan, and the southeast Asian mainland.
British troops, arriving in Muscat (in Oman) in 1821 to put an end to the slave trade, brought cholera with them. From Muscat, it was carried by the slave traders along the eastern coast of Africa to Zanzibar. Basra, at the head of the Persian Gulf, was invaded in 1821. Shortly thereafter, it traveled upstream to Baghdad and also infected an invading Persian army. Syria, Anatolia, and the port of Astrakhan in southern Russia were also infected. An exceptionally severe winter in 1823-24 ensured that cholera did not spread beyond the Caspian Sea into Europe.
K. David Patterson, “Cholera Diffusion in Russia, 1823-1923,” Social Science and Medicine, 38, 9, 1994, 1171-1191, 1994. Elsevier Science Ltd. (PDF online)
The rapidity and virulence with which the disease struck entire populations took everyone by surprise. Subsequently, cholera became endemic in most of the Asian countries and continued to wreak havoc in many parts of Russia. This pandemic marked the first recorded spread of the disease outside India and affected hundreds of thousands of people. Those which followed were more widespread in their impact.
Steamship port city (British Empire) globalization
Steamship globalization
Empire and nation in India and the United States
The Influenza Pandemic of 1918
The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people.
It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351.
A very old story. See for example:
Zlata Blažina-Tomić author. Vesna Blažina author.
Montreal : McGill-Queen's University Press 2015
Reading: Chapter 5, “Control of Arrivals in Dubrovnik, 1500-1530.”
The Spanish influenza arrived in the United States at a time when new forms of mass transportation, mass media, mass consumption, and mass warfare had vastly expanded the public places in which communicable diseases could spread. Faced with a deadly “crowd” disease, public health authorities tried to implement social-distancing measures at an unprecedented level of intensity. Recent historical work suggests that the early and sustained imposition of gathering bans, school closures, and other social-distancing measures significantly reduced mortality rates during the 1918–1919 epidemics. This finding makes it all the more important to understand the sources of resistance to such measures, especially since social-distancing measures remain a vital tool in managing the current H1N1 influenza pandemic. To that end, this historical analysis revisits the public health lessons learned during the 1918–1919 pandemic and reflects on their relevance for the present.
METHODOLOGICAL NATIONALISM: HISTORY LESSONS FOR THE NATION
NOTE THE NAMING AND BORDER CROSSING “ARRIVAL” – FROM OUTSIDE
GOOD NEWS FROM HISTORIANS
National territory is an political enclosure, into which and inside of which territorial power regulates mobility, in many ways, e.g. with transport/communication infrastructure and law enforcement.
the American cities which experienced the highest number of deaths from the flu pandemic also tended to suffer the biggest hits to their economies (measured in terms of the decline of manufacturing output and employment). The fatality rate was highly dependent on public policies. The authors estimate that cities which imposed tougher-than-average restrictions suffered 560 deaths per 100,000 people, on average, compared with 730 per 100,000 elsewhere. They also found that governments which implemented stricter policies, such as banning public gatherings and shutting down churches and schools, fared better than those which pursued more lenient ones.
Policymakers battling covid-19 might not view the experience of the Spanish flu, even in places that fought it relatively well, to be something to aim to repeat. But economists tend to think that the aggressive policies in place to fight the covid-19 epidemic are desirable.
THE 1918 FLU PANDEMIC … FORGOTTEN PEOPLE, AND LESSONS FOR TODAY FROM MIKE DAVIS IN THE NATION
The 1918 ‘flu: India’s worst pandemic
The 20th century’s worst pandemic – Spanish Flu – erupted in March 1918 in Camp Funston (Kansas, U.S.) during the Great War. Much like Covid-19 it spread globally at an astonishing pace. Its Second Autumnal Wave took about 30 million lives in four months, half of those in India. It’s sheer virulence and high mortality makes this virus the correct analogy for Covid-19
Death arrived in many forms in 1918. India was laid low by famines made worse by First World War requisitions of food grains from the Subcontinent, endemic cholera, typhoid and small-pox outbreaks, miasmic fevers, and spasmodic reappearances of the 1896 plague. There was ferment on the political scene too, with Indian Muslim angst over Indian troops (many Muslim) fighting the Ottoman Caliph’s armies across West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean. Of the 1 million Indian soldiers who fought in this War, 53,486 lost their lives and 64,350 were wounded, fighting a war that was not theirs.
It was on this trail of death and despair that the Spanish Flu entered Bombay city aboard troop ships in June 1918. Its rapid spread was subsumed by the more dramatic events that preceded it, like news from multiple war fronts in Europe, Asia, East Africa, and pockets of epidemics across the Subcontinent. This, according to historians, made it the least documented epidemic on the Subcontinent and – even globally, till quite recently.
IMPERIAL PANDEMIC
Thinking historically about pandemics:
2000 years, 200 years, 100 years, 30 years, 10 years, 2 years.
Final 5-page paper, due FRIDAY Jan 21, 5PM.
Prompt: How does historical perspective influence your understanding of our current pandemic?
2000 year pattern ends in 1800s
modern pandemic clustering in 200 YEARS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
THE WORLD OF NATION STATES IS A HISTORICAL NOVELTY, post-1945
A useful way to think about influenza A events of the past 91 years is to recognize that we are living in a pandemic era that began around 1918.4 At that time, a presumably new founding virus, containing a novel set of eight influenza genes and probably derived from an unidentified avian-like precursor virus, became adapted to mammals; the molecular and virologic events responsible for that adaptation remain unclear. This virus caused an explosive and historic pandemic, during which humans also transmitted the virus to pigs, in which it remains in circulation. Ever since 1918, this tenacious virus has drawn on a bag of evolutionary tricks to survive in one form or another, in both humans and pigs, and to spawn a host of novel progeny viruses with novel gene constellations, through the periodic importation or exportation of viral genes (see Zimmer and Burke, pages 279–285). The 2009 H1N1 pandemic virus represents yet another genetic product in the still-growing family tree of this remarkable 1918 virus.
The proposition that the US is an empire is less controversial today. The case can be made in a number of ways. The dispossession of Native Americans and relegation of many to reservations was pretty transparently imperialist. Then, in the 1840s, the US fought a war with Mexico and seized a third of it. Fifty years later, it fought a war with Spain and claimed the bulk of Spain’s overseas territories.
Empire isn’t just landgrabs, though. What do you call the subordination of African Americans? Starting in the interwar period, the celebrated US intellectual WEB Du Bois argued that black people in the US looked more like colonised subjects than like citizens. Many other black thinkers, including Malcolm X and the leaders of the Black Panthers, have agreed.
Or what about the spread of US economic power abroad? The US might not have physically conquered western Europe after the second world war, but that didn’t stop the French from complaining of “coca-colonisation”. Critics there felt swamped by US commerce. Today, with the world’s business denominated in dollars, and McDonald’s in more than 100 countries, you can see they might have had a point.
Following the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the idea of American imperialism was re-examined.
In November 2001, jubilant marines hoisted an American flag over Kandahar and in a stage display referred to the moment as the third after those on San Juan Hill and Iwo Jima. All moments, writes Neil Smith, express U.S. global ambition. "Labelled a War on Terrorism, the new war represents an unprecedented quickening of the American Empire, a third chance at global power."
On October 15, 2001, the cover of Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard carried the headline, "The Case for American Empire".
Rich Lowry, editor in chief of the National Review, called for "a kind of low-grade colonialism" to topple dangerous regimes beyond Afghanistan.
The columnist Charles Krauthammer declared that, given complete U.S. domination "culturally, economically, technologically and militarily", people were "now coming out of the closet on the word 'empire'".
The New York Times Sunday magazine cover for January 5, 2003, read "American Empire: Get Used To It". The phrase "American empire" appeared more than 1000 times in news stories during November 2002 – April 2003.
From Wikipedia on “American Imperialism”
AND IMPERIAL POWER IS STILL ALIVE ..
imperial fantasies continue
NATIONAL UNITS OF MEASUREMENT AND AGGREGATION
There is an emergent mode of nationhood being fashioned under the project of preemptive biopreparedness. I call this “pathogenic nation-making”—the forging of a sense of national solidarity through pandemic fear and avoidance. Although other states engage disease management with their own securitized logics, pathogenic nation-making names a process peculiar to an American national project. As Joseph Masco has shown, Americans living under the counterterror state today are being “emotionally managed” along a spectrum of terror. This is an effort, he argues, that draws rhetorical, material, and affective resources from the Cold War project to form American life—economically, emotionally, politically, materially—under the prospect of collective ruination under the nuclear bomb.
Rooted in this historical framework and the imperatives of the counterterror state that Masco calls its “ideological fulfillment,” pathogenic nation-making names the process of defining and redefining nationhood though the collective contemplation of possible microbial futures and their catastrophic endings.
That forms of nationhood come to be defined and redefined through the discourses of disease preparedness has been well established by many scholars, most notably by Priscilla Wald. See NYU ebook: Priscilla Wald, Contagious : Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, Duke University Press, 2008
Gloria Kim, "Pathogenic Nation-Making: Media Ecologies and American Nationhood Under the Shadow of Viral Emergence." Configurations, vol. 24 no. 4, 2016, p. 441-470. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/con.2016.0029.
COVID-19 AND NATION-MAKING
That forms of nationhood come to be defined and redefined through the discourses of disease preparedness has been well established by many scholars, most notably by Priscilla Wald. Contemporary pandemics, she argues, highlight the dense and interconnected worlds of accelerated globalization.
Pandemics make us aware of the global networks that ineluctably join pathogens from the “distant places,” so often framed as the origins of infections, to our own bodies. This awareness of both the porosity of national borders and the vulnerability of the collective within those lines strengthen … imaginings of nationhood.
The prospect of contagion does so by invoking the precariousness of the national community, thus instilling in individuals the desire to fortify the nation to assure its (and their) continued protection. In examining narratives of disease through the realm of representation, both visual and narrative, Wald, among others, reveals how forms of nationhood become articulated through the management of race, class, and gender. Hence, works in this vein establish that representation shapes concepts of nationhood as they make and remake its boundaries in the discourse of global contagion.
Quote from Gloria Kim, "Pathogenic Nation-Making.” (emphasis added) Ref to
Priscilla Wald, Contagious : Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, Duke University Press, 2008, pp.6-14, 29-53
NATIONS ARE PERSONIFIED AND TAKE CARE OF THEMSELVES, DEFINING THE PUBLIC IN PUBLIC HEALTH
KEEPING OUT SICKNESS = STOP THE SPREAD. KEEP OUT SICK PEOPLE. ��TERRITORIAL BORDERS ARE PUBLIC HEALTH TECHNOLOGIES
Classes of aliens ineligible for visas or admission
Except as otherwise provided in this chapter, aliens who are inadmissible under the following paragraphs are ineligible to receive visas and ineligible to be admitted to the United States:
In general
Any alien—
(i)who is determined (in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services) to have a communicable disease of public health significance;
A very old story. See for example:
Zlata Blažina-Tomić author. Vesna Blažina author.
Montreal : McGill-Queen's University Press 2015
*Gerald Keutsch, "The History of Nutrition: Malnutrition, Infection, and Immunity," The Fogarty International Center, American Society for Nutritional Sciences.
Keeping poor immigrants from across the southern border OUT has always been his goal.
Public Health concerns dovetail with political interests … this was true also in 16th century Dubrovnik, as it faced the Ottoman Empire.
A WARNING FROM 2005: GLOBAL ECOLOGY AND NATIONAL PROTECTION ��– NOW COVID-19 IS THE MONSTER
BLAMING PEOPLE FOR PANDEMICS
March 19, 2020
But keeping people out and demonizing the alien threat also implicates people inside state territory whose families had moved across that border anytime in the past.
And not only India
This question, asked by one of India’s most renown historians, in 1999, deals with a marginalization of Muslims in India that has moved in the last twenty years to the verge of an official government effort to make them all non-citizens.
COMPARATIVE NATIONAL DATA ON PUBLIC HEALTH �DURING THIS PANDEMIC
March 15, 2020
Read the article.