Fighting Pandemics from Below. Global North-South Public Health Cooperation in the Middle East and North Africa, 1792-1942

This project will recapture the lost archives and historical knowledge of international public health cooperation between the global north and the global south by analysing its first and longest-lasting instances: the sanitary councils in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Established in Tangier, Alexandria, Tunis, Istanbul and Tehran, these unprecedented institutions strategised against waves of epidemics and pandemics between the 1790s and the 1940s.

Their European, American and native co-founders invented new models for fighting pandemics from below and stopping the diseases in their tracks.

They continually strove to overcome the familiar barriers to cooperation posed by inter-imperial competition in a multipolar world, economic inequities, protests against quarantine restrictions and racial and Orientalist biases, among others.

In this light, the councils constituted the microcosms of the complex dynamics of north-south health cooperation that also need to be addressed urgently today. However, to date, there has been no in-depth, comparative and longitudinal analysis of their workings.

This project will challenge the mainstream narratives by writing an entangled, rather than West-centric, history of health cooperation and by shifting the focus from top-down to bottom-up processes.

It will determine what the preconditions for effective international public health cooperation in MENA were and hypothesise that rather than Great Power imposition or veiled imperialism alone, multifaceted reciprocal action induced and sustained sanitary internationalism on the ground.

My preliminary data show that the agency of local actors and smaller and medium European powers in accrediting public health cooperation was more central than has been documented to date.

This research will test my hypothesis by examining the councils activity, performance, legitimacy and endurance, and by consulting archival sources in Europe, MENA, North America and Russia.