Why read The Yellow Flag?

Book cover of The Yellow Flag: Quarantine and the British Mediterranean World, 1780–1860

Book description

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, quarantine laws in all Western European nations mandated the detention of every inbound trader, traveller, soldier, sailor, merchant, missionary, letter, and trade good arriving from the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Most of these quarantines occurred in large, ominous fortresses in Mediterranean port…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Yellow Flag as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Pamela K. Gilbert

Author

This is a more recent history of cholera in the context of quarantine, and clarifies some of the stakes of decisions about quarantine in the context of the history of plague. It places it nicely in the context of a larger European response to epidemic disease and the history of plague in the Mediterranean. I liked that it expands the focus to an international context, and a longer period of history—epidemics, like any novel experience, are processed within existing schema, and the plague was a particularly resonant and long-lasting framework for understanding contagion.

From Pamela's list on how epidemics relate to bigger narratives.