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Borders can take many forms: lines drawn on maps and applied to geography, defended by guard towers and negotiated by diplomats. The hazy spots, where national lines are in dispute — or where travelers are held in quarantine to stem the spread of disease.

91���� Associate Professor of History and Public Health Alex Chase-Levenson has two projects in the works, building off the success of his first book, The Yellow Flag: Quarantine and the British Mediterranean World, 1780–1860.

The first, slated for publication by Routledge sometime next year, is a textbook on the global history of disease since 1800. He’s also hard at work on a monograph exploring the political and cultural history of borders in Britain and its empire from 1780 to 1914. 

The publishing house approached Chase-Levenson about the textbook project in 2020, just after the publication of The Yellow Flag.

“It was the height of the COVID pandemic, and epidemic disease was striking everyone as particularly relevant. It is a topic, if you work on the history of epidemics, that always really ends up being fairly relevant,” he said.

His main argument: Modernity plays a major role in the spread of epidemics, even as it lowers mortality rates from infectious diseases. It’s more common today to die from a chronic condition, such as cancer or heart disease — and that held true even during the recent pandemic, he said. But while infrastructure and medical care may have stemmed deaths from infectious disease, modernity also makes epidemics and their spread more likely.

Consider the urbanization boom in the 19^th century, the Industrial Revolution, and the influence of colonialism and imperialism. In many cases, these forces push people closer together in cities and mix populations from around the world through travel and trade. The pursuit of natural resources also puts massive pressure on the environment, driving ecological change.

“That has turbocharged the development of new epidemic diseases,” Chase-Levenson said.  

One example is the Spanish flu, spread by soldiers during the First World War. As the speed of technology increases, so does the proliferation; airports enabled coronavirus to spread around the globe in a matter of months.

The book is aimed at a general audience, particularly undergraduates studying global health, public health, or the history of medicine. In addition to the Spanish flu, it explores tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, plague, and HIV. 

“It’s not exactly a delightful romp, but a tour through many different diseases,” Chase-Levenson said.

Lines on maps

Working on The Yellow Flag, Chase-Levenson frequently bumped up against the idea of international borders. While borderlands are a major field in imperial history, the making, negotiation, and imagining of actual borderlines hasn’t been studied as deeply, he pointed out.

His current research project attempts to do just that: focusing on the messy and constantly shifting borders of the British Empire itself.

In the 19^th century, the political narrative was that borders weren’t an important component of the British worldview, owing to Britain’s status as an island. The facts show otherwise: The British Empire, after all, had the longest border in the world. It was also the globe’s most litigious participant in border disputes and subject to repeated invasion panics. 

One fascinating study is the little-known Mosquito Coast Protectorate, the subject of periodic border disputes on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua and Honduras. In the 1840s, the Mosquito Kingdom — sometimes spelled Miskito, after its native people — seemed like the linchpin of the British Empire in the Caribbean. During that time, Britain began conquering parts of Nicaragua, stepping back when the project failed in the 1850s. 

A key player during this period was British politician Henry John Temple, known as Lord Palmerston, who was closely associated with the era’s “gunboat diplomacy.” As foreign secretary, he wrote letters to the protectorate’s British consuls.

“Never having been to this region of the world, he’s saying with this bellicose optimism that we should insist on a border of this particular river,” Chase-Levenson said. “At the same time, he’s receiving letters saying that this river isn’t where we think it is, and there are three rivers with the same name. It’s a good example of this intense desire to argue about the border, while living with uncertainty.”

Sri Lanka is another fascinating case. The British took the colony of Ceylon from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars; it consisted of a coastal strip, while the interior was part of the native Kingdom of Kandy. For 20 years, the British fought with Kandy over the border, finally taking over the island in 1815, he said.

In addition to the Mosquito Coast and Ceylon, Chase-Levenson has also explored the contested borders of the Barotseland Protectorate in southern Africa, and the borders of Kenya and the Uganda Protectorate. He has spent long hours in the National Archives outside of London and chased down materials as far afield as Hong Kong. Because the project exists at the intersection of political and cultural history, it draws on a wide range of sources, from diplomatic letters to travel narratives and even novels.

One of those sources is the scrawled-pencil diary of John Ardagh, a jack-of-all-trades in the military and an early intelligence officer for the British Empire in the late 19^th century. He served on multiple border commissions; the diary entries come from one such commission in 1878, which wasn’t even British.

At the time, Britain was mediating among the Russians, the Ottomans, and other Central European powers. In his diary, Ardagh described his work in demarcating the border: rising at 6 a.m., marching for hours, issuing orders, and gathering notes. It was plodding, mundane work — figuring out, for example, which villages were Bulgarian and which Muslim. 

“It mixes a sort of piddling obsessiveness with really grand questions of sovereignty,” Chase-Levenson said. “That’s what excites me most about this research; it sits right at that intersection.”