Date
-

Influenza in Late Ottoman and British Occupied Iraq - Isacar Bolaños (California State University, Long Beach)
 
"In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, influenza spread across the world in two major pandemics—one in 1889-1893, the other in 1918-1920. This paper examines the effects of these pandemics in Iraq during the periods of Ottoman and British rule. It demonstrates that while influenza certainly had an effect on the region, Ottoman and British officials viewed cholera and malaria as bigger issues of concern, particularly in light of Iraq’s ecology and its relation to epidemic diseases. Not only does this reveal an important instance of continuity in how the Ottomans and the British addressed matters of disease control in Iraq; it also suggests that greater attention must be placed on the specificity of location when narrating the global history of influenza, especially in light of recent scholarship that has revealed significant differences in how societies across the Middle East experienced influenza when compared to societies in other parts of the world."