Checkpoints of Contagion: Health and Disease in Tashkent, Hong Kong, and Manila, 1890-1920

Between 1890 and 1920, epidemics in Tashkent, Hong Kong, and Manila reshaped urban governance, revealing how disease functioned as both a crisis and an instrument of colonial rule. Checkpoints of Contagion examines how the Russian, British, and American empires deployed medical interventions to reconfigure urban landscapes, regulate mobility, and enforce racial hierarchies. Moving beyond state-centric narratives, this project foregrounds how colonial subjects navigated and subverted health governance, situating medical infrastructures within the broader colonial everyday. Bridging archival research, spatial history, and visual analysis, the study interrogates how urban quarantine stations, hospitals, and sanitation cordons materialised imperial ideologies while facilitating transimperial circulations of medical knowledge. By examining epidemic photography, architectural blueprints, and disease mapping, the project uncovers the visual cultures of contagion that legitimised public health interventions. Comparative in scope and interdisciplinary in method, the research project expands global health historiography by demonstrating how colonial medicine operated not as a unidirectional force but as a negotiated process shaped by resistance, adaptation, and local agency. Engaging with ongoing debates on biopolitics, quarantine, and global health governance, the project points to the legacies of imperial public health interventions in contemporary epidemiology and border regimes. Keywords: colonial medicine, disease, urban, infrastructure, quarantine.