Volume 35, Number 11 · June 30, 1988
Politics of a Plague
By Gordon A. Craig
Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830–1910
by Richard J. Evans
Oxford University Press (Clarendon Press), 676 pp., $98.00
Asiatic cholera, one of humanity's greatest scourges in the modern period, came to Europe for the first time in the years after 1817, traveling by ship and caravan route from the banks of the Ganges, where it was endemic, to the Persian Gulf, Mesopotamia and Iran, the Caspian Sea and southern Russia, and then—thanks to troop movements occasioned by Russia's wars against Persia and Turkey in the late 1820s and its suppression of the revolt in Poland in 1830–1831—to the shores of the Baltic Sea. From there its spread westward was swift and devastating, and before the end of 1833 it had ravaged the German states, France, and the British Isles and passed on to Canada, the western and southern parts of the United States, and Mexico.
Review, 3677 words
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