Urban demolition in Egypt was justified by miasmic contagion theory.

Evidence

If such measures seem heartless, it must be remembered that, like the educational policies I will be examining later on, they conformed with prevailing medical and political theory. The disorder and narrowness of the streets that open boulevards eliminated were considered a principal cause of physical disease and of crime, just as the indiscipline and lack of schooling among their inhabitants was the principal cause of the country’s backwardness. The medical argument was made according to the miasmic theory of contagion, which in nineteenth-century Europe had temporarily superseded the rival germ theory as an explanation of the transmission of diseases. Contagion would not be checked, it was now thought, by quarantine and confinement, practices common throughout the Mediterranean world including Egypt, against the tyranny of which English liberals had in recent decades campaigned. What was required was the elimination from the city of sites from which the foul vapours of disease were given off, such as ‘cemeteries … as well as sewers, cess pools and all places of rottenness and decomposition’, and the demolition of houses to allow the unobstructed passage of air and light. The new theories made this an urgent matter. Indeed there were questions raised, considering the number of buried human corpses alone, whether the ground all over Egypt had not become so saturated with putrifying material that it was unable further to decompose. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 217

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains what the miasmic theory of contagion was and how it displaced both germ theory and quarantine in 19th-century Europe.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to ‘Grafting & Growth’: the elimination of ‘places of rottenness and decomposition’ — cemeteries, cesspools — as an infrastructure logic that treats the city as an organic body to be ventilated.
• QUESTION: Could trace how the miasmic/germ theory contest mapped onto colonial urban planning elsewhere in the empire.