Introduction: the plague and the city in history

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins with the middle ages when urban centres were equally preoccupied with dirt and disease. It provides studies of early modern London have shown that there was no consistent model in the correlation between the quality of housing and plague nor between poverty and plague across the series of outbreaks experienced by the city. The book aims to underline the close connection between the city and plague. It examines how the disease was experienced and acted upon as arising from, unfolding in and challenging urban structures and urban life. The book describes how plague photography thus merged colonial power with the sanitary policy applied to the plague house in the British Empire. It focuses on photographic renderings of plagued houses in 1899–1900 Hawaii.