Camoglu / Defoe’s Epidemiological Orientalism 583

Plague, Paradox, and the Ends of

Community: Defoe’s Epidemiological
Orientalism

Arif Camoglu

“[W]ith a kind of a Turkish predestinarianism, they would say, ‘If it

pleased God to strike them, it was all one whether they went abroad or stayed at
home, they could not escape it.’”1 So does H. F., the narrator of Daniel Defoe’s
1722 novel, A Journal of the Plague Year, recount the negligence of his fellow
Londoners in the face of a contagion that sweeps across the city, killing thousands
per week at its peak. To H. F.’s dismay, many city dwellers become “hardened to
the danger” posed by the disease, and “grow less concerned at it” as they concur,
“We draw in Death when we breathe, and therefore ’tis the Hand of God; there is
notwithstanding it” (Journal 165).2 This collective submission to fate troubles H.
F., who insists instead that the disease “was really propagated by natural means”
(166). Those “natural means,” however, appear no less obscure than the dismissed
fatalistic assumptions in the text wherein the actual source of plague is never prop-
erly diagnosed. Speculations as to what “propagated” the “distemper” abound,
while culprits of and solutions to it vary in the mounting communal despair H.
F. witnesses. Human contact is regulated through quarantine and self-isolation,
animals are exterminated in frantic efforts to sanitize domestic and public spaces,
and produce and merchandise are treated cautiously as potentially contaminated;
but still, regardless of all methods and measures of prevention, plague prevails.
Inevitably, H. F. begins to waver between rational explanations and
mystical contemplations, anxiously trying to “find assurances that he is follow-
ing God’s will,” as John Richetti notes, while he goes on to stress the relevance of
the plague being propagated by “natural means.”3 According to Louis A. Landa,
H. F.’s vacillation mirrors Defoe’s own propensity toward “both traditional and

Arif Camoglu is Assistant Professor of Literature at New York University Shanghai. He would
like to thank the readers of the earlier drafts of this essay for their insightful feedback.

© 2023 by the ASECS Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 56, no. 4 (2023) Pp. 583–99.
584 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 56, No. 4

contemporary views of plague, as on the one hand a divine visitation and on the
other a natural calamity—a viewpoint which invited inconsistencies.”4 What
Landa terms as inconsistency is dealt with in this essay as a paradox, a politically
charged rhetorical maneuver that H. F. resorts to in his inability to make sense of
the epidemic. Indeed, Defoe’s novel stages a conflict between the desire to survive
plague by being reasonable about it and the fatal defeatism provoked by plague’s
defiance of reason.
The sense of futility ensuing from the inability to comprehend how con-
tagion occurs in the Journal is eased, in Christopher F. Loar’s opinion, “when we
understand that the goal” of the narrative “is a mitigation of risk rather than an
absolute immunity or mastery of plague’s ecologies.”5 If, following the same vein
of thought, the Journal “imagines the construction of individual autonomy within
the plague-stricken city,” as Martin Wagner suggests, it is then an imaginary of an
ineluctably limited autonomy.6 Plague marks in H. F.’s testimonies a socio-historical
moment when life is predicated upon a strict reconciliation with constraints, or
alterations of human agency. Therefore, a compromise does occur in the Journal—at
least in the way Wagner and Loar see it—in which H. F. is bound to reconsider the
limitations of his reasoning. However, this compromise does not only concern nar-
rowly the relationship between the individual and environment, but also a larger
social-planetary nexus since, after all, what plague instantiates is nothing short of
collective suffering. Maximillian E. Novak underscores this caveat by stating that
“the main impulse behind A Journal of the Plague Year was a demonstration of
human pity and fellowship… What Robinson Crusoe… asked his readers to feel
for his isolation, the Saddler asks for an entire community.”7 Thus, even though it
mandates confinements on individual levels, plague constitutes a communal ordeal,
precipitating, in Paula R. Backsheider’s words, “a moral as well as biological crisis
for community.”8 H. F. himself emphasizes the pressures the epidemic places on
social relations with a bitter acknowledgment that “there was no such Thing as
Communication with one another” when the disease “was in the Extremity” (61).
As such, the burden of autonomy and mastery, conventionally levied on the indi-
vidual, falls on the entire community struck by a crisis that threatens its existence;
Defoe’s novel amplifies this nuance by dramatizing the conflicted attitude of H. F.
and his fellow Londoners toward plague in terms of how they reason with it. A
peculiar kind of reasoning, hence, manifests in the Journal, which contradicts itself
explicitly in the face of a collapsing community.
Readers of the Journal are compelled to see that negotiating with the hard-
ships caused by plague entails an imaginative process, specifically a reimagining of
community in its present inability to materialize itself. Here I argue that Defoe’s
novel sheds light on the socially operative force of paradox, visualizing the chal-
lenges pertaining to the reconfiguration of how communities can stand together
while their members stay apart. Thus, this article suggests that plague, a collectively
shared medical condition, generates in H. F.’s narrative a figurative replacement
of the existent boundaries (dictated by the disease prevention protocols) by imagi-
nary ones that make it possible for readers to picture Londoners as united in their
isolation. Such paradoxical consolidation of community is facilitated in the novel
through a repeated deployment of the notion of “Turkish predestinarianism,” that
is, through the discursive expulsion of the ethnocultural other. To echo John Bender,
 Camoglu / Defoe’s Epidemiological Orientalism 585

H. F. can be read as “a personified contradiction” who “simultaneously considers

his ‘own Deliverance’ to be one next to miraculous,” and “yet condemns ‘Turkish
predestinarianism’” without attempting to reckon with this logical dissonance.9
Defoe’s embrace of Turkish predestinarianism occasions what Nükhet
Varlık terms broadly as “epidemiological orientalism.” In her survey of the early
modern European accounts of Ottoman plagues, Varlık notes that “Ottomans”
were viewed “as fatalistic in facing the plague, not taking any precautions to protect
themselves from it.”10 According with this description, Turkish predestinarianism
registers in the Journal as a marker of a self-destructive mindset against which H.
F. cautions his readers vehemently by pointing to its “consequence in Turkey,”
where people “were infected, and died by hundreds and thousands” (166). Richetti
astutely underscores this detail, urging critics to consider H. F.’s rejection of “‘Turk-
ish Predestinarianism’ and its extremes of trust and careless fatalism in favour of
Christian moderating action” in tandem with the “community of survival” envis-
aged in the text.11 What I find striking in Defoe’s repurposing of this orientalist
motif is the paradox found therein: after all, H. F. turns out to embody the very
characteristics he frowns upon, namely, the signs of Turkish predestinarianism
that he aggressively warns his community against. It is my contention that Defoe’s
epidemiological orientalism symptomatizes an openly contradictory discrimina-
tion of the ethnocultural other, which is conducive to cultivating a fraught sense
of communal belonging.
Decades of scholarship on orientalism have proven how versatile the
discourse is in regard to its ideological or sociocultural functionalities. Rather
than rehearsing well-known arguments and counterarguments, in this article I
point to one thread common to almost all discussions of orientalism, irrespective
of their conclusions: what Srinivas Aravamudan dubs the “dualistic logic of self
and other.”12 Indeed, we have been preoccupied so long with how the relationship
between the domestic and the foreign is inflected in and through imaginary and ac-
tual encounters with “the Orientals,” wondering, like Michael J. Franklin, whether
“Orientalist knowledge might be used to challenge European dominance,” and if, as
Emily A. Haddad asks, orientalist “entertainment” could assume an “instructional
purpose” that dictates self-reflective social and political agendas. 13 In other words,
it is now part of the conventional wisdom that, to borrow from Gerald Maclean,
orientalism “involves identification as well as differentiation, of sameness as well
as otherness, of desire and attraction as well as revulsion.”14 My suggestion here is
that this conventional wisdom—i.e. the “dualistic logic” so habitually attributed to
orientalism—is riddled with teleological claims that reduce the relationality between
self and other either to a binary opposition or a radical fusion.
It goes without saying that there emerge geocultural, ethnocultural, and
gendered tensions between the known and the unknown in orientalist textual and
visual representations. As Rosalind Ballaster proposes, self-questioning might as
well be made possible through the “psychic convolutions” that Western subjects
experience in their “encounter with oriental ‘otherness.’”15 The same can be said
for the writing of Defoe, according to G. A. Starr, wherein the Orient mediates a
satirical evaluation of “English and European folly.”16 While the critical impulse
behind these affirmative—more precisely, liberal and multiculturalist—approaches
to orientalist productions can be appreciated, the tendency to argue for the undoing
586 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 56, No. 4

of the antagonistic relationship between self and other remains problematic insofar
as the Orient is relegated to a site of opportunity or trial for confused Western
subjects to correct or improve themselves. In other words, in the anticipation of
a self-reformist politics from orientalist poetics is implied a Eurocentric wish for
betterment that reduces the ethnocultural other to an instrument for putatively
liberating ethical and political experiments. The impetus to neutralize the charged
relationship between self and other entails, thus, the risk of redeeming orientalist
discourses, from which Defoe’s Journal compels the reader to steer away.
A politically and culturally loaded theme in the Journal, Turkish predesti-
narianism merits careful consideration not simply because of how it operates as an
essentialist construct in and through which exclusionary impulses of a community
get vocalized. More importantly, Turkish predestinarianism demands scrutiny
because it happens to be a trope that is transmitted to Defoe’s writing from the
medical treatises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The notion of Turkish
predestinarianism helps generate in Defoe’s writing and the medical discourse of the
period, as will be shown later, productive paradoxes that have the effect of binding
the community together imaginarily even as they expose the similarity between
self and other. The British urge to act and think reasonably and the simultaneous
deflation of this urge is the central paradox underpinning the novel’s imaginary of
community, displaying and undermining at the same time the relatability of other
to self. Accordingly, whereas it foregrounds an oppositional relationality, Defoe’s
epidemiological orientalism does not encourage readers to fantasize a reconcilia-
tion; it resists interpretations that might—even if unintentionally—gloss over the
fortitude of ethnoculturally divisive visions in Eurocentric celebrations of subjec-
tive enlightenment. The Journal illustrates how these (di)visions persist even in
instances like plagues wherein they are expected to vanish under the existentially
equalizing force of the disease.

TO REASON (UN)LIKE TURKS

Defoe’s interest in plague extends beyond the Journal, registering amply
in his earlier writings that appeared in periodicals from the first decade of the
1700s such as The Daily Post and Mist’s Journal. His enduring investment in the
topic culminated, approximately a month before the Journal was released, in the
publication of Due Preparations for the Plague, a manual for both governments
and individuals on how to manage epidemics. On Defoe’s choice to pen two manu-
scripts about plague at such short intervals, Landa holds that “Defoe clearly wanted
something more” than a didactic account: “a tale which would reflect the profound
agony, the dark and mysterious tragedy which enveloped London in 1665.”17 The
Journal reads certainly as a tragic retelling of the Great Plague of 1665 with its
fictional distemper arriving in London in September 1664. However, also fresh in
Defoe’s mind was a recent outbreak that occurred in Marseilles in 1720, which
cost approximately 39,000 lives within a span of two years.18 Defoe was by no
means alone in his fascination with the Marseilles plague since, as David Robert
notes, dozens of publications about it circulated in England between 1720 and
1722.19 Such collectively shared (and consumed) fear that plague would sooner or
later make its way into England was indeed a driving force in the composition of
the Journal, wherein the horror of catching the disease haunts all layers of society,
and survival translates into a communal endeavor:
 Camoglu / Defoe’s Epidemiological Orientalism 587

The Infection spread in a dreadful Manner, and the Bills rose high, the
Articles of the Fever, spotted fever, and teeth, began to swell; for all that
could conceal their distempers, did it to prevent their neighbours shun-
ning and refusing to converse with them; and also to prevent authority
shutting up their houses, which though it was not yet practised, yet was
threatened, and People were extremely terrify’d at the thoughts of it. (7)

At the early onset of the epidemic in the Journal, the fear of social stigma spreads
faster than the infection itself. What makes the symptoms of plague rather dread-
ful, as far as H. F. can see, is the threat of excommunication they pose to the sick
individual. The visibility of plague, hence, corresponds to a metaphorical invisibility
of the diseased, as it sanctions their removal from social contact. The “thought” of
quarantine “terrifies” people in almost as substantial a way as the thought of the
contagion during this early phase, when the magnitude of plague is yet to dawn
on its future victims.
To avoid being confined to “their houses” and being deprived of commu-
nication with “their neighbors,” the infected attempt to “conceal their distempers,”
thus, jeopardizing—purposely or unwittingly—the wellbeing of others. Starting his
account with this striking observation, H. F. delicately accentuates not only the
terror of being confined to the same space with the diseased, but also the desire
to stay with and within a community. Seen in this light, the need for community
in Defoe’s text does not only place itself above public health in this particular in-
stance, but more radically, it also turns into a potential catalyst of a public health
crisis. The craving for social interaction (phrased in the text as “Entertainment”)
alongside the necessity of “Provisions” proves pressing enough that frequently
the quarantined “People who had the Distemper” would break “out from Houses
which were so shut up” (62).
Communication generates communities as shared access to binding nar-
ratives enables the imagination of a homogenous social existence. Print especially,
as Benedict Anderson famously argued, plays a significant role in the tightening of
communal ties by creating “fellow-readers” who become “aware of hundreds of
thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language field… connected
through… their… particular visible invisibility.”20 H. F.’s imagined community,
by contrast, is dispossessed of this luxury. When explaining how people got wind
of the plague in his town, he underlines that “We had no such thing as printed
Newspapers in those days, to spread rumours and reports of things” (3). The only
print documents available to the public that announced the outbreak “in those
days” are weekly mortality bills, and they hardly satisfy the thirst for informational
certainty. If anything, as Paula McDowell argues, these print documents suspend
the presumed hierarchy between literacy and orality in terms of the factuality of
their contents, which H. F. makes a point of as he “excoriates the unreliability of
the bills of morality.”21 Frustrated by the “Knavery and Collision” (7) the bills are
riddled with, H. F., in the incisive way Michelle Brandwein puts it, “speaks from
an archive of indeterminacy about the unstable reality in which he lives.”22 There
is something, accordingly, that is not capturable in these documents, which can
be described as an epistemological rupture engendered by the plague. What the
papers broadcast is nothing other than the numbers of the deceased, and as Everett
Zimmerman poignantly remarks, whereas “numbers, the lists, the incidents are
somehow expected to fix the truth” of the contagion, “the truth is evasive.”23 Being
588 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 56, No. 4

in essence a medium of communication, the bills function as a tool not to deliver

reliable facts about life, but rather to trace the death of community. In such collec-
tive failure to know for sure who is alive or dead, the link between community and
communication appears to be less than tenuous. Rather than a means of imagining
a community, the bills can be said to inform community of the possibility of its
impending end.
The farther the disease is communicated, the fainter the livelihood of com-
munity gets in Defoe’s fiction. When their proximity to plague diminishes with the
perishing of their family members, neighbors, and acquaintances, Londoners get
truly alarmed, and the city proclamations grow stricter, resulting in individuals being
forcefully “shut up” in their homes and streets being “emptied of their inhabitants”
(147). This picture is reminiscent, to an extent, of how Michel Foucault describes the
sociopolitical conditions of plague in his Discipline and Punish: “It is a segmented,
immobile, frozen space. Each individual is fixed in his place. And, if he moves, he
does so at the risk of his life, contagion or punishment.”24 In his commentaries on
the medical history of the eighteenth century, Foucault underscores how plagues
activate stringent mechanisms of surveillance that penalize individuals who disobey
the authorities. There is no shortage of material the Journal could offer to sup-
port Foucault’s point. “An Act for the charitable Relief and Ordering of Persons,”
passed during the contagion, for instance, licenses “Justices of the Peace, Mayors,
Bailiffs, and other head officers, to appoint… Examiners, Searchers, Watchmen,
Keepers, and Buriers for the persons and places infected,” and “if any fit person
so appointed, shall refuse to undertake the same,” they would “be committed to
prison until they shall conform themselves accordingly” (34). On the other hand,
in the course of such multilayered monitoring of social behavior, the line between
authorities and community tends to blur in Defoe’s text. After all, both the watchers
and the watched prove equally vulnerable to infection. H. F. does not fail to add
that neither doctors, whom Foucault cites among “programmers of a well-ordered
society,” nor other actors of surveillance are immune to the spreading disease.25
The bills eventually begin to communicate the absorption of authorities into the
dying community by the unregulatable force of the contagion: “there died sixteen
clergy-men, two aldermen, five physicians, and thirteen surgeons” (203).
Hierarchies within community may indeed seem less defined under the
shadow of plague. In his essay on the Journal, Ernest B. Gilman contends that Defoe
makes legible “the sovereign power of infectious disease… in the face of which the
limitations of political power per se are revealed… by a microbial appropriation of
the sovereign power to ‘take’ life.”26 Contrarily, H. F.’s recurring emphasis on the
disproportionate proneness of “the poor People” who “could not lay up provisions”
urges readers not to overestimate the equalizing effect of plague (68). Structures
of power relations, especially those that are socioeconomically determined, are
not altogether turned upside down in the novel, where the unequal distribution of
wealth continues to afflict the poor. While plague can be said to animate a vision of
a planetary vulnerability, politically charged differentials and asymmetries persist.
Novak touches on this issue by emphasizing the heightened vulnerability of the
London poor to infection as a concern that is embraced not only by Defoe but also
by contemporaneous physicians who searched for ways of “preventing a complete
breakdown of communal and political organization” in their written works.27 If,
 Camoglu / Defoe’s Epidemiological Orientalism 589

then, there is a potentially subversive politics signaled in Defoe’s fictional plague, it

would be through the reader’s realization that communities can no longer pretend
to stand together despite their uncured divisions: now they are compelled to seek
out an equitable socioeconomic structure that could allow them to stay socially
distant yet healthily together.
Plague widens gaps further within community in the Journal as it triggers
people to flee from one another. Contra Foucault’s assertion that “each individual
is fixed in his place” during the times of plague in the eighteenth century, Defoe
stresses the significance of mobility in charting the reactions of community to the
disease. H. F., for example, speaks of escaping the city and retiring to the country
as a reasonable act of self-preservation particularly among “the wealthiest of the
People… unincumbered with Trades and Business” (17). He perceives that “self-
preservation, indeed, appeared here to be the first law, for the children ran away
from their parents, as they languished in the utmost distress; and in some places,
though not so frequent as the other, parents did the like to their children” (100).
Being mobile, in this sense, entails movement in the opposite direction of a collec-
tive, that is, an active effort to dissociate oneself from it physically and spatially,
should the individual have the necessary resources to be able to do so. Rushed to
tear themselves apart even from their families, whether by the force of governmen-
tal measures or the privilege of their private means, individuals begin to stare at
the end of their community. With such dramatic accounts as the pulling apart of
families, H. F. invites his readers to ponder if togetherness is imaginable in such
circumstances wherein the only thing that is communicable is disease.
At any rate, H. F. later concedes, whether social distancing ensured survival
was yet to be confirmed, “for none knows when, or where, or how they may have
received the Infection, or from whom” (165). The absence of any scientific evidence
as to how the disease is contracted, according to H. F. is “the reason” why “so
many people talk of the air being corrupted and infected, and that they need not be
cautious of whom they converse with, for that the Contagion was in the air” (165).
In Due Preparations, Defoe debunks the miasmatic theory, remarking assertively
that “the plague is carried from one to another by infected persons conversing with
one another, or by clothes, goods… not by any general stagnation of air, or noxious
fumes infecting the air, or poisonous particles carried by the winds from one country
to another.”28 When H. F. glances at the dissolving web of community, however,
scientifically unfounded reasoning—nourished by the despair plague unleashes on
“so many people”—appears to be a thread that holds it together, no matter how
loosely. To reason without needing to be reasonable becomes a collective act of
endurance, which H. F. despises as “a kind of a Turkish predestinarianism” (165).
Turkish predestinarianism is but one component of the wider “ethnocentric
metaphysics,” to use James Cruise’s term, undergirding the orientalism that targeted
the Ottoman Empire in the British literature of the long eighteenth century.29 The
notion can be seen as another iteration of what Rodrick Cavalliero alludes to as
the “irrational behavior” that defined Ottomans in many oriental texts from the
period.30 The presupposed inability of Ottomans to behave reasonably is often tied
to an imperially charged notion of surrendered will, which Lady Mary W. Montagu
attributes in her poem “Constantinople” to the servants of the Ottoman Empire
who, at the sight of the sultan, with “awful Duty decline their eyes.”31 Mary Pix
590 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 56, No. 4

accentuates further the imperial undercurrents of such fatalistic submissiveness in

her 1696 play Ibrahim, The Thirteenth Emperor of the Turks: A Tragedy, where
“the Ottoman Armies that are Invincible” cruelly “punish” those who dare defy
their incursions.32 Paul Rycaut’s treatise on The History of the Present State of the
Ottoman Empire (1686), which Pix cites as a historical source for her dramatic
work, surmises that “submission and subjection are so incident to the nature of
the Turks, and obedience taught, and so carefully instilled into them with their
first Rudiments.”33 The discourse of Turkish predestinarianism, hence, can be
considered an extension of the orientalist ethnographic and aesthetic portrayals
of Turks as being inherently destitute of autonomy and thus fatalistically inclined,
and dovetails neatly with epidemiologically justified ethnocultural discriminations,
as demonstrated in Rycaut’s treatise. For in his orientalist accounts, Rycaut also
conjectures that the “doctrine” of Turkish predestinarianism desensitizes Ottoman
Muslims to “the infection of the Plague; Mahomet’s precepts being not to abandon
the City-house where the Infection rages, because God hath numbred their days,
and predestinated their fate.”34
In such speculations, wherein the so-called Turkish custom of remaining
in or on the site of contagion is narrated as a cautionary tale, the limits of reason
and reasonableness are drawn through an imagined antithesis between being an
ethnocultural other and the self’s capacity to affirm life. The Journal’s repeated
emphasis on the notion of Turkish predestinarianism magnifies this contrast between
community and its others. It is worth recalling that when plague encroaches upon
their immediate neighborhood, H. F.’s brother recommends him to act reasonably
and move with him to the countryside; to further incentivize H. F., he speaks “of
the mischievous consequences which attended the Presumption of the Turks and
Mahometans in Asia and in other places” (11). What perturbs H. F.’s brother is
the stubborn Turkish disposition, “presuming upon their professed predestinating
notions,” to stay put in infected vicinities, which he is surprised to see H. F. display
in his reaction to the contagion (12). While his brother prepares to leave London
and implores him to join, H. F. resolves to “stay and take my lot in that station in
which God had placed me” (11). Although his brother’s “arguments” give him a
long pause—succeeding in making him rather “irresolute”—H. F. eventually yields
to the divine “promise of being preserved,” and refuses to leave (12).
Despite his penchant for rational assessments, H. F. cannot help doing
what many “early historians” were tempted to do, which, as Alfred W. Crosby Jr.
describes it, was to treat “epidemics as obvious evidence of God’s wrath.”35 Indeed,
for H. F., Landa writes, plague signifies not merely “a great natural calamity,” but
also “something to be explained in terms of God’s government of ‘all his creatures
and all their actions.’”36 Oddly, then, Defoe’s text situates Christian acceptance of
divine preordinance against its eerily similar Islamic counterpart while disregarding
their philosophical resemblance, and more significantly, disparaging only the latter
for being unredeemable in the purview of reason. This inconsistency grows into a
contradiction in the text when H. F. turns out to personify what his religious brother
ridicules. Very much like those “Turks and Mahometans,” H. F. rejects the idea of
escaping the plague. And yet, in spite of the apparent fragility of the dichotomies
promoted therein, the novel never fully affirms the comparability of the narrator
to his oriental others. H. F. attempts to annul such behavioral intimacy between
 Camoglu / Defoe’s Epidemiological Orientalism 591

himself and Turks by buttressing that his is not a passive surrender to destiny. On
the contrary, he lays claim to his own future through a theatrical demonstration of
his ability to take reasonable action. As H. F. recollects the details of his thought
process, it becomes clear to his readers that his choice is a product of diligent
reasoning: “I stated the Arguments with which my Brother had press’d me to go
into the Country, and I set against them the strong impressions which I had on my
mind for staying” (12). Here, H.F. subtly but determinedly tries to persuade himself
and his readers that he is actively and rationally involved in the determination of
his fate. Richetti aptly concludes that “all this reasonableness and more serve to
obscure that initial irrationality, the decision to stay.”37 Weighing arguments care-
fully assures H. F. that he is being reasonable even if his conclusion may not be so.
For he confesses, in hindsight, that “I wished often, that I had not taken upon me
to stay, but had gone away with my brother and his family” (67). By the time he
makes up his mind to remain in the city, the infection already “increased around
me, and the bills were risen to almost 700 a-Week” (12). Acutely cognizant of the
fatality of plague and blessed with the opportunity to run from it, H. F. prefers to
stay put. He proves himself to be able to reason, albeit in a starkly unreasonable
way, as he makes efforts to mold his own fate by voluntarily risking death. In a
way, then, H. F. masters Turkish predestinarianism by reasoning fatalistically.
Although it is conspicuously fraught with contradictions, the distinction
between H. F. and Turks still holds on a discursive level. Even if the Journal can be
said to sensationalize the ways in which plague sharpens the cultural-behavioral
similarities, identification with other, or alternately, alienation from self, never
entirely happens. Whereas one might catch a glimpse of what Aravamudan calls
“experimental antifoundationalism” in other orientalist works from the eighteenth
century, in the case of the Journal we see the deflation of any potential disillusion-
ment with the predetermined strangeness of other.38 The novel’s epidemiological
orientalism compels critics to be rather cautious about affirmative critical stances
in broad investigations of orientalism as it does not yield, in the words of David
Simpson, “a host-and-guest event in which host and guest seem radically different
but are one.”39 H. F. is hardly ever likened to Turks even though he acts and thinks
like how they are imagined to act and think. Their undeniable comparability is
viscerally denied as H. F. parrots his brother, despite the fact that his own narrative
implicates him as a target of his own ethnocentric reasoning.
As H. F. attempts to exteriorize the oriental other—i.e. as he endeavors to
position himself as the subject of reason who can judge Turks from a safe distance—
he paradoxically projects his frustration with them onto his community, accusing
his fellow Londoners of succumbing to Turkish predestinarianism as they resign to
the inevitability that “it was all one whether they went Abroad or staid at home,
they cou’d not escape” (165). His community is guilty as charged, and so is H. F.
And yet, Turks remain sentenced to the margins of the novel’s imagined community
as exorcised outsiders, while H. F. and his community are virtually reconnected in
their shared unreasonableness that is almost the same as but somehow different
from that of the ethnocultural other.
The “predestinarian Turk” exemplifies, in Homi Bhabha’s words, “a subject
of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.”40 However, the performance
of mimicry Bhabha elaborates on in colonial context is reversed in Defoe’s novel.
592 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 56, No. 4

The contested sameness encoded in the Journal concerns subjects who each inhabit
imperial positions. Evaluating the imaginary and actual relationship between the
Turks and the British of the eighteenth century through colonial dynamics would
therefore be unproductive. H. F., furthermore, is more preoccupied with Londoners
than Turks as the agent of dreaded sameness. In other words, it is the British sus-
ceptibility to reason like Turks—not the other way around—that produces tension
in H. F.’s anecdotes. This tension is managed and diffused effectively by upholding
the difference between self and the oriental other through the concurrent implica-
tion and elision of their commonalities in their reaction to plague.

IMAGINED BORDERS OF DISEASE AND COMMUNITY

Given that H. F.’s focus remains centered on the plight of Londoners, not
its ethnocultural outsiders, the notion of Turkish predestinarianism has admittedly
a peripheral significance in the narrative economy of the Journal. And yet, fleet-
ing but repeated mentions of reckless Turks in the context of a contagion have
the effect of carrying foreign bodies (metaphorically) into the imaginary of a local
population. In this regard, this theme operates as a reminder of what Cristobal Silva
underlines astutely as “the ideological power of epidemiology to reshape social and
geographic spaces.”41 Indeed, the trope of Turkish predestinarianism, despite its only
sporadic appearances in Defoe’s text, functions—when situated within the broader
medical-cultural landscape of the long eighteenth century—as a synecdoche not
only for ethnocultural categorizations but also for geospatial configurations that
are associated with infectious diseases. Insofar as “epidemiological thinking… is
explicitly framed as comparative and international,” as Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb
argues, this aspect of the Journal accentuates the geoculturally transgressive yet
relationally insular circulation of infectious diseases as signifiers.42
The correlation between the Turks and plague is established at the very
beginning of the novel when H. F. names Turkey as a possible site of origin for a
disease that traveled from Holland to England. Turkey is referenced as a zone of
contagion in Due Preparations too, wherein Defoe informs the reader that “the
Parliament put the nation to [the] expense of £25,000 sterling to burn two Turkish
ships which were but suspected to have goods on board which might contain an
infection.”43 Epitomizing a “plaguescape,” to borrow the term from Lori Jones,
Turkey is thus conflated with infection in both texts.44
The identification of plague with Turkey, however, is by no means an
idiosyncrasy found solely in Defoe’s writing. It is a recurring motif in the medical
writing from the period in which the Ottoman Empire “came to represent a plague
exporter, the home of all plagues that assailed Europe’s shores.”45 For instance,
a physician named Richard Mead, whom Defoe cites in his Due Preparations,
characterizes the Ottoman Empire in his 1720 study of pestilences as a “perpetual
Seminary of the plague.”46 Published a year later, an anonymous compilation of
essays—bearing striking similarities to the Journal in its organization and pre-
sentation of knowledge related to plague (such as the detailed reproductions of
weekly mortality bills)—asserts that “the Pest was communicated to us from the
Netherlands by way of Contagion… it came from Smyrna to Holland in a parcel
of infected Goods.”47 Analogously, another MD, Sir Richard Blackmore, reiterates
 Camoglu / Defoe’s Epidemiological Orientalism 593

the same argument in his 1722 treatise on plague and fevers as follows: “We have
maintain’d Trade and Commerce by Navigation a long Series of Years with Tur-
key… and yet have not for more than Fifty Years past imported with their Goods
this destructive Contagion into our Country, tho’ their Towns are never or rarely…
free from the Pestilence.”48 These medical texts, some of which Defoe is known to
have consulted when writing the Journal, do not only legitimate epidemiological
orientalism with scientific authority, but also intensify the ethnocentric parameters
of the cultural imaginary of plague.49
While such scientific reasoning cannot identify a cure to plague, it harbors
and fosters an impulse to locate the disease in a concrete way elsewhere. “Disease
threats,” Robert Peckham proposes, end up “producing particular sites of anxiety
and forms of collective panic” where the other morphs into a vector of disease.50
Such concretization of the invisible enemy amounts in the aforementioned medi-
cal texts to assigning plague geocultural and ethnocultural roots and meanings,
which has the (rhetorical) effect of dissociating the community from a foreign
influence. In this orientalist epidemiology, “immunization,” as Graham Hammill
puts it, “preserves communal norms through the rejection of spiritual foes that
are potentially already infecting the individuals who make up that community.”51
Whereas Defoe’s novel reenergizes the epidemiological orientalism of the
medical sources of the period by underlining that plague came from Turkey, it does
so, strangely enough, by exposing the practical irrelevance of this supposition. Even
as he alludes to Holland’s “Turkey Fleet” as the most likely vector of the contagion,
H. F. grants that “it matter’d not, from whence it come” (3). With this small but
sobering acknowledgment, the Journal gently nudges the reader to recall that plague
is already in London, and hence, that it is not a distant reality of a foreign people.
And yet, the recognition regarding the futility of assigning an origin to the disease
does not necessarily culminate in what Andrew Warren detects in other English
texts from the long eighteenth century as a “self-conscious and ironic” instance
of orientalism wherein the British would finally get to “explore and critique the
epistemological, existential, and above all political limits of their own solipsistic
imaginations.”52 In other words, affirming the insignificance of where plague came
from does not necessarily lead in the novel to a straightforward renunciation of
stigmas. Quite the opposite, it showcases how the imagined alterity of the other and
the concurrent solipsism of the self stay intact despite the acknowledged absurdity
of thinking them apart.
As Margaret Healy points out, one of Defoe’s main motivations in writ-
ing the Journal was to “bolster public support for the government’s unpopular
embargo on trade with plague-stricken countries.”53 If Defoe had such a motive,
it can be traced in the novel particularly in the interactions with people of the Ot-
toman Empire which are imagined to take place away from London. H. F. laments
that “no port of France, or Holland, or Spain, or Italy would admit our ships or
correspond with us” (183), and then adds almost with a sigh of relief that regula-
tions “in Turkey… were not so very rigid” and merchants “were freely admitted to
unlade their cargo without any difficulty” at the ports of “Smyrna and Scanderoon”
(183). Capable of altering the course of established trade relations, plague consti-
tutes a disruptive geo-economic dynamic. Whereas the British trade suffers grave
setbacks because of the epidemic, it nonetheless does not come to a complete halt.
594 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 56, No. 4

In the Journal the financial wellbeing of Britain—as far as it concerns its overseas
activities—depends on businesses with non-European actors, the chief amongst
which happens to be the Ottoman Empire. The continuing circulation of possibly
infected goods and individuals renders the Ottoman Empire imaginable as a free
zone of contagion where plague potentially inheres in each and every exchange.54
“Illnesses,” Susan Sontag reminds us, “have always been used as metaphors
to enliven charges that a society was corrupt or unjust,” and as such it does not take
much to understand how they can be weaponized in the discriminatory economy
of orientalism .55 Although he does not delve into the medical layers of orientalist
epistemology, Edward Said gestures to them when he highlights the claim of many
orientalists that “few Egyptians live beyond a few years, because of fatal illness,
the absence of medical aid, and oppressive summer weather.”56 Indeed, prejudiced
accounts of “the inferiority and backwardness of the non-European medical sci-
ence,” as Marie-Cecile Thoral argues, are “at the core of Orientalism.”57 Such
epidemiological orientalization of the foreign body is known to justify itself through
an ethnocentric refusal of others’ ability to access and practice medical knowledge
by their own means, upholding Eurocentric conceptualizations of medicine that
eclipse the diverse history of medical practices across the globe. Calling for a cor-
rective to such reductivism, Miri Shefer-Mossensohn holds that “medicine in the
Muslim Middle East… [is] composed of several subsystems, each promoting a
unique etiology and practice, and each enjoying a different legitimacy.” 58 In the
case of the Ottoman Empire, contra orientalist narratives, there is no empirical
evidence of a uniform reaction to plague that justified itself in religious terms.
Studying the accounts of early modern Ottoman religious scholars on plague, John
Curry concludes that fleeing from infected areas was in fact a common practice in
the Ottoman Empire.59 Furthermore, as Yaron Ayalon’s research on the Ottoman
perceptions of epidemics in the eighteenth century shows, people’s responses to
contagions varied not only on the basis of their religious beliefs but also economic
and psychological factors, as would be expected.60
Although even Rycaut himself stresses the discrepancies between religious
interpretations and actions in the context of plague in the Ottoman Empire, the
myth of Turkish predestinarism pervades the medical publications of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, utilized to illustrate a scientifically illiterate mindset. 61 For
instance, a William Kemp, contemporaneous with Rycaut, relays the following in
his 1665 A Brief Treatise of the Nature, Causes, Signs and Preservation from and
Cure of Pestilence: “The Turks are perswaded, that every one’s fate is written in
his forehead, and hath a fatal destiny appointed by God, which it is impossible for
any to avoid; so that they believe, those that shall die by the Plague.”62 Almost half
a century later, Blackmore exploited the same trope in his medical writing. Even as
he concedes that there is no way to cure plague, Blackmore conjectures that “the
immense Catalogue of Medicines for suppressing the Plague” would not do much
for people like “Turks” who “neglect the use of all Medicines in this Case, led by
the Doctrine of fatal necessity… and thus act absurdly and inconsistently.”63 The
repeated emphasis on Turkish predestinarianism in medical texts does not only
showcase how saturated the medical discourse of the period is with ethnocentric
biases; more crucially, it also illustrates how these medical writings index a sci-
entifically condoned apathy toward the death of the ethnocultural other. It can
 Camoglu / Defoe’s Epidemiological Orientalism 595

indeed be argued that Turks’ presumed irrational indifference to save their own
lives through medicine normalizes the imagination of their death. For, to envision
survival by medicalizing life, these texts have one recommendation in common for
their readers: do not die like Turks.

THE TRIUMPH OF PARADOX

Throughout this article it has been my contention that the distancing of
the oriental other from community does not rely simply on neat dichotomies such
as sick foreigners versus healthy citizens, or the scientific self versus the supersti-
tious other. It is also the paradoxes figuring in medically and fictionally invented
oppositions that immunize—or, desensitize—community against its internal dif-
ferences. Quite disturbingly, then, community can be imagined as bonding over a
discursive removal of its outsiders even when it is confronted with the alienness
that is intrinsic to its presumed uniformity.
Richard A. Barney and Helen Sheck emphasizes the role xenophobic
language plays in the construction of group identity, drawing examples from the
early modern Europe where “Christian communities, especially in Germany and
France, found in Jews and other fringe groups ready scape goats, imagining an
international bioterrorist movement spawned by Satan himself.”64 Menglu Gao
discerns a similar pattern in nineteenth-century British literary and medical por-
trayals of the Chinese, in which a comparative discussion of opium consumption
“presents the British Empire as a united and extensive entity” while condemning
China for lacking “enough ‘motion’ or stimulant to change.”65 What I detect in
the Journal is analogous to the problematic moments spotlighted in the studies
of Gao and Barney and Sheck in that the Islamophobic sentiment encapsulated in
the notion of Turkish predestinarianism echoes the anti-Semitism and Sinophobia
that permeate medical-cultural discourses across time and space, and that prove
disturbingly resilient. For when the socio-psychological kinship between the Turks
and Londoners becomes discernible in the universalizable pain inflicted by plague
in the Journal, that is, even at a moment when shared precarity seems to discour-
age xenophobic preconceptions, the dividing line between self and other—which
is already seemingly vanishing—maintains its presence.
The paradox, which is embedded in the inconsequentiality of the realization
that one is indeed like the other, exemplifies how the meaning-making process in
Defoe’s epidemiological orientalism (and orientalism at large) may not be undercut,
but to the contrary, be bolstered by contradictions. Consequently, the epidemiologi-
cal orientalism of the Journal prompts us to be careful with affirmative perspec-
tives on orientalist narratives wherein the Western subject might be anticipated to
experience, in the words of Ballaster, “startling alienations” and an overwhelming
“shock at the total otherness” of their own cultural identity.66 When nearing its
possible extinction, H. F.’s community exhibits to him a radical estrangement from
what he thinks it is supposed to be: Londoners behaving like predestinarian Turks
puzzles him as a strange phenomenon. Indeed, H. F. cannot help but notice that
“people of London” who “were perfectly sound” were no less “obstinate” than
Turks “prepossess’d with the Principle of Predestination” (197). The strangeness
of it all unsettles H. F. because it comes from within his community, not outside.67
596 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 56, No. 4

And yet, although it names such otherness that is inherent to the community and
thereby gestures toward the collapse of its imaginary homogeneity, Turkish pre-
destinarianism paradoxically operates as a marker of another form of belonging:
a communal belonging that is confronted by, yet unrelentingly uncritical of the
reality of its internal foreignness.
The Journal ends with the uplifting news that the epidemic—after sev-
eral deadly waves—finally disappears. H. F. is elated: “Nor was this by any new
Medicine found out, or new method of cure discovered, or by any experience in
the operation, which the Physicians or Surgeons attained to; but it was evidently
from the secret invisible Hand of Him . . .” (211).
Ultimately, H. F. decides to hold firmly onto the same “hand of God” he
would be reluctant to take as the only cause and cure of plague in his disdain for
Turkish predestinarianism. Whereas, as Landa says, “for the orthodox rationalism
of the period it was sufficient to maintain that God is the undoubted original Source
and prime Cause of all Natural Causes, and Himself the ‘true original Cause’ of the
plague,” H. F. in effect contradicts himself as he suspends his receptiveness toward
religious predeterminism when it applies to Turks.68 This paradox is a formative
ingredient of the collective glimpsed in the novel. Contradictions do not disrupt the
imagination of community in the Journal, but on the contrary, ground it.
Plagues expose the precarity of human existence by demonstrating first
and foremost its social porousness, which is perhaps why critics such as Sergio
Benvenuto optimistically posit that “the basic signifying oppositions… collapse
and… racist categorizations lose all their mobilizing charm” during the times of
contagions.69 Defoe’s fiction, on the other hand, demands that readers reconsider
whether diseases help remove or reinstate imagined borders. The Journal cautions
against any celebratory treatment of plague as an event that can cure geocultur-
ally constructed divides, showcasing the unsavory endurance of orientalist dis-
crimination. In place of the “epistemological alienation” Aravamudan locates in
other eighteenth-century orientalist texts, Defoe’s novel points to the resilience of
ethnocultural myths and biases even when they might be known to be baseless.70
Xenophobic oppositions that get articulated in the dualism of self and other, as H.
F. witnesses, can be paradoxically reinvigorated even when there is a (momentary)
recognition that they neither hold nor matter. Therefore, readers of the Journal
are urged to resist the soothing proposition that ethnocultural demarcations and
discriminations would lose oxygen in global predicaments like plagues. Instead,
what they, that is, we—as twenty-first-century survivors of plague—are directed
toward is a critical vigilance against the complacency that might arise from affir-
mative criticisms of orientalism. It is an ethicopolitical imperative to reimagine the
ends of community by rigorously dismantling orientalist worldviews that solidify,
not evaporate, in times of plague.

NOTES
1. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year; or, Memorials of the Great Pestilence in London,
in 1665, ed. Louis Landa (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010), 165, henceforth cited parenthetically
in the text.

2. I have retained the idiosyncrasies of the original spelling, punctuation, and capitalization in my
quotations from all primary sources.
 Camoglu / Defoe’s Epidemiological Orientalism 597
3. John Richetti, The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
2005), 310.

4. Louis A. Landa, “Introduction,” A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis A. Landa (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), xviii.

5. Christopher F. Loar, “Plague’s Ecologies: Daniel Defoe and the Epidemic Constitution,” Eigh-
teenth-Century Fiction 32, no. 1 (2019): 46.

6. Martin Wagner, “Defoe, Foucault, and the Politics of the Plague,” SEL Studies in English Lit-
erature 1500–1900 57, no. 3 (2017): 503.

7. Maximillian E. Novak, “Defoe and the Disordered City,” PMLA 92, no. 2 (1977): 248.

8. Paula R. Backsheider, “Preface,” A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Paula R. Backsheider (New
York, London: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc. 1992), ix.

9. John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-
Century England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987), 81.

10. Nükhet Varlık, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman
Experience, 1347–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015), 88.

11. John Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 297.

12. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 2012), 2.

13. Michael J. Franklin, Orientalist Jones: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer, and Linguist, 1746–1794
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 42; Emily A. Haddad, Orientalist Poetics: The Islamic Middle
East in Nineteenth-Century English and French Poetry (New York: Routledge, 2002), 27.

14. Gerald Maclean, Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire Before 1800 (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 22.

15. Rosalind Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2005), 15.

16. G. A. Starr, “Defoe and China,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43, no. 4 (2010): 436.

17. Landa, “Introduction,” xv.

18. J. N. Hays, Epidemics and Pandemics: Their Impacts on Human History (Oxford: ABC-CLIO,
2005), 137.

19. David Roberts, “Introduction,” A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis A. Landa (Oxford:
Oxford World’s Classics, 2010), x.

20. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 2006), 44.

21. Paula McDowell, The Invention of the Oral Print Commerce and Fugitive Voices in Eighteenth-
Century Britain (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2017), 96.

22. Michelle Brandwein, “Formation, Process, and Transition in A Journal of the Plague Year,” A
Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Paula R. Backsheider (New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company
Inc., 1992), 353.

23. Everett Zimmerman, “H. F.’s Meditations: A Journal of the Plague Year,” PMLA 87, no. 3
(1972): 288.

24. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1977), 195.

25. Michel Foucault, Power, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 2001), 100.

26. Ernest B. Gilman, “The Subject of the Plague,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10,
no. 2 (2010): 41.

27. Novak, “Defoe and the Disordered City,” 241.

598 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 56, No. 4
28. Daniel Defoe, Due Preparations for the Plague, Romances and Narratives by Daniel Defoe, 16
vols., ed. George A. Aitken (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1895), xv: 16–17.

29. James Cruise, “A Journal of the Plague Year: Defoe’s Grammatology and the Secrets of Belong-
ing,” The Eighteenth Century 54, no. 4 (2013): 480.

30. Rodrick Cavalliero, Ottomania: The Romantics and the Myth of the Islamic Orient (New York:
I. B. Tauris and Co. Ltd., 2013), 166.

31. Lady Mary W. Montagu, The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 3 vols., ed.
Lord Wharncliffe (London: Richard Bentley, 1837), iii: 365.

32. Mary Pix, Ibrahim, The Thirteenth Emperor of the Turks: A Tragedy (London: Bible and Anchor,
1696), 3.

33. Paul Rycaut, The history of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London: Charles Brome,
1686), 17.

34. Ibid., 220. In Rycaut’s historiography, the word “Turk” operates as a synonym for a follower
of Mahomet, whose unreasonable tendency to be fatalistic is attributed to his Islamic faith. Similarly,
Defoe refers to Turks and “Mahometans” interchangeably in the Journal as those “who, prepossessed
with the Principle of Predestination value nothing of Contagion” (275).

35. Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492
(London: Praeger, 2003), 55.

36. Landa, “Introduction,” xvii.

37. Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives: Situations and Structures, 297.

38. Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, 8.

39. David Simpson, Romanticism and the Question of the Stranger (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
2013), 70.

40. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, London: Routledge, 2004), 86.

41. Cristobal Silva, Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of Early New England Narrative (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 2011), 9.

42. Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2021), 13.

43. Defoe, Due Preparations, 4.

44. Lori Jones, “The Diseased Landscape: Medieval and Early Modern Plaguescapes,” Landscapes
17, no. 2 (2016): 118.

45. Varlık, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World, 3.

46. Richard Mead, A Short Discourse Concerning Pestilential Contagion (London: Sam. Buckley,
1720), 27.

47. A Collection of Very Valuable and Scarce Pieces Relating to the Last Plague in the Year 1665
(London: F. Roberts 1721), 14–15.

48. Sir Richard Blackmore, A Discourse upon the Plague with a Preparatory Account of Malignant
Fevers (London: John Clark, 1722), 23.

49. Epidemiological ethnocentrism is at work in orientalist depictions of many other nominally

non-Western countries alongside Turkey. For instance, in the writings of Mead and other physicians,
Egypt is also referenced as a zone of infection.

50. Robert Peckham, “Panic: Reading the Signs,” in Empires of Panic: Epidemics and Colonial
Anxieties, ed. Robert Peckham (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Univ. Press, 2015), 4.

51. Graham Hammill, “Miracles and Plagues: Plague Discourse as Political Thought,” Journal of
Early Modern Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2010): 89.
 Camoglu / Defoe’s Epidemiological Orientalism 599
52. Andrew Warren, The Orient and the Young Romantics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
2014), 3.

53. Margaret Healy, “Defoe’s Journal and the English Plague Writing Tradition,” Literature and
Medicine 22, no. 1 (2003): 26.

54. Distinctions between the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, and by extension of Ottomans and Turks,
blur in the ethnoculturally-charged medical and fictional discourses studied here, which is why they are
referenced throughout the essay interchangeably.

55. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 1990), 9.

56. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London and Henley: Routledge and Kaegan Paul, 1980), 162.

57. Marie-Cecile Thoral, “Colonial Medical Encounters in the Nineteenth Century: The French
Campaigns in Egypt, Saint Domingue and Algeria,” Social History of Medicine 25, no. 3 (2012): 610.

58. Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions 1500–1700
(New York: SUNY Press, 2009), 21.

59. John Curry, “Scholars, Sufis, and Disease: Can Muslim Religious Works Offer Us Novel Insights
on Plagues and Epidemics among the Medieval and Early Modern Ottomans,” in Plague and Contagion
in the Islamic Mediterranean, ed. Nükhet Varlık (Kalamazoo and Bradford: Arc Humanities Press,
2017): 49.

60. Yaron Ayalon, “Religion and Ottoman Society’s Responses to Epidemics in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries,” in Varlık, ed., Plague and Contagion in the Islamic Mediterranean: 181. For a
comprehensive study of Ottoman social and institutional responses to contagions, see Birsen Bulmu,
Plagues, Quarantines, and Geopolitics in the Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press,
2012).

61. Rycaut, The history of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire, 220.

62. William Kemp, A Brief Treatise of the Nature, Causes, Signs, Preservation from, and Cure of
the Pestilence (London: D. Kemp, 1665), 16.

63. Blackmore, A Discourse upon the Plague with a Preparatory Account of Malignant Fevers, 85.

64. Richard A. Barney and Helene Scheck, “Introduction: Early and Modern Biospheres, Politics,
and the Rhetorics of Plague,” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (2010): 7.

65. Menglu Gao, “‘Founding Its Empire on Spells of Pleasure’: Brunonian Excitability, the Invigo-
rated British Opium Eater, De Quincey’s ‘China Question,’” Literature and Medicine 38, no. 1 (2020):
20–21.

66. Ballaster, Fabulous Orients, 45.

67. Defoe’s emphasis on the uncanny resemblance of Londoners to Turks in terms of how they
respond to plague echoes Kemp’s unflattering comparison between “Constantinople,” where people
“neglect all care of avoiding the infection,” and “England,” where it is hard to “think there would be
any such” who would act “without any regard to their own safety” (Journal 16).

68. Landa, “Introduction,” xxiii.

69. Sergio Benvenuto, “Coronavirus and Philosophers: A Tribune,” European Journal of Psycho-
analysis, February 2020, https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/coronavirus-and-philosophers/.

70. Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism, 56.