Establishing the Health Governance of Flows: Authority Performances and Expertise at the International Sanitary Conference of 1892

Abstract

At the 1892 International Sanitary Conference in Venice, experts established international health politics as governing the flows of people, traffic, and information. This focus has remained ingrained in current health politics and shaped the international response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper focuses on the micropolitics among these experts to understand the emergence of such governance expertise. In Venice, experts struggled to perform authority as European governments were unwilling to accept authoritative international expert practice. In response, the experts limited the role of international politics to regulating the movements of information, traffic, and people to make their expertise more agreeable. Such compromising governance expertise entailed two acts of silencing. The experts claimed that interventions that limited themselves to governing these flows were still highly effective and also silenced the de facto intrusiveness of their expertise into colonized sites. Combining classical sociology with science and technology studies, this article contributes conceptually by detailing how authority performances affect governance expertise. Contributing to the history of international relations, I show how the notion of international health politics as governing flows—rather than targeting ill health with global sanitary reform—became established in the late nineteenth century.