In recent years, the Hajj has once again emerged in debates on global health. In 2009, the journey was connected to fears of H1N1, more commonly known as “swine flu,” and in 2012 and 2013, there were rumors of a possibly global spread of a new disease, the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), through the annual meeting of pilgrims in Mecca. This latter affliction triggered a whole list of precautions, propagated by the World Health Organization (WHO). Pilgrims should consider at the outset if they were fit enough to travel and then take precautions such as the wearing of facial masks, frequent hand washing, good personal hygiene, and food safety practices. A publicity campaign with banners, pamphlets, and radio announcements on board planes and ships and at international points of entry should raise awareness about the disease. WHO surveillance schemes and laboratory services should be stepped up, and the health of returning pilgrims should be closely monitored with potentially ill travelers identified and transported to specific hospitals for assessment and treatment. If a diseased pilgrim was found on board a plane, a “passenger locator form” was to be used to make sure that crucial intelligence on the particular pilgrim and the outbreak of the disease could be centrally collected.

These precautions – in particular, the focus on the pilgrims’ bodily practices, the routes of travel, information, science, and international organizations – resonate elements of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments that will be teased out in the following. In this chapter, I build an argument relating to the connection of the Hajj and the establishment of international health regimes. The chapter follows cycles of connection between contagious disease and the Hajj as a mass event, beginning in the 1850s and 1860s with the Conference of Constantinople and the establishment of quarantines in the Red Sea, to the introduction of new scientific measures around the turn of the century, the experiment with new international organizations in the 1920s, and the question of decolonization and self-government after the Second World War.