Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

History

Advisor

Beth Baron

Committee Members

Clifford Rosenberg

Sara Farhan

Mandana Limbert

Subject Categories

Arts and Humanities | History | History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Islamic World and Near East History

Keywords

Iraq, public health, rurality, governance

Abstract

This dissertation is a social and political history of public health in rural Iraq between the 1930s and the 1970s, examining the countryside as both a subject of study and an object of state reform. It traces the evolution of a range of public health interventions – from disease control programmes and rural health centres to environmental management and agricultural reform – which sought to reshape Iraq’s rural provinces towards a normative vision of better health among the population and, ultimately, the nation itself. Drawing on Iraqi government archives, public health reports, medical journals, WHO archives and print media, this dissertation explores how medicine and public health became central arenas through which the state articulated its authority and sought to transform the countryside. As a growing corpus of Iraqi doctors and scientists began to wield greater influence across the medical system in the post-mandate period, they took a leading role in directing attention towards the issues they encountered: debilitating rates of diseases such as malaria and schistosomiasis, particularly in areas far from the capital. Such issues provided a tangible focus for increasing anxieties about village and rural life in the provinces, while a series of severe floods reinforced the potential dangers of the water and the land. Greater access to oil revenues in the 1950s, and even more so after nationalisation in the 1970s, provided the capital to exert greater control over bodies and the environment on a rapidly increasing scale, driving new visions of development and productivity. These interventions did not end rural marginalisation; instead, in many ways, they entrenched it. Taken together, they not only reflected shifting medical paradigms but also redefined the relationship between state and rural society, structured by colonial legacies, global health networks and the political economy of oil. This dissertation ultimately offers a case study of how public health governance operated in and through rural areas, and by doing so, demonstrates the value of rurality as an analytical concept in understanding the history of the modern Middle East.

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