Across the Atlantic: A King’s Speech and a Plague Ship

The following is a guest post from Bassam Sidiki, author of the forthcoming book Parasitic Empires: Infection, Insularity, Inter-Imperiality, 1880–2022 (November 2026).

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What does King Charles III’s speech to the US Congress on April 28th have to do with the outbreak, earlier that month, of Hantavirus aboard a Dutch-owned cruise ship sailing from Argentina to Cape Verde? An outbreak that people across the world, having survived a pandemic not too long ago, continue to watch with wary attention even after passengers disembarked and the MV Hondius reached port.

Ostensibly, not so much. But when considering these transatlantic scenes of the US-UK special relationship and a virus-stricken vessel together, I cannot help but be reminded of the central argument of Parasitic Empires: how the imaginary of infectious disease enabled the collaboration and competition between the British and US empires in the long twentieth century, both in the Atlantic and beyond.

King Charles’s speech has all the hallmarks of the rhetoric of Anglo-American unity that has persisted since the Great Rapprochement of the turn of the twentieth century: emphasis on shared values, culture, and language—although, at the beginning of his speech, the King invokes Oscar Wilde to quip that “We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.” 

For many observers however, the speech is a sobering and somewhat ironic event, one in which a British monarch not only has to remind the American Republic of its commitments to democracy, liberalism, and freedom of speech, but also one in which the king chooses to cite the Magna Carta as the very fountain from which American constitutional principles spring: 

[The Founding Fathers] carried with them, and carried forward, the great inheritance of the British Enlightenment – as well as the ideals which had an even deeper history in English common law and Magna Carta. These roots run deep, and they are still vital. Our Declaration of Rights of 1689 was not only the foundation of our constitutional monarchy but also provided the source of so many of the principles reiterated, often verbatim, in the American Bill of Rights of 1791.

By invoking the British Enlightenment, Charles punctures the fantasies of American exceptionalism or insularity. Indeed, he warns both Britons and Americans to “ignore the clarion calls to become ever more inward-looking.” We cannot be insular if we have always been one shared space, he seems to suggest; he goes on to conjure an evocative image of how the two nations were one landmass before being rent asunder by the deep time of plate tectonics: “Millennia before our nations existed, before any border drawn, the mountains of Scotland and Appalachia were one, a single, continuous range, forged in the ancient collision of continents.” 

Charles’s speech is notable not only for such imaginaries of shared Anglo-American space, but also for emphasizing the significance of the current time. He notes that 2026 marks not just the 250th anniversary of the American War of Independence, but also the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Where 1776 sowed the seeds of bitter discord between these two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race, 2001—building on solidarities forged in the intervening years—brings them back together even more forcefully through a shared commitment to (empire under the guise of) international security. “Renewal today starts with security,” he avers. “The United Kingdom recognizes that the threats we face demand a transformation in British defense. That is why our country, in order to be fit for the future, has committed to the biggest sustained increase in defense spending since the Cold War.”

Parasitic Empires, however, demonstrates British-US collaboration not through military defense, but defense against infectious microbes. In numerous discourses from the emergence of germ theories at the turn of the twentieth century into the present, these two forms of defense—namely, the military and medical—appear to be coextensive, as scholars such as Ed Cohen, Lorenzo Servitje, and others have shown. For instance, consider how British physician Sir Francis Fremantle writes, in A Traveler’s Study of Health and Empire (1911), that “The future of our empire will rest, it is said, on treaties, tariffs, and defence. These pages seek to show that defence of health is as important as defence of territory. For disease is a deadlier foe than man; health and morale give greater strength than armaments.” Indeed, as Anjuli Raza Kolb provocatively suggests in Epidemic Empire, this militarized rhetoric of disease continued to inform representations of the War on Terror as well, the same War on Terror that Charles calls upon as the ground zero of mutual Anglo-American sympathy. 

The current MV Hondius situation is pertinent within this historical context because, as I show in the second chapter of my book, the “plague ship narrative” was a key discursive strategy of fin-de-siecle transatlantic literatures through which authors actively reckoned with the rising hegemony of the United States, the resulting tension with the British Empire, and the maritime transmission of epidemics from racialized and/or colonized places. The ship by itself had immense historical resonance as it became the reigning symbol of the Great Rapprochement, with Britons and Americans routinely shuttling across the pond of the Atlantic. But in 1897, the ship accrued symbolic associations not just with Anglo-Saxon reunion but also with non-Anglo-Saxon peril. In the wake of cholera, bubonic plague, and yellow fever outbreaks, numerous plague ship narratives constructed such diseases as peculiar to the Other: the Asian, the Black, the Jew. These narratives of what I call “racialized quarantined,” such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Jack London’s short story “The Plague Ship”—and wherein the disease threats travel to British and American shores via ships in the Mediterranean and the Pacific, respectively—recruited the emerging germ theories to construct a global color line. 

The “plague ship narrative” was a key discursive strategy of fin-de-siecle transatlantic literatures through which authors actively reckoned with the rising hegemony of the United States, the resulting tension with the British Empire, and the maritime transmission of epidemics from racialized and/or colonized places.

And yet, this color line was not always about demarking white from nonwhite. The figure of the parasitic microbe was also used by the Britons to characterize the “Yankee invasions” of tourism and commerce that had lately beleaguered their isles, betraying anxieties about a rising US and a waning British empire. In popular literature, this was most famously demonstrated in Dracula, where it is the Texan Quincey Morris who first mentions the word “vampire,” thereby becoming associated with the parasitic Count; both are vanquished by the end of the novel to neutralize not only the colonial or Jewish threat, but also the American one. But more importantly, Quincey first encounters the vampire bat in the Pampas of Argentina—the same country from where the MV Hondius departed this April. 

The mention of Argentina in Dracula anticipates the Monroe Doctrine, which the Dutch scientist Van Helsing invokes to ingratiate himself with Quincey in the following terms: “[Texas’s] reception into the Union was a precedent which may have far-reaching effects hereafter, when the Pole and the Tropics may hold alliance to the Stars and Stripes. The power of Treaty may yet prove a vast engine of enlargement, when the Monroe doctrine takes its true place as a political fable.” This doctrine would have been foremost in Bram Stoker’s mind because Dracula was published a mere two years after the Venezuela Crisis in 1895, the first serious enforcement of Monroe wherein the Americans arbitrated a boundary dispute between Britain and the Latin American country. And that doctrine was, as we may recall, on the lips of every politico, historian, and journalist at the beginning of this year when the United States launched a military strike on Venezuela. 

In his speech to Congress, King Charles noted the significance of 2026 in terms of American independence and 9/11, but the strike on Venezuela and his own address as a British monarch censuring the current US administration demonstrate the importance of 2026 in another way: as the close of a 130-year long American century, bookended by imperial triumph in Venezuela on the one hand, and post-imperial debacle in that country on the other. 

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Bassam Sidiki is assistant professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin.