A History of the World in Eight Plagues

The fall of Neanderthal and the rise of homo sapiens; the fall of Rome, the rise of Christianity; the fall of Ghenghis Khan and the rise of Ming dynasty; the Age of Exploration and the splinter of the Catholic Church, the rise of capitalism, the fate of the American Revolution and where slavery took root and did not.

We only see history as a story about people, but tiny microbes are far more important. That’s the take by academic Jonathan Kennedy‘s 2023 book Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues. (After On Savage Shores, this is the second book in a row I’ve read by authors from southwest England).

For most of human history we didn’t know the microscopic level so we didn’t understand the role it played. Fewer than 1,300 of our ancestors may have lived at one time a million years ago, in part because of climate and disease, according to research released this summer. The effects of the microscopic world are bigger than we’ve yet realized.

This book picks up from an influential 1976 book called Plagues and People. It’s insightful and challenging and presents a new way to see the world. I recommend it. Below I share my notes from the book for future research.

My notes:

• Victor Hugo: “Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins”
• Sigmund Freud said there’s been three great revolutions in Western science and each dealt a blow to humans belief in our special status or what he referred to as our “naïve self love. “The first began with Copernicus, noting that the Earth is not the center of the universe. Then Charles Darwin pointed out that humans are just another species and the third was his own discovery of the unconscious, that we don’t even control our own thought process the “most irritating insult “to “the human mania of greatness “
• Galileo found reversing his telescope lenses made small things visible but 50 years later Leeuwenhoek found microscopic world and another 200 years that we understood it
• Luca Bacteria, eukaryotes and archea
• A gene inherited from a virus 400m years ago helps us form memories; by coding for tiny protein bubbles that help log information between neurons like how viruses spread their genetic information from one cell to another
• Between 100-200 million years ago a virus infected a distant ancestor that helped the placenta form, not a gradual form of evolution but a lasting mark of virus — which uses the same function to create proteins that attach to cells without triggering an immune response; most of the animal kingdom otherwise still lay eggs
• We have an Anthropic view of history: Thomas Carlisle wrote “the history of the world is about the biography of great men “and the common alternative to the great men theory of history is what Lucien Febvre referred to in the 1930s as “history from below, and not from above, “ or “histoire vue d’en bas et non d’en haut”
• Did humans explode over other homo species 50k years ago because of “symbolic behavior” to coordinate? (Like Yuval Noah Harrari and others argue came with the cognitive revolution) Or?
• Margaret Mead: human civilization began when we started to care for the weak and sick. So the find that a Neanderthal skeleton of a disabled 45 year old man in Shanidar was cared for by his community conveys complexity. Neanderthals also made tools, could speak and In Spain they made cave art
• Maybe the cognitive revolution was really a cultural one as Neanderthal and Homo sapiens exchanged. Europeans and indigenous were separated for 17k years and it caused plagues; modern humans and Neanderthals were separated for at least 30 times longer. Interbreeding May have helped (poison antidote model)
• Paleolithic plagues: Last glacial period 110-12k years ago had Neanderthals numbering just 5k-70k and spread widely so interbred ; Homo sapiens were still in Africa and numbered 120k-325k so more genetically varied, and so more resilient to infectious disease, and they carried a greater disease load from living in animal dense tropics than Neanderthals in cold Europe for hundreds of thousands of years. When Homo sapiens finally built up enough Neanderthal immunity(after several visits and retreats), we came out and brought disease that killed out everyone else
• Stonehenge was built by immigrants
• David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything argue the 3k years of Neolithic Revolution was too long and meandering to call a revolution— in the Fertile Crescent the warming climate made foraging easier too so farming wasn’t out of desperation but “playful experiments” to stay longer in semi permanent villages. Even though hunter gatherers lived average 72 years, not so different than today
• Large Neolithic cities didn’t develop in eastern woodlands of North America
• Was Neolithic Revolution good? Jean Jacques Rousseau called it the “fall of a man“ theory, and Jared Diamond famously argued the adoption of settled agriculture was the “worst mistake in the history of the human race” Janes Scott says the “standard civilizational narrative” argues obviously it was good. Graber and Wengrow argue the link between farming and and civilization is less clearly linked
• A study argued the earth can only hold 10m hunter gatherers
• Marshall Sahlins calls it The Neolithic Great Leap Forward” referencing the Mao Chinese five year plan , because Neolithic farming tended to result 500 -1k years later a decline in population; early farming was more likely to starve than hunter gatherers because of dependence and fewer less healthy foods, so we got weaker just as we were exposed to animal pathogens
• John Mcneil: mosquitoes are a domesticated insect because we help them thrive (pools of water and agriculture)
• Cheddar Man and other prehistoric remains suggest that farming diets made lighter skin advantageous in less sunny Europe
• Europe’s Western Hunter Gatherers were likely killed out by pathogens spread by Neolithic European Farmers
• Then Western Steppe Herders took the invention of wheel and domestic horses , lighter skinned, lactose tolerant and 4800-4900 years ago they came to dominate Europe , with both some war but also plague
• Cucuteni-Trypilla mega settlements may have ended because of plague
• Basque language likely last surviving remnant of Neolithic farmer language; Western Steppe Herders likely brought in the language of Proto Indo European
• Karl Marx wrote “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”
• Athens got hit with a plague (Pericles and as much as a third of the men died), before losing to Sparta in the long Pellopenniasian war.
• From Horace: “Conquered Greece took captive her conqueror” (of how Greece to Macedonian Greats broke apart to Ptolemaic among others to Rome which adored many Greek styles and forms
• Rome’s lack of awareness of germ theory meant that their attempts at public health failed (open pit latrines and no hand washing) meaning it created a kind of force field: if you survived to adulthood you were immune. In 3rd BCE when Hannibal invaded Rome it was malaria that killed then off
• Kyle Harper in The Fate of Rome: dense and globalized Rome with poor hygiene was vulnerable to pandemic more than dense “barbarians”
• The Antonine Plague (killing 10% of empire, or 7-8 million) was just first of many that brought the end of Pax Romana
• Rodney Stark argues fall of Greco/Roman paganism and the rise of Christianity was due to plague: paganism had no charmed afterlife and required sacrifice; Jesus had afterlife and a chance of redemption which attracted during pandemic
• Islam rises because of answer to plague too . As a billl, Gina, Story and Henri Pirenne argued without Muhammad Charlemagne would be inconceivable.
• The 1957 film Seventh Seal popularized the visual of Death playing chess; also gives a sense of the devastation of the black at times of crusades

• No black plague for 500 years then little ice age changed climate for rodents
• The Black plague brought down Ghenghis Khan and rise of Ming dynasty
• Ole Benedictow estimates that 50 of 80 m Europeans died between 1346-1353; ice core dried in Swiss alps shows a compete halt of lead pollution (the economy just stopped, no mining); a second outbreak in 1361 killed another 20% ; continued throughout rest of 14th and 15th centuries
• Erfurt treasure: Jewish family hid in the walls before being massacred on March 21, 1349, one of 350 attacks on Europe’s Jews for being blamed for Black Death
• England didn’t return to 1300 population until 18th century; quarantine word comes from Italy /Venice requiring 40 days of ship waiting period
• Quarantine and cordon sanitarie were effective in slowing and marked big shift in need for nations to control people: Michel Foucault (1926-1984) noted the shift from controlling territory to controlling people is a mark of the modern world
• The plague opened up opportunity for the less-dense Ottoman expansions which disrupted European land routes to far east so, as Alan Mikhail has argued, Spain snd Portugal looked for a sea route to the Indies and found America’s (Columbus was a Genovese trader who responded to Genovese trading colony of Kaffa falling to Ottomans)
• Plague drove a loss of faith in Catholic Church whose priests were less Christ followers and were in pursuit of wealth and easy jobs ; John Wycliffe in 1320 born and starts what becomes Lollards , who are portrayed kindly by the Parson in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1380s). This is Proto Protestantism 150 years before Martin Luther
• Max Weber said Protestantism pursed capitalism more than Catholics (legal system and opposition to single papacy and property rights
• The Black plague shrunk the European labor force but France remained feudal while the English institutionalized (parliament and leftover change from the Norman conquest of 1066); this resulted in stronger serfs who gained clout; some didn’t compete but others began to invest in new processes and trade surplus (capitalism! ) which got them out of the “Malthusian cycle of demographic boom and bust”
• Corte‘s 500 men disobeyed orders in Mexico and Pizarro’s 150 in Peru conquered complex societies with small numbers
• Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel doesn’t point to germs enough, quoting Diamond as saying: “ the Spaniard’s superior weapons would have ensured an ultimate Spanish victory in any case”
• Spanish GDP was just 1.5 times that of Mexico or Peru; Similar to U.S. vs UK today; and only few horses actually came over initially
• Diamond’s theory predates US struggles in Afghanistan (US had 40 times the GDP) or Vietnam, where superior military technology was not decisive. (Especially in a defensive infinite contest vs a offensive finite one) should be called Germs Germs Germs
• Columbus left behind a ship’s crew because the ship ran aground but when he returned less than a year later with 17 ships; his crew had been killed. Hundreds of thousands of Taino on Hispaniola so easily overwhelmed them, but by 1514 only 26k remained after disease and by mid 1500s they were all gone (brutality but more disease: flu and then 1518 smallpox killing as much as half population
• Casas’s 1552 “a short account of the destruction of the indies”
• Cortes was badly beaten but a 1k troop stationed in Cuba came to stop him though carried disease, which they saw as divine intervention: Francisco Aguilar: “when the Christians were exhausted from war, god saw fit to send the Indians smallpox”
• 99.5% of troops in 75 day siege of Tenochitkan were indigenous
• A 1545 Mexica pandemic killed 80% of poppkstin perhaps deadliest known of any outbreak (similar to salmonella)
• Melissa Dell: those today in Bolivia who descend from mita serving worlds largest silver mine Cerro Rico at Potosi are poorer and unhealthier than peers
• Norsemen were isolated and didn’t have diseases like Spanish when they failed to establish Vinland on the Americas
• John Winthrop of MASS BAY Colony 1634 “For the natives, they are neere all dead of small Poxe, so as the Lord bathe cleared our title to what we possess.”
• Disease ravaged Americas for Spanish but the Portuguese turned to Africa where there was more exposure to Eurasian disease and so less brutal pandemic. Instead it was malaria and yellow fever that hurt Europeans slowing process to coastal ports, North Africa and South Africa, until 1846 paper by Thomas Thomson who identified chinchona bark (which holds quinine) as a combat to malaria (but not yellow fever which wasn’t yet understood as different). This truly began and allowed the Scramble for Africa, as by the 1890s Europe’s was exploring the interior. Further with less decimated population, Europeans built “extractive institutions” for Africa but built permanent homes in Americas
• “When we revolt, it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.” Frantz Fanon
• Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations agreed slavery was repugnant but also “ the work done by Freeman comes cheaper in the end in the work performed by slaves”
• By 1680s black Africans had become primary slavery in Caribbean (where English indentured servants couldn’t survive due to yellow fever that Africans had), and came to define modern slavery more than the less racialized past
• “The single biggest factor behind the sudden and marked increase in enslaved African-Americans between 1680 and 1750 in the southern colonies – but not the northern ones – was infectious diseases.” Falciparum Malaria became endemic to the south where Africans fared better than the indentured servants of the north, which Adam Smith argued would be more effective; the temperate zone for those Mosquitoes ? split more or less the mason Dixon line
• Elena Esposito argues those slaves from Sierra Leone and other areas known for malaria fetched highest prices became known for immunity
• John McNeil: malaria killed 8 times more British troops than American guns, especially decisive Yorktown as part of failed British southern strategy
• Haiti becomes independent with help of malaria against French, Napoleon gives up his pursuit of Americas and sells off Louisiana purchase; British ends slave trade in 1807 to reduce flow of cheap slaves to boost price and increase treatment of more expensive remaining slaves
• “A greater revolution for humanity than the theories of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud, but together came with the invention of the toilet” Goce Smilevski
• Eric Hobsbawm the long nineteenth century (And Bradford Delong’s long 20th
• Why industrialization in United Kingdom but not in Spain when it has influx of riches from the Americas that caused excess and devaluing of silver? In UK, expensive labor dating back to Black Death, feudal Taranstiin to capitalism where investment made sense, existing coal reserves and raw materials at the right time fro Caribbean and Americas
• The Factory Act of 1833 limited working hours 9-12 to 48 hours a week but some thought it was unlawful intervention into free market
• “Filth theory of disease” sanitary movement in England
• Crisis always motivates. After generations of failed reform, an especially brutal cholera outbreak in 1848 killing 14k spurred the Public Health Act to which The Times said brokers was “the best of all sanitary reformers”
• 1854; John Snow’s famous cholera study finding it came from the same water pump handle
• Author calls Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now reductive because it ignores widespread inequality in life and wealth gains
• Jeffrey Sachs “poverty trap”
• Daron Acemoglu: disease from colonial era predicts patterns today: New England indigenous were killed by disease so colonists brought families; Africa diseases killed colonists so they built extractive systems
• “Shit Life Syndrome” local doctors in Blackpool where cheap rents attract struggling people
• 1980s US and UK pull out of one nation one vote from WHO to instead move to World Bank and IMF
• Angus Deaton: deaths of despair since 2015
• “The whole thing is not about heroism. It’s about decency. It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency.” Albert Camus
• Thomas Carlyle “great men” of history
• Shockingly he notes China system offers advantages to American liberal democracy
• Anti microbial resistance could offer next plague
• William McNeil: we didn’t improve health outcomes for rich counties in 19th and 20th centuries by better medicine or economic growth but by political decisions to invest in sanitation, drinking water, housing and poverty reduction
• In a review of William Mcneil‘s influential 1976 bok Plages & Peoples, the British historian Thomas described the people who undertake such studies as “small peasants, intensively cultivating tiny tracts of the past… Their labor is arduous and indispensable, but if they pause to raise their heads their vision is usually bounded by their neighbors fence”
• ((My note: Journalists are an eccentric and cluttered breed who collect tiny fragments of stories today so that 1 of 100 might give an historian some insight decades later, who might in turn share something with the later world. Journalists then sell bits of attention to retailers today so that our grandchildren can know themselves. And yet you ask us to do away with the advertisements.))