It’s easy to forget, growing up in the now, that getting sick used to be much more serious than a doctor’s visit co-pay and the annoyance of having to stand in line to pick up your prescription at a pharmacy. Until the discovery of penicillin, disease was a major, sometimes civilization-altering problem. Though there have since been several books published that explore the issue, William H. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples was the first major work to really dig into the impact of germs on the course of human history.
It begins by tracing the development of civilization itself through the rise of agriculture, allowing humans to make long-term, population-dense settlements for the first time. Out of this came two parasitic relationships: germs on people, and upper classes on lower classes. In probably the most interesting (to me) part of the book, McNeill argues that in both cases, the takers have to deliberately calibrate their relationship to the givers. If an illness causes too much death too quickly, or aristocrats demand too much labor from the workers, the pool of those that can serve to meet the needs of the parasite shrinks too quickly, leading to collapse.
McNeill then uses this lens to examine how this has actually worked throughout history, focusing especially on disease. China proves a particularly illustrative example, as its northern regions are temperate and its southern regions are tropical and subject to mosquito-borne endemic diseases like malaria. The north, therefore, was home to much larger and more stratified cities, as waves of disease kept southern cities from being able to achieve the same numbers. But that disease also helped repel periodic invasions, as any entering force would encounter the native pathogens for the first time and died off in significant numbers. He also examines the success of the Mongol Empire and the way its hordes were abetted by the plague-carrying fleas that came with them from the northern steppes. The local tribes had long familiarity with the signs of plague outbreak among the rodent population and had techniques to avoid exposure…not so for groups encountering it for the first time.
There are a lot of ideas in this book that have, since its publication in the 1970s, become central to an understanding of why and how history developed the way it has. In that sense, it’s a major success. In the sense of a reading experience, however, this failed majorly for me. It is drier than the Gobi desert. McNeill is obviously a thoughtful, diligent historian but was not able to find a way to convey his actually interesting ideas in a compelling fashion. It’s written clearly, without technical language or jargon getting in the way. Nevertheless, I found it very difficult to stay focused on this book and the theories it presents, not because of a failure to understand it per se, but because it was just honestly so boring that I found myself forgetting what I’d read just a few pages earlier. I wish the book’s contents had been presented more dynamically, because this is a subject area I find inherently compelling. Even if you do too, though, I can’t recommend slogging through this. It has been influential on other authors, like Jared Diamond and Laurie Garrett, and I recommend seeking out their work instead.
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