The Plague Cycle

by Charles Kenny

  21. Crawford, Deadly Companions, p. 68.

  22. Ibid., p. 60.

  23. IRIN News, “Pig-Cull Induced Street Rubbish ‘National Scandal,’ ” January 26, 2010. Retrieved from http://www.irinnews.org/report/87853/egypt-pig-cull-induced-street-rubbish-a-national-scandal.

  24. Drisdelle, Parasites.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Kelly Harkins and Anne Stone, “Ancient Pathogen Genomics: Insights into Timing and Adaptation,” Journal of Human Evolution 79 (2015): 137–49.

  27. Wolfe et al., “Origins of Major Human Infectious Diseases,” and Harkins and Stone, “Ancient Pathogen Genomics.”

  28. J. O. Wertheim, M. D. Smith, D. M. Smith, K. Scheffler, and S. L. Kosakovsky Pond, “Evolutionary Origins of Human Herpes Simplex Viruses 1 and 2,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 31, no. 9 (2014): 2356–2364. Hepatitis B and an early form of tuberculosis are other examples. Andrew P. Dobson and E. Robin Carper, “Infectious Diseases and Human Population History,” Bioscience 46, no. 2 (1996): 115–126, Green, “Globalisations of Disease.”

  29. Scott, Against the Grain, p. 4.

  30. Yuki Furuse, Akira Suzuki, and Hitoshi Oshitani, “Origin of Measles Virus: Divergence from Rinderpest Virus between the 11th and 12th Centuries,” Virology Journal 7, no. 52 (2010).

  31. Dobson and Carper, “Infectious Diseases.”

  32. Furuse, “Origin of Measles Virus.”

  33. Sarah Cobey, “Modeling Infectious Disease Dynamics,” Science, April 24, 2020.

  34. Marcus J. Hamilton, Robert S. Walker, and Dylan C. Kesler, “Crash and Rebound of Indigenous Populations in Lowland South America,” Scientific Reports 4 (2014).

  35. Deepa Naraya et al., Voices of the Poor: Can Anyone Hear Us? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  36. Peter Katona and Judit Katona-Apte, “The Interaction Between Nutrition and Infection,” Clinical Infectious Diseases 46, no. 10 (2008): 1582–1588. For a summary of the debate over the related McKeown Thesis, see James Colgrove, “The McKeown Thesis: A Historical Controversy and Its Enduring Influence,” American Journal of Public Health 92, no. 5 (2002): 725–729.

  37. Cohen, Health and the Rise of Civilization, pp. 58–64.

  38. Ibid., pp. 116–124. See also Richard H. Steckel, The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: Health and Nutrition in Pre-Columbian America, Working Paper no.10299, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2004.

  39. Simon Szreter, “The Importance of Social Intervention in Britain’s Mortality Decline c. 1850–1914: A Re-interpretation of the Role of Public Health,” Social History of Medicine 1, no. 1 (1988): 1–38, on Liverpool. Data on life expectancy from Gapminder for Sierra Leone is 25.1 and Nigeria 30.4 for 1850, for example (from www.gapminder.org).

  40. In addition, the average height of recruits to the British Army fell between the 1820s and the 1850s, led by city recruits. Bernard Harris, “Public Health, Nutrition, and the Decline of Mortality: The McKeown Thesis Revisited,” Social History of Medicine 17, no. 3 (2004): 379–407.

  41. As the Biblical God had warned Biblical Eve on her exile from Eden: “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16).

  42. Note the order between fertility leading to population growth leading to infection (as opposed to population growth from other causes leading to infection creating pressure to increase fertility) is debatable. See Jean-Pierre Bocquet-Appel, “When the World’s Population Took Off: The Springboard of the Neolithic Demographic Transition,” Science 333, no. 6042 (2011): 560–561.

  43. Scott, Against the Grain, p. 82, suggests it is not just “domesticated” humans who experience higher fertility—the same occurs with rats and foxes.

  44. The Code of Hammurabi, translated by L. W. King. Retrieved from http://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/hamframe.asp.

  45. Ester Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change Under Population Pressure (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1965), p. 4.

  46. Ibid., p. 7.

  47. Ibid., p. 30.

  48. See Jed Kaplan et al., “Holocene Carbon Emissions as a Result of Anthropogenic Land Cover Change,” Holocene 1 (2010): 17, and Kees Klein Goldewijk et al., “The HYDE 3.1 Spatially Explicit Database of Human-Induced Global Land-Use Change over the Past 12,000 Years,” Global Ecology and Biogeography 20, no.1 (2011): 73–86.

  49. Cormac Ó Gráda, Famine: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

  50. Walter Scheidel, “Emperors, Aristocrats, and the Grim Reaper: Towards a Demographic Profile of the Roman Elite,” Classical Quarterly 49, no. 1 (1999): 254–281.

  51. Scott, Against the Grain, p. 35.

  52. Data available from the Yale University SETO lab: http://urban.yale.edu/data.

  Chapter Three: Trade Merges Disease Pools

  1. James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the First Civilizations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 125.

  2. Mark Nathan Cohen, Health and the Rise of Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 23.

  3. William Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World (New York: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2009), pp. 44–45 and 49.

  4. M. J. Papagrigorakis et al., “DNA Examination of Ancient Dental Pulp Incriminates Typhoid Fever as a Probable Cause of the Plague of Athens,” International Journal of Infectious Diseases 10, no. 3 (2006): 206–214, and Powel Kazanjian, “Ebola in Antiquity?” Clinical Infectious Diseases 61, no. 6 (September 2015): 963–968.

  5. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Richard Crawley, Chapter VII. Retrieved from http://classics.mit.edu/Thucydides/pelopwar.2.second.html.

  6. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, abridgement of Vols. I–VI by D. C. Somervell (Cambridge, UK: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 183–184.

  7. Livy’s History of Rome: Book 3, translated by Rev. Canon Roberts. Retrieved from http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/txt/ah/Livy/Livy03.html.

  8. Frederick Fox Cartwright and Michael Denis Biddiss, Disease and History (New York: Marboro Books, 1972), p. 10.

  9. Scott, Against the Grain, p. 156.

  10. Quoted in Raoul McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East: Trade Routes to the Ancient Lands of Arabia, India and China (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010), p. 3.

  11. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples.

  12. William Rosen, Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire and the Birth of Europe (New York: Random House, 2010).

  13. Yu Huan, The Peoples of the West from the Weilue, a third-century Chinese account composed between 239 and 265 CE, quoted in zhuan 30 of the Sanguozhi, published in 429 CE, English translation by John E. Hill. Retrieved from http://depts.washington.edu/silkroad/texts/weilue/weilue.html.

  14. Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).

  15. Cartwright and Biddiss, Disease and History, p. 13.

  16. R. S. Bray, Armies of Pestilence: The Impact of Disease on History (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke & Co., 2004), pp. 12–13.

  17. Kyle Harper, “Pandemics and Passages to Late Antiquity: Rethinking the Plague of c. 249–270 Described by Cyprian,” Journal of Roman Archaeology 28 (2015): 223–260.

  18. Robert Sallares, Abigail Bouwman, and Cecilia Anderung, “The Spread of Malaria to Southern Europe in Antiquity: New Approaches to Old Problems,” Medical History 48, no. 3 (2004): 311–328.

  19. Procopius of Caesarea, “The Secret History,” translated by Richard Atwater. Fordham University Medieval Sourcebook. Retrieved from http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/procop-anec1.asp.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Nicolás Rascovan, Karl-Göran Sjögren, Kristian Kristiansen, Rasmus Nielsen, Eske Willerslev, Christelle Desnues, and Simon Rasmussen, “Emergence and Spread of Basal Lineages of Yersinia Pestis During the Neolithic Decline,” Cell 176, nos. 1–2 (2019): 29
5–305.

  22. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange, p. 139.

  23. Monica Green, “Taking ‘Pandemic’ Seriously: Making the Black Death Global,” Medieval Globe 1, no. 1 (2016).

  24. M. Harbeck et al., “Yersinia pestis DNA from Skeletal Remains from the 6th Century CE Reveals Insights into Justinianic Plague,” PLoS Pathogens 9, no. 5 (2013).

  25. Quoted in Lester K. Little, “Life and Afterlife of the First Plague Pandemic,” in Lester K. Little (ed.), Plague and the End of Antiquity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 7.

  26. Procopius, History of the Wars, Books I and II. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16764/16764-h/16764-h.htm.

  27. Bray, Armies of Pestilence, p. 42.

  28. Procopius of Caesarea, “The Secret History.”

  29. Bray, Armies of Pestilence, p. 29, and Rosen, Justinian’s Flea.

  30. Bray, Armies of Pestilence, p. 116.

  31. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange, p. 137.

  32. John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 44.

  33. Little, “Life and Afterlife,” and Rosen, Justinian’s Flea.

  34. Forest cover in England and Germany may have fallen to below 10 percent in 1350. Jed O. Kaplan, Kristen M. Krumhardt, and Niklaus Zimmermann, “The Prehistoric and Preindustrial Deforestation of Europe,” Quaternary Science Reviews 28, no. 27 (2009): 3016–3034.

  35. Kelly, The Great Mortality.

  36. Quoted by Ronald Latham in his Introduction to Marco Polo: The Travels (New York: Penguin, 1958), p. 11.

  37. Marco Polo, The Travels, translated by Ronald Latham, pp. 57, 66, and 80.

  38. Quoted in Roger Crowley, City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas (New York: Random House, 2012).

  39. Polo, The Travels, pp. 150–151.

  40. Ibid., p. 98.

  41. Quoted in Mark Wheelis, “Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8, no. 9 (2002): 971–975.

  42. Kelly, The Great Mortality, and Wheelis, “Biological Warfare,” provide reasons for some skepticism on the role of Caffa refugees in spreading the plague onward.

  43. From Boccaccio, The Decameron, translated by J. M. Rigg, 1903. Available at https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/texts/.

  44. “Letters on Familiar Matters,” in John Aberth, The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348–1350: A Brief History with Documents (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

  45. Quoted in Kelly, The Great Mortality, p. 145.

  46. José Gómez and Miguel Verdú, “Network Theory May Explain the Vulnerability of Medieval Human Settlements to the Black Death Pandemic,” Nature Scientific Reports 7 (2017): 43467.

  47. Petrarch, Petrarca Ad Seipsum, Volume I, Chapter 14, translated by Jonathan Usher, University of Edinburgh. Retrieved from http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/plague/perspectives/petrarca2.php.

  48. Quoted in Aberth, “Letters on Familiar Matters,” p. 72.

  49. Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 3.

  50. Kelly, The Great Mortality, p. 248.

  51. Cartwright and Biddis, Disease and History, p. 47.

  52. Bray, Armies of Pestilence, p. 69.

  53. Jo Nelson Hays, The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009), p. 46.

  54. UK Government, “Ordinance of Laborers,” 1349, Fordham University Sourcebook. Retrieved from https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/seth/ordinance-labourers.asp.

  55. Kelly, The Great Mortality.

  56. Norman F. Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).

  57. Additionally, wages for women’s casual employment did increase after the plague, which might have been an incentive for married women to substitute child-rearing for working. Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf, “The Wages of Women in England, 1260–1850,” Journal of Economic History 75, no. 2 (June 2015): 405–447.

  58. Margaret Peters, “Labor Markets After the Black Death: Landlord Collusion and the Imposition of Serfdom in Eastern Europe and the Middle East,” mimeo, prepared for the Stanford Comparative Politics Workshop, 2010.

  59. Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), estimates that income per person in the UK more than doubled between the 1310s and the 1450s.

  60. G. D. Sussman, “Was the Black Death in India and China?” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2011, pp. 319–355.

  61. Giovanna Morelli, Yajun Song, Camila J. Mazzoni, Mark Eppinger, Philippe Roumagnac, David M. Wagner, Mirjam Feldkamp et al., “Yersinia Pestis Genome Sequencing Identifies Patterns of Global Phylogenetic Diversity,” Nature Genetics 42, no. 12 (2010): 1140–1143.

  62. Christian E. Demeure, Olivier Dussurget, Guillem Mas Fiol, Anne-Sophie Le Guern, Cyril Savin, and Javier Pizarro-Cerdá, “Yersinia Pestis and Plague: An Updated View on Evolution, Virulence Determinants, Immune Subversion, Vaccination, and Diagnostics,” Genes & Immunity 20, no. 5 (2019): 357–370.

  63. Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, “The Three Horsemen of Riches: Plague, War, and Urbanization in Early Modern Europe,” Review of Economic Studies 80, no. 2 (2012): 774–811.

  64. Cartwright and Biddis, Disease and History, p. 32.

  Chapter Four: Pestilence Conquers

  1. Bastien Llamas, Lars Fehren-Schmitz, Guido Valverde, Julien Soubrier, Swapan Mallick, Nadin Rohland, Susanne Nordenfelt et al., “Ancient Mitochondrial DNA Provides High-Resolution Time Scale of the Peopling of the Americas,” Science Advances 2, no. 4 (2016).

  2. Anthony D. Barnosky and Emily L. Lindsey, “Timing of Quaternary Megafaunal Extinction in South America in Relation to Human Arrival and Climate Change,” Quaternary International 217, nos. 1–2 (2010): 10–29, discuss the roles of climate and human activities; Zachary D. Nickell and Matthew D. Moran, “Disease Introduction by Aboriginal Humans in North America and the Pleistocene Extinction,” Journal of Ecological Anthropology 19, no. 1 (2017): 2, the role of introduced disease.

  3. Dorothy Crawford, Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 112–113. The reason for the caveat of “mostly” is recent evidence suggesting that at least human tuberculosis was present before Columbus, potentially brought to the Americas via seals (Kirsten I. Bos et al., “Pre-Columbian Mycobacterial Genomes Reveal Seals as a Source of New World Human Tuberculosis,” Nature 514 [2014]: 494).

  4. W. M. Denevan, “After 1492: Nature Rebounds,” Geographical Review 106, no. 3 (2016): 381–398, and Angus Maddison, The World Economy, Volume 1: A Millennial Perspective and Volume 2: Historical Statistics (Haryana, India: Academic Foundation, 2007).

  5. Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).

  6. Ibid., p. 72.

  7. Ibid., p. 140.

  8. Latham, introduction to Marco Polo: The Travels.

  9. William Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World (New York: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2009), p. 166.

  10. Christopher Columbus, The Four Voyages of Christopher Columbus, translated by John Cohen (London: Penguin UK, 1969), pp. 58–59.

  11. Ibid., p. 122.

  12. Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492–1650 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 57–58.

  13. R. S. Bray, Armies of Pestilence: The Impact of Disease on History (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke & Co., 2004), pp. 125, and Mark Harrison, Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the Present Day (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), p. 73.

  14. Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 89.

  15. Quoted in
Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Cortés, Montezuma, and the Fall of Old Mexico (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).

  16. Quoted in Watts, Epidemics and History, p. 89.

  17. Las Casas, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indes. Retrieved from http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/contact/text7/casas_destruction.pdf.

  18. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas, p. 61.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Watts, Epidemics and History, p. 93.

  22. Ibid., p. 233.

  23. Quoted in ibid., p. 235.

  24. See Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), for a discussion.

  25. Elena Esposito, Side Effects of Immunities: The African Slave Trade, Working Paper no. MWP2015/09, European University Institute, 2015.

  26. Robert A. McGuire and Philip Coelho, Parasites, Pathogens, and Progress (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), Chapter 5.

  27. Bray, Armies of Pestilence, p. 129.

  28. Malthus’s estimate was from Benjamin Franklin, who wrote an article on demographics in the 1750s. Personal communication from Charles Mann.

  29. His ignorance of the role of disease in creating the wide open spaces of the Americas is clear from his discussion of Central America. (Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population; or a View of Its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness, an Inquiry Into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal Or Mitigation of the Evils which it Occasions, edited with an introduction and notes by Geoffrey Gilbert [Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008], Chapter VI, paragraph I.)

  30. Louis Putterman, and David N. Weil, Post-1500 Population Flows and the Long Run Determinants of Economic Growth and Inequality, no. w14448, National Bureau of Economic Research, 2008.