Plagues and Their Aftermath

"Jenkins has organized his book around themes, and as he explores them, he leads the reader back and forth through history, pointing out parallels in humankind’s responses to different epidemics...thoroughly researched and cogently written..." -- New York Journal of Books

A look at the long history of epidemics and pandemics provides an enthralling account of what we can expect of a post-COVID world

In a concise, authoritative, and gripping telling, Brian Michael Jenkins — one of our leading authorities on national security and an advisor to governments, presidents and CEOs — provides a masterly account of what kind of future the planet might be facing ... by looking at the world's long history of epidemics and discerning what was common about their aftermath.  
 
From a plague in Athens during the Peloponnesian War in 430 BCE, to another in 540 that wiped out half the population of the Roman empire, down through the Black Death in the Middle Ages and on through the 1918 flu epidemic (which killed between 50 and 100 million people) and this century's deadly SARS outbreak, plagues have been a much more relentless fact of life than many realize.
 
The legacy of epidemics, Jenkins observes, is not only one of lives lost but of devastated economies and social disorder, all of which have severe political repercussions.
 
Thus, each chapter of Plagues and Their Aftermath draws on those historical precursors to focus on one particular aspect of their aftermath: What happens to political systems? What happens in the area of crime and terrorism? Do wars happen? What are the effects on cultures? What was the impact of widespread fear and public hysteria, of increased suspicion and scapegoating, of the spread of rumors and conspiracy theories?
 
Jenkins' sobering analysis is riveting and thought-provoking reading for general readers and specialists alike, and throws welcome light into what many fear is a dark future."This is an accessible and well-informed assessment of what comes next." -- Publishers Weekly

"With the pandemic apparently past the high-water mark, this book takes a look at what might follow...Jenkins does offer useful historical perspective and rightfully points out that the Covid-19 pandemic’s economic and social consequences will remain with us for a long time, as will the disease itself." -- Kirkus

"Jenkins has organized his book around themes, and as he explores them, he leads the reader back and forth through history, pointing out parallels in humankind’s responses to different epidemics...thoroughly researched and cogently written..." -- New York Journal of Books

"[Jenkins] covers everything from ancient Athens to the effects of SARS, making for an informative and timely read." -- InsideHook

"Chapter by chapter, Jenkins explains how humanity, the economy, our political infrastructure, our military and more will return to a sense of normalcy, and the clues from past pandemics that could help guide our decision-making in the pivotal years to come." --- KPCC's AirTalk

"Impressively informative, exceptionally well written, organized and presented... a seminal study that is quite timely..." -- Library BookwatchBrian Michael Jenkins is a senior advisor to the president of the RAND Corporation.  He served in the U.S. Army’s Special Forces in during the war in Vietnam, before joining RAND in 1972. In 1996, President Bill Clinton appointed Jenkins to the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. Jenkins has also served as adviser to the National Commission on Terrorism.  He is a frequent commentator on matters of global security and safety for major media outlets including NBC, PBS, NPR, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others.INTRODUCTION

And, as the story plain doth tell,
within the Countrey there did rest
A dredfull Dragon, fierce and fell,
whereby they were full sore opprest:
Who by his poisoned breath each day
did many of the City slay.
—The Shirburn Ballads, 1585–1616.


Early chroniclers connected plagues with pestilential fumes from fire-breathing dragons. The idea, although fanciful, was not far from medical theory at the time, which attributed outbreaks of disease to miasmas—concentrations of poisonous vapors. Although contagion theory replaced noxious-air explanations of infirmity in the nineteenth century, as late as the mid-1960s, when I was a soldier in the Dominican Republic, farmers showing up at our makeshift medical clinic still blamed chronic aches and other health problems on “a bad wind” (“un viento malo”) that had entered their body, usually at night. 

The focus in this study is not on the causes of epidemics but on their consequences. Like dragons, epidemics have long, thrashing tails—legacies not only of lives lost but of devastated economies and social disorder. These, in turn, are likely to have political repercussions. The COVID-19 pandemic will be intensively studied, but it may be years before its effects can be observed and analyzed. Past epidemics, however, offer clues as to what could occur in a future post-pandemic environment. 

Scholars have produced a rich literature of past outbreaks of disease, ranging from Thucydides’ account of the plague that ravaged Athens starting in 430 B.C.E. to recent accounts of the AIDS and Ebola epidemics. 

The effects of epidemics are not measured only in mortality. “Their secondary consequences,” a prominent bacteriologist wrote in 1934, “have been much more far-reaching and disorganizing than anything that could have resulted from the mere reduction of the population.”  

Secondary effects include the economic and social disruptions caused by the contagion and efforts to contain it, the effects of widespread fear and public hysteria, increased suspicion and scapegoating, the spread of rumors and conspiracy theories, and political disturbances and disorder that undermine government legitimacy. Modern medicine has been able to reduce the number of deaths and to mitigate, if not eliminate, the sense of helplessness and despair that people must have felt in previous centuries when faced with plagues they could not understand. With advances in science able to reduce mortality—especially as a percentage of the world’s population,  other kinds of disruptions may now be the primary effects of epidemics.

Historical descriptions of the impact of epidemics fall into several broad categories. Traditional historians relating the history of a country or people mention epidemics only when the epidemics clearly alter the trajectory of events—for example, when they result in the loss of a war, contribute to the fall of an empire, or have such dramatic depopulation effects that they change the organization of society. 

More recent historians look at huge swaths of time and territory to uncover underlying forces that affect the course of events in ways that conventional national histories might miss. As Jared Diamond noted in Guns, Germs, and Steel, “Because diseases have been the biggest killers of people, they have been decisive shapers of history.”

Disease has also attracted a set of historians who see epidemics as a distinct category for analysis. As Frank Snowden wrote in Epidemics and Society, “Epidemics have left a particular legacy in their wake. Their singularity merits attention.”  Historians of epidemics analyze the effects of various contagious diseases throughout history or document specific outbreaks of disease and their consequences in certain regions, countries, or cities. With its massive death toll, Europe’s Black Death of the fourteenth century has probably attracted the most attention, but books such as Death in Hamburg, Naples in the Time of Cholera, or Russia and the Cholera: 1823–1832, cited above, provide detailed accounts of the social and political effects of other epidemics.

In this book, we look at the plagues that afflicted the last centuries of the Roman Empire, the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the Middle Ages and returned in waves over the next four hundred years, the cholera epidemics that washed back and forth across Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the third pandemic of the bubonic plague in the late nineteenth century, and the 1918 “Spanish” flu pandemic that killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide. Outbreaks of smallpox, typhus, yellow fever, AIDS, Ebola, and other mass killers are also discussed. (A dramatis pestilentiae is provided at the end of the book.) 

These historical examples serve as a template for identifying recurring attributes of post-epidemic history. Taking a thematic rather than a chronological or geographical approach, this study catalogs the immediate effects of epidemics and examines the potential longer-term repercussions of today’s ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. 

We begin by comparing the human toll of the COVID-19 pandemic with the mortality of past epidemics. We then compare the responses to previous outbreaks of disease with the immediately observable economic and societal effects of the current pandemic. The discussion next examines the possible political consequences of COVID-19. The longer-term effects are necessarily speculative—historians still debate the consequences of the Black Death, which began nearly seven centuries ago. 

Finally, we explore how past epidemics have affected armed conflict and whether the COVID-19 pandemic might promote future wars or terrorist campaigns or encourage the use of biological weapons. A concluding section summarizes the observations.

The COVID-19 pandemic is by definition a global event, and this analysis is intended to be global in its scope. The United States admittedly dominates the narrative for several reasons. As we are dealing with a fast-moving topic, a greater volume of information regarding the United States was available to me. It is also true that, according to the latest reported statistics (April 2022), the United States not only leads the world in the total number of reported cases but accounts for more than 16 percent of the world’s total. With no intention of marginalizing other countries, I have greater familiarity with the social and political situation in the United States. Others will be able to offer more informed comments on the economic, social, and political developments in their countries, making international comparisons possible.

This is a preliminary work. As of April 2022, the COVID-19 pandemic is still not contained, making all conclusions tentative. While the virus is declining in some countries, it is surging in many others. Its impact will vary from region to region, country to country, city to city. Mutations of the virus, some more contagious or having greater effect on younger people, have been identified. A fifth wave, involving the Omicron variant of the virus, spread throughout the world and then subsided, but a further variant reported in March 2022 reversed the downward trend of cases in a number of countries. At the same time, China and Hong Kong, which had managed to quickly suppress the contagion in early 2020  through strict lockdowns, saw a sharp rise in cases. Still more variants will no doubt appear. We are uncertain yet if efforts to slow the spread of the virus, combined with vaccination efforts, will bring the pandemic to an end, much as the 1918 flu outbreak ended, or if instead the virus will become endemic as waves of new variants wash back and forth across the planet. Are we looking at recovery, or at a new and chronic human condition?