Pandemics in World History from the Black Death to COVID-19

Catalog description

The study of pandemic disease, past and present, is a call to understand our world as complexly interconnected global community. It is sustained human-to-human interaction that facilitates the spread of disease thus linking pandemics to the development of agriculture, long distance trade, and the creation of urbanized settlements. Moreover, the ever-growing desire and necessity to exploit remote resources and settle uninhabited spaces disrupts local ecologies and bring human communities into closer contact with deadly pathogens. Pandemics only make sense when studied alongside the forces of globalization: trade, migration, transportation, war, colonization, exploration and economic development. 002167