If you thought Great Men shaped our history, you’d be wrong, the author – a public health specialist at London Medical School – argues. Rather, he says, our destiny was determined by the microscopic bacteria and viruses which caused numerous society-shattering plagues and pandemics down the ages.
The rise of Islam, the fall of Byzantium, the rise of the Ottoman Turks, even the Act of Union between Scotland and England is all down to germs, he says.
The central thesis is that when society is severely disrupted by disease, then it is vulnerable to whatever stronger, healthier, forces are willing to exploit it.
The book is structured to cover plagues that have changed the world from palaeolithic to industrial times, and right up to today’s “plagues of poverty”.
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Since hunter-gatherers began to settle down after the agricultural revolution in the Middle East, 12,000 years ago, germs have driven our history.
The evidence is accumulating, the author says, that Rome fell not for reasons of decadence, but because Romans, living closely together, were far more susceptible to smallpox pandemics than were scattered Barbarian tribes.
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The success of Muslim-Arab armies in the 630s and 640s, as they swept across densely populated areas of the Middle East and North Africa, the author says, was because, as nomads, they were less affected by raging plague.
The strength of slavery in southern compared to northern states was because the black labouring population – which had come from malaria infected parts of Africa and were immune to the disease – coped better than whites with the parasites that caused whites to die in droves in the malaria-infected south.
The serious damage to the authority of the universal Catholic Church and the old order in the Middle Ages is deemed the result of plague-induced chaos.
The lack of clean drinking water in the towns of England during the industrial revolution led to repeated cholera epidemics – a deadly waterborne disease.
The rise of socialism there in the early 19th century had much to do with the realisation that free market economics wasn’t stopping cholera.
This is a book that underlines how human life, and history, is execrably part of the natural world, and even down to the smallest living components of that world.
Germs have made a habit of exposing societal weaknesses across history and this was seen again recently, the author says, as the retrenchment of the role of the state in countries such as the UK and USA allowed Covid-19 to thrive there.
