Plagues and Their Aftermath

July 4, 2022
Counterterrorism expert Jenkins (The Long Shadow of 9/11) offers a succinct review of the “myriad effects of past pandemics” to forecast how Covid-19 will transform society. Drawing on histories of the Black Death, cholera, the 1918 Spanish flu, AIDS, and more, Jenkins examines the political, economic, social, and national security consequences of epidemics. He estimates that the worldwide death toll from Covid-19 will reach “somewhere between 12 and 24 million, putting at seventh place on the list of modern calamities”; posits that some companies will “re-shore” manufacturing jobs in their native countries, slowing the economic recovery in less-developed parts of the world; cites the 1917 Russian Revolution (which followed a series of cholera outbreaks) and the 1986 ouster of Haiti’s Jean-Claude Chevalier (amid the AIDS crisis) as examples of how epidemics foster political instability; and suggests that the disproportionate impact of cholera on the poor contributed to the radicalization of anarchist revolutionaries in 19th-century Europe. In some cases, Jenkins’s interpretations, including that the Black Death “in the long run actually improved the situation of those lower on the economic scale,” are debatable, and contradict claims he makes elsewhere in the book. Still, this is an accessible and well-informed assessment of what comes next.

July 15, 2022
With the pandemic apparently past the high-water mark, this book takes a look at what might follow. A senior adviser to the president of the RAND Corporation and author of numerous books on political and global affairs, Jenkins provides a solid overview of past pandemics, from the Black Death to Zika, as well as a Dramatis Pestilentae in an appendix. While he acknowledges that each event has had a character and trajectory of its own, he points out recurring themes of social dislocation and political instability. There has always been a desire to find causes, ranging from "outsider" ethnic groups to divine wrath. This often metastasizes into conspiracy theories and resistance to government efforts to combat disease, going back to the plagues of Athens. A difference with the current pandemic is social media has spread and amplified misinformation and extremism. A problem with the book is that much of this ground has already been covered. Jenkins acknowledges that American society was dangerously polarized before the Covid-19 pandemic and has become even more so in the past few years. However, whether that is the result of the pandemic might be confusing correlation with causation. "Epidemics leave legacies of distrust and disorder," he writes. "They reveal and reinforce existing problems--poor governance, societal divisions, prejudices, inequality, corruption. Social and political cleavages intensify." Would America be more politically unified and emotionally satisfied if the pandemic had never happened? It seems unlikely. 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. Readers should consult this book after Polly J. Price's Plagues in the Nation, Kyle Harper's Plagues Upon the Earth, and Charles Kenny's The Plague Cycle. Pandemics and plagues have been around for a long time, and this book traces some of the common threads.

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