Dan Snow's History Hit - Pandemics: Science and History

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

I was thrilled to be joined by the legendary Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Oxford University and bestselling author of 'The Silk Roads: A New History of the World'. In this podcast we discussed the current crisis in a wider historical context, and Peter gave some fascinating insights. This podcast was the first of our live Zoom discussions between Dan, Peter and History Hit subscribers, who were invited to join the discussion at the end. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I've got a treat for you today. Distinguished, legendary professor, Peter Frank at Panebox University, a thought leader, best-selling author of Silk Roads, talking about the pandemic, what he thinks of the world, what's going on, what are his views, what's he thinking about at the moment. I hope you'll enjoy. This was the first of our recorded Zoom podcasts and subscribers to History Hit TV can actually come on board those Zooms. So we had lots and lots of people watching Peter and I talk and then we had an opportunity for questions and comments as well from those who came in. If you subscribe to History Hit TV, you'll get sent an email on Wednesday.

We're having one on Thursday. We're having Rutger Bregman, the Dutch historian that everyone's talking about at the moment. His book is making some waves you may have heard it in over the weekend press it was the true story of Lord of the Flies those young men from Tonga who got marooned on an island and behaved very nicely to each other had a wonderful time so he is coming on to talk with me and you if you're a subscriber on Thursday please subscribe to historyhit.tv and that email will be landing in your inbox with joining instructions on Wednesday night. Next week, we've got the American Pulitzer Prize winner Caleb McDaniel. He's going to be talking about slavery and restitution. His wonderful book that won the Pulitzer is about a woman who successfully sued

the man who abducted her and took her into slavery in the 19th century we got some proper rock stars coming up on these zoom chats so please come in as a subscriber and check them out it's just one of the incredible range of advantages you get by subscribing to history hit you get access to our tv channel with hundreds of documentaries you get quizzes and exclusive articles all of the podcasts only available on there and as well you the opportunity to come on these Zoom chats. Please go to historyhit.tv, sign up using the code POD1, P-O-D-1, and you get a month for free, and then you get one month for just one pound, euro, or dollar. So go and check that out. Here's Peter Frankopan, everybody. Always fascinating insights. Enjoy. Peter Frankopan, thank you very much for coming back on the podcast.

Absolute pleasure. Nice to see you, Dan. I mean, it'd be nice to have a cold beer at the end of all of this, but I'm missing the human contact. Well, I think you must be in particular, because you are someone who is always on a plane advising foreign governments on what not to do. You must be dazed being in one place for so long. Good news is you're still, you have a chance to reflect. The bad thing, and everybody's in life is different, is that I'm much better in a crisis and with a deadline when you're sort of forced

into things. But also what I miss, you know, I've been very lucky that I get to meet interesting people and have great conversations with them about what's going on in the world. And that it's just harder to do online. you know we're all in it together and you doing lots of teaching at the moment or are you writing another extraordinary book what's the kind of peter franklin plan i've got sort of three or four chapters for academic books about ideas about jerusalem in the 11th and 12th centuries around crusades i've got something i'm writing about transportation networks in south asia in the early moguls you know late 15 early 1600s and then I'm working up a new

kind of global history, trying to reinvent the wheel. And what I should do, I should try and write a book about Silk Roads again, but with either more pictures or less pictures and make them for myself. But I'm trying to think about the ways in which all these new resources that we have as historians, you know, I was trained to look at literature and then a little bit about the archaeology and then the art and so on. But today's world, there's so much being generated by the science. So things like history of the Black Death, you can't understand without looking at the genetics and without understanding the strains. And in some cases, this is overturning all the stuff we think about pandemics in particular, which obviously we're all spending a lot of time

thinking about right now. But the scientific data around climate, around disease, around exchange, you know, there's a fantastic project we have in Oxford where we've been measuring the human deposits, literally shoveling the shit in Bristol and to look at the parasites that are in the fundament brought back by sailors from around the world.

As they came back, one of the first things they would do is defecate, always in the latrines, and that's provided about 25 metres depth. And you can see patterns of trade that change. You can see all the people coming up in Bristol, what are they eating? Because in different parts of the world, there are different microbiomes and so on. All this stuff is really, really exciting

to try to integrate science into how we look at history. And there are some times when it reinforces what we know, and sometimes when it really challenges it. I mean, that's heretical stuff from a professor of history at Oxford. I mean, if you're getting into the science, that's going to scare a lot of the competition off the pitch. Well, you know, I'm never going to knock history, as you know, Dan, but why is history different to geography or maths or chemistry? You know, it's a completely artificial breakdown of how we split the world.? You know, it's a completely artificial breakdown of how we split the world in. But, you know, one of the prices we're paying in the UK right now

is that none of the people who are politicians making decisions have got degrees in the sciences or in medicine. And so how do you make sense of complex statistics and different models? We don't stop learning just because you do A-levels in a certain subject or you get a degree in a certain subject. It doesn't mean that that's the moment that you hang up your hat and go, look, I'm a historian and forget I wasn't very good at math

when I was 16 you know you've got to keep on going and one of the great challenges I think as a historian is to keep that momentum of being a open-minded enough but be not being ashamed to say look I really need to understand fairly basic things about fossilization or about genetics and working, you know, working hard doesn't hurt. It just takes time. That's all.

And you become aware that it's very hard to quantify and to qualify and to know what you're looking at. And the scientific evidence that's coming towards us in history is really, really exciting right now. So I'm trying to spend a bit of time on the math, biology, physics and chemistry as well to kind of make me a better historian. That's remarkable. So it now turns out

we've always thought that the black death comes from china, goes east, goes westwards into europe and so on but the strain that is established in barcelona first we find in england before we find it in most parts of europe which needs some explanation before we had a great navy and so on but that strain that infects in spain and barcelona then you find later in central asia right which is not what we'd expect, and in Russia. Things go back in the other direction, and we've got to try to explain that, and we've got to understand, is the science, you know, are there margins of error in all of this? Are we getting it right? Actually, there are some fantastic historians like Monica Green

in the US who works on these things, who's kind of really opened the eyes of scholars to realise how much we take at face value, how much harder we have to work with new materials. You know, it's really exciting. Well, let's talk a little bit about the Black Death or indeed pandemics and travelling microbes. As a historian of the Silk Roads, as someone who's written extensively about the journey of whether it's Asiatic, things like cholera as a result of imperialism that ends up in Europe or the Black Death famously, until now I thought came from east to west. That's one strain of it did. You've been talking about pandemics long before January 2020. It is something you wrote about, it is something you were concerned about and presumably that came

from your, you know, long familiarity with previous pandemics. Historians are all interested in different things. I'm particularly interested in the history of exchange and exchange of goods and of ideas and of language and so on. When you look at the world like that and you're charting how do we borrow and exchange, you're naturally interested in following all sorts of other things that happen too. And the spread of disease and infectious disease is a very important part of global history, you know, because you can see how people are moving and exchanging things by genetic materials, but also by disease. So as we were, I should say, living in a hyper-globalized world where everybody's 18 hours apart, there are lots of things that are great about that. Six months ago, four months ago, if you bought something online,

it could be made somewhere on the other side of the world, it could reach you 48 hours later. And you would never really think about where it's been produced, where it's been made, who made it, under what conditions and so on. And sometimes turning a blind eye to human rights, sometimes turning a blind eye to supply chains, to costs, etc. But I think realising that those connections that allow low prices also bring other sorts of costs too and disease is one of those. And so, in fact, I was in December was asked about that

and was asked to go to number 10 to talk about problems and challenges and global Britain. And I said that the two things I was most worried about were pandemic and the lack of a global plan to deal with a pandemic. And historians, you know, we're good at asking questions and asking the right kind of questions, how you solve them and how you deal with them. But, you know, as it's turned out, in fact, this evening, it turns out that 100% of our medical stores of syringes were out of questions, how you solve them and how you deal with them. But you know, as it's turned out, in fact, this evening, it turns out that 100% of our medical stores of syringes were out of date, 80% of our masks and surgical material had expired, some of it was 10 years old. And I think if you're not prepared, if you don't understand what might come towards you, a bit like when I saw you on the beach on Periscope this afternoon, talking about Nelson

and so on, the key to being able to not just to win and be prepared like the royal navy did in britain's history but how you stop yourself from being caught by surprise is knowing what the threats might be and that constant scoping for challenges and problems and disease comes right at the top of those i mean change of climate and so on has long-term burn but even with climate you can have sudden impacts and sudden events. You know, not that long ago that a single volcano blowing up over Iceland stopped international air travel for, you know, whatever it was, a couple of weeks at the time. So we sort of forget, we thought we lived in a world that everything is always safe and everything is always perfect and that we can all get on with

each other. But, you know, we're here the night before the celebration of VE Day. Even my parents' The night before the celebration of VE Day, even my parents' generation lived through the whole of the war. And the idea that we were somehow immune from any kind of dislocation, from warfare. It's like we've been listening to too much John Lennon and not living in the real world. The bad stuff does happen. It happens regularly. It happens often. And if we don't kill each other through war, there are plenty of other ways in which Mother Nature can beat us if we're not paying attention. Lots of people talking about the threats of pandemic, wasn't just me, but I got my timing spot on. So in Prospect magazine, they put me on the front cover on the 1st of January, when I said, look, pandemic is the key to the 2020s. And in fact,

you know, Samir Rahim is a great friend of mine, who's the books editor there. He said, you know, you sure don't worry about Huawei, or Brexit, or China, or Russia, or military tension. And I said, you know, you sure don't worry about Huawei or Brexit or China or Russia or military tension? And I said, we're going to find out about why pandemics are a problem sooner rather than later. But I didn't expect it was going to be later that week. You know, the timing was very lucky. Well, I mean, you mentioned two important points there. One is the impact of climate breakdown on pandemics. And we've had lots of people now explaining to us it's because of deforestation.

It's because of our lopsided relationship with nature that we are going to see greater transmission. The Ebola story was after giant deforestation and all these bats had to settle in a far more populated area. But you've raised another point now, which is number 10, which is politics. You, A, studying history, but also all these places that you go around the world and advise, do you think there is a key dysfunction in democratic politics and that we don't, and it's not their fault, because we don't incentivise our rulers to think in the medium, let alone the long term? And do you buy into the idea that if you're a Tudor monarch, you know your son, daughters are going to be on the throne, you do think in a more long term where you plant your oak trees for their navies? Is there anything in that? Is there something with democracy that we're

going to need to have a look at? I think that there's no monopoly on being stupid or making bad decisions. And I don't think it matters whether you're a dictator, an emperor or a democrat. I don't think the system is the problem. I think that it's the decision making process. And there the big question is, who do you listen to? And, you know, and in difficult situations, in crisis situations, do you make good decisions? And I suppose if you were being sanguine, you'd say, well, look, what is it that made the Duke of Wellington or Nelson, all these great heroes that we love to read about, what gave them that leadership skill when things were needed? How come they didn't mess it all up?

So personality does play a part of that. But I don't think it's to do with democratic systems. In fact, in January, February, the only question I got asked was, is China going to have regime change? Is there going to be a rise of the people to have autocracies fail? Doesn't this prove that authoritarian states are a disaster? And now two months later, the only question people are saying is, isn't democracy under threat and under pressure, and they've all failed. But I think that's got a lot more to do with the particular individuals making decisions at this particular moment in time. So when Trump wouldn't take a call from his health advisor,

Alexei, until middle of February, and when he eventually got through having tried for two weeks to explain this is a real problem, Trump interrupted him talking about coronavirus and said, I've got a more important question, which is when are flavoured vapes going to be back on sale in the US? And so when you have I think political leaders who are out to lunch or absent or have a political agenda they don't want to listen to people or have paranoia syndromes then bad decisions can get made but you know most of Eastern Europe at the moment right now has had not a bad medical experience with coronavirus. It tends to be richer, more developed countries. And it could be because we connect more. It could be for all sorts of

different reasons. But one of the primary ones is that we, all of us have these great histories that we fall back on, so that we think we're capable of making better decisions than foreigners living far away from us. And the evidence doesn't bear that out. Yeah, I mean, I do wonder about that. I struggle to blame politicians in some cases, because if we don't incentivize, if they give, as Trump just did in the US, you know, giant corporate tax cuts, that may also have this, although adding a lot to the deficit, may have added a point or two to this kind of economic buzz that was going on until so recently. Just as in the 18th century, we thought about things like written constitutions to try and, in some way, force certain kinds of behavior on the executive branch. Bimming the office that focuses on pandemic response should be, clearly, you can't sort of

build it into a constitutional document, but there's no upside to Trump or a government maintaining that, because actually, chance are, it won't happen. It's costing a lot of money that could go in tax cuts. So how do we try and build that resilience so that it's not too easy to cut? Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast

brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week right well listen i think you're completely right. It's our fault, right, as voters. We choose these guys who promise short-term impossible outcomes and we're suckered into believing them. And that's partly because the narrative is over-fanned by the media and it's not the media's fault either. They've got to report what they report. But I think that the punch and judy of our politics

and the kind of the one-line gag that Trump and Boris specialize in are fine. When the economy is growing and we're all doing fine, then it's quite entertaining. But suddenly you realize like a pilot or like a ship's captain, what you're really paying for is someone who can guide you through the storm when it gets going. And I do agree with you, it's difficult to make decisions. And looking back on it, actually, getting it right was not possible. It's just how could you have made the least bad choices that you could have and in that sense here in the UK and Trump is a different category and you know not here to talk about that but I suppose here in the UK there is something unique that we have in this country that the heir to the throne caught coronavirus the prime minister

told everyone was shake hands and went into intensive care you know and so on we've had the chief medical officer in Scotland had to resign for whatever. We've then had the most prominent data scientist has had to stand down. You know, we've had the minister of health has had to self-isolate, the chief scientific officer, and that's not happened in a single country on earth. So, you know, there are questions about, is the Anglo-Saxon model, Jeremy Cliff said this yesterday on Twitter, is the Anglo-Saxon model that the UK and the US for some reason are the source of the financial crisis in 2008. You know, we puffed that all up, the mishandling of the coronavirus. Until last week, we had 150,000 people flying

into the UK without being screened, without being checked, quarantined, temperature checked, and so on. And it's either because we are incompetent, or because we have such grand views of ourselves that we think we're immune to it or that the machine is just too big that the left and the right hands don't know what each other are doing and I think that one would be much more generous even looking at Italy where you know our impressions here in the UK are that Italians they don't obey the law everybody has stayed locked in our impressions even of Italy and in terms of its budget you know Italy has reported a surplus in its budget 24 out of the last 25 years and yet our impression is

well the italians don't do things right and so on and so forth so some of that is rooted i think in deep history of how we see ourselves and the single worst disease you can have in any time in history is the imperial disease where you had an empire and you think that that gives you the rights and the monopoly on getting decisions right and in britain we should be much more open about what the faults have been and to learn some of the lessons but my guess is that we won't like you say it'll all be about short-term rewards rather than long-term plan and the truth is if we get it wrong about pandemics weren't, what other really big problems coming towards us might we also get wrong about our nuclear arsenal, about digital, about climate? If you're uninvestable because you make this many mistakes with disease, what are the other things that are

going to come towards you where you're also not going to be able and ready to deal with? So some of it is about how do you improve the competence? And some of it, you know, I think, talking to a friend of mine in the Gulf, and some of it is how do you attract different people with different views, goes to work for a bank, or they did anyway, I think it's quite hard to get that balance right about what does public service mean? How do you reflect on where we are? How do you try to make the country a better place? And, you know, it is unenviable being a politician. You can't get it right. You're constantly going to get attacked by left, right or centre. But on the other hand, who do you listen to? Where do you get advice from? And how inclusive do you want to be? And the group think in democracies shouldn't happen. And yet, here we are. As someone who's working on the Silk Roads and thinks a lot about where the locus of

economic, political, strategic power lies on the Eurasian landmass. What do you think the effect of this pandemic will be on the rise of the East effectively? Well, it's a very good question. Everything starts in history with demographics, climate and resources. And you can see that right now for all sorts of different reasons, and some of them perfectly logical and understandable reasons, the US, to a certain extent Britain with Brexit, but also the European Union too, are trying to put up barriers with other states in Asia. So in the worlds that I work on, sort of broadly east of Istanbul, there's not a single person we like within a kind of Western context. You know, no one likes Erdogan and his government. We don't like the

Saudis or the Gulf. Iran is a nightmare. Forget about Iraq and Syria, basket cases, no one likes Putin. All Central Asia, it's all sort of dodgy. India's on the rise, Pakistan, ISI and intelligence services, China, etc. You know, so when you start to look at the world and go, who do we have overlapping interests with? Who can we work with? Who do we respect? It's not a big list that we work on it. Maybe that should make us reflect on ourselves. So, you know, right now in the UK today, studying not just languages, but studying Chinese, Thai, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Urdu,

all those languages totted up. I don't know if I missed anybody else that even gets taught in the UK, Khmer, Thai. It's less than a thousand students. Less than a thousand. So it means that we fall back on Hitler and Mussolini and the Spanish flu and the Black Death. About 1% of research on the Black Death is about what the Black Death did in China, Southeast Asia, and South Asia. You stitch your eyelids closed. So I think that that world, the region that I work on, they have very similar interests economically. They're politically quite aligned insofar as they have different relationships between the states and their citizens, more surveillance,

more interventions, less freedoms, political, religious, media, freedoms of speech, etc. And it's a much less free world than ours. It seems to me that not only are they going to become more resilient, but unless I'm mistaken, in the next year or two, our experiences in Western Europe and the US are going to be brutal. You know, there are figures today, another three million are to work in the US. About half of the US workforce won't be earning a wage by the middle of this month. Not just depression in the 1930s, that's biblical in its consequences. So your sense of it is that this is going to speed up the processes that people like you have been identifying for a while now? Who knows? A lot will depend on the pathogens, a lot will depend on

the incidents in Southeast Asia, you know, looked like it was under control. Singapore's had a very worrying last couple of weeks in terms of a new wave. A lot will depend on what happens in places like Pakistan and Iran, where high levels of incidents, low levels of reporting, and so on. India likewise. How states that are economically less developed than we are in the West, how resilient will they be? All the things that have been happening here with the state taking the strain of paying people's wages, that can't carry on presumably forever. But other states and other parts of the world don't have the resources to do that. So there are lots of variables about what might go wrong. And historians, we tend to be highly pessimistic and negative because we work

on revolutions and upheavals and change and catastrophes. So normally you bet on the loser rather than on the winner. But I'd have thought if we come out the other side, relatively intact globally, that you're bound to see states with large populations, large demographics that are regionally close to each other, wanting to work and cooperate more together, because the EU, Britain, the US are going to put up more and more barriers to these kind of states. And you know, this week, three days ago, a big report in China, sponsored by the State Security Council, says that China needs to prepare itself for military confrontation.

And those kinds of things in other parts of the world, you know, the model that we're selling with Trump of the UK right now is not one that is as attractive as perhaps we think that it is. Because in those terms of competence, you know, like the Saudi press, for whatever it's worth, you know, saying the only people who dealt with this well are China. If you'd said that two months ago, you'd have thought we were laughing when Wuhan was locked down and China got the whole thing wrong.

Now China is presenting itself as the savior rather than the villain. And that's very persuasive in other parts of the world where our numbers keep rising, the number of old people keep rising. Our prime minister keeps saying it's a great success. And Donald Trump says, drink bleach, detergent,

and insert light bulbs into your backside. It's very hard to stay credible and a lot of history is about controlling that narrative and I think that we are lazy in the West because we don't bother looking at anybody else's histories, we're not very good at remembering how we fit into their story as well as how they fit into ours and then we assume that the reversion to norm is that everyone wants to be like us. So yeah, I can see that there are lots of contexts where this will enhance corporations economically, politically, militarily, digitally, and will separate us from other parts of the world. There has been some discussion, hasn't there, during this time, because everything is now under the spotlight. Universities are suffering hugely. Students are making huge life choices.

We're having arguments about whether there should be more expertise, science-led policymaking in government. Where do you think that leaves the study of history? I mean, you've made a powerful case at the beginning, but do you think that this crisis has emphasised the importance of the humanities? And if so, why? Not related to coronavirus, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a historian in terms of new materials. That's what we all need. And the sciences open up a whole new series of perspectives. You know, we're living in a kind of golden age of history writing, I think, here in the UK, where, you know, luckily you track them all down,

down these brilliant young and old historians who are writing things that are changing the way we look at the world. It's hugely exciting, the amount of work that's being done. And, you know, and lots of brilliant work done on history of England and social mobility in Lancashire in the 1600s. You know, I mean, it doesn't just have to be about re-understanding the Ottomans or the Seraphids, right? That just might happen to my interest.

So I think that it's flourishing and alive and well. There will be three challenges. Number one is the humanities look like they're expendable. Societies, when they go through trauma, they think, well, we understand why we need to develop cancer treatments and ventilators that save children's lives. Do we need somebody else who works on Shakespeare or on poets or on the music of Tchaikovsky? And if the humanities don't make a case for themselves, then they get pushed out the door. That's the first one. So the funding issue. Second is that it can be very easy, I think, if you work in the humanities to assume that you

will find an audience. And there's a constant tension often kept under the bonnet, you know, Dan, that what historians are, what they do, and between what's so-called popular history and academic history. And I suppose crudely, you know, academics have the benefit of being able to write whatever they like under whatever context and circumstances, as long as it gets published in peer-reviewed journals, because they don't have to worry about finding readership and that is a way that you can advance the subject forwards but equally if you never have to worry about making your work interesting or exciting then is that a disengagement from what joe public and jessica public who's ultimately your taxpayer is that value for money and third i think humanities

are not separate from the sciences. It's not either or. You know, I don't want any less funding for the sciences. On the contrary, but humanities, we need to explain why what we do is important. Why is it significant? Why does it matter what the Quran says? And, you know, there are lots of very easy answers about that to explain that that's crucial to be able to understand what ISIS are after, or being able to understand about coin supplies in early medieval China. You know, it doesn't have to be relevant for today, but you have to explain why I think that matters. And so I think the humanities, the fact that we sit and look like we're different to other disciplines of knowledge,

comes as our Achilles heel. So we need to do much better at knitting those together, and to explain why society matters. Because, you know, human beings, as you know, we're at our finest when we are creative, when we write, when we paint, when we sing, when we build things. And we're our worst when we kill each other. And of course, historians like writing about the second one.

Hegel said, you know, the pages of history that are blank are the ones where there are no wars and revolutions. Because no one cares about the periods where people get on with each other. We all want the same compression points and the disasters and catastrophes, because it tells us something that we kind of want to hear. And even this pandemic, there's something sort of gruesomely addictive about, you know, listening in every single day to this number of deaths or what's happening in the States. So I think the kind of the nitty gritty of day to day life is

more mundane, but more interesting from my perspective. Well, Peter, thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast and giving us a download of all your thoughts at this time. Good luck sitting in the garden in all that sun. I hope that rain's ticking over. Thanks, Dan. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go,

bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do it to me as favourites for free, go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it,

I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.