Dan Snow's History Hit - Plagues

Episode Date: April 9, 2024

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 realise.Brian Michael Jenkins is one of the leading authorities on U.S. national security and an advisor to governments, presidents and CEOs. Brain joins Dan to discuss the legacy of epidemics— which is not only one of the lives lost but also of devastated economies, social disorder, and severe political repercussions.This episode was produced by Hannah Ward and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hey everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. A couple of years ago, as COVID-19 was reaching its peak zenith, well I don't know if it was reaching its peak anyway, as it seemed to be reaching its peak and the global shutdowns were occurring, we talked a lot about pandemics of the past. We talked about the 19th century, Asiatic dysentries like cholera. We talked about the Black Death, of course. We may have mentioned the Justinian Plague in the 6th century, which proved pretty devastating across the Persian and Roman empires in the Mediterranean and the Near East. And then, of course, we talked a lot about the great influenza of 1918-19 and previous waves of influenza. And interestingly, as Boris Johnson was in intensive care, fighting for his life, I think, with COVID-19. We talked about how David Lloyd George was completely debilitated by influenza in 1918.

And in fact, I think Lord Salisbury as well, in a previous wave of influenza. So British prime ministers have had a tough time in these pandemics. They're on the front line. Anyway, you can go back and listen to all those podcasts if you want it. History Hit TV, of course, the best audio and video history channel on planet Earth. But on this podcast, I'm linking them all up, learning what we can from the history of these pandemics. An American writer and thinker, Brian Michael Jenkins, has written a book about how societies respond to pandemics. He's gone back through history and he's seen if he can tease out

any of the lessons to help us get a bit of perspective on what we're going through at the moment. Maybe even give us a few pointers about how things are likely to progress. He is an expert on terrorism and violence. He was in the US Army himself. He was in Vietnam. And he subsequently advised the US government on things like terrorism. And he spends a lot of his time thinking about how terrorism is changing and morphing to pose a threat in the US and further afield. So it's great to have him on the podcast. We talked about pandemics past and what we can learn from them. Enjoy. T-minus 10.

The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Brian, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much for having me here. This is history at its best.

This is applied history, isn't it? What stage during the pandemic did you think what we need to do here is look back on past examples and try and harvest useful lessons as perspectives from history? Well, to be honest with you, I really did not set out to write a book. The usual pasture of research is political violence. And so it wasn't unusual that during the pandemic, people asked me how COVID-19 might affect the future of violence. Would it contribute to radicalization? Yes. Would it encourage terrorists to employ biological weapons?

Not necessarily. Would it start wars? So I looked at the past for clues, and I became increasingly fascinated with the subject of plagues, the plague of Athens, the Justinian plague, the Black Death, and the recurring waves of the Black Death that lasted 400 years, the cholera epidemics of the 19th century, the 1918 flu, and so on. And they really provided clues to the effects of pandemics on the economy, society, psychology, people's moods, political consequences. I kept reading and took notes. And the book really is my own journal of exploration.

What are some of the top line findings, if you like? I mean, presumably mortality, the effect of sudden spikes of mortality upon societies. Is that something that's very striking? It is, although there there's a sharp difference. I mean, a comparison of the toll, the human toll of COVID-19 with the mortality of past pandemics, it really suggests that we are not seeing that level of mortality simply because of improvements in science, improvements in medical treatment, and of course, the development of a vaccine. I mean, in the 14th century, the Black Death killed half the population of Europe. And the 1918 flu killed between 50 and 100 million people.

That was about 3% of the world's population at the time, which was then about 1.8 billion. Today, close to 600 million people worldwide have been infected. And of those, about six and a half million, it's climbing slowly towards seven million people, have died. That's about 1.1% of the total cases. So we're not talking about depopulation here. We're not talking about the massive loss of life. We're not seeing bodies piled high in mass graves. So that leads to an issue that people can look at those numbers and they can look at the personal risk involved and reach quite different conclusions. As you're speaking,

I'm wondering now, is that one of the lessons that you've been able to learn from history and compare to the present? There's a mortality effect, there's a kind of demographic effect, but there's also this political and ideological effect of the, well, you tell me of these previous pandemics, the hardening of the partisanship around mask wearing, around the measures that we've had to take across the world. Is it that pandemics can give a nod to the actual size of the population it that pandemics can give a nod to the actual size of the population, but do they also give a shake to the foundations of the political certainties? Can they be quite transformative politically as well? They indeed are. In fact, one of the fascinating findings was the fact that I suppose historians historians looking at past pandemics would find relatively few surprises in COVID-19.

I mean, sudden massive outbreaks of disease require prompt and aggressive government intervention to protect people. And whether it's in the form of quarantines or the lazarettos, the pest houses to which people were consigned in the Middle Ages, or whether it is the shutdowns and social distancing that we saw during COVID-19. Those provoke responses. They provoke resistance. Pandemics really carve deep scars into economies, Pandemics really carve deep scars into economies. And that's a recurring theme. They completely overturn economies.

Pandemics affect societies unequally. They not only affect countries unequally. I mean, in the COVID-19 case, the developing world economies were mightily affected and will take them far longer to recover. Tens of millions of people worldwide, hundreds of millions, according to some estimates, are being pushed back into absolute poverty. By that, I mean not having enough income to provide basic food and shelter. They also provoke resistance. They provoke social disorders. There's a great deal of scapegoating that takes place. People blame others for it. They often lead to a lack of trust in each other. And what is fascinating about that is that there is some research that indicates that that lack of trust is inherited to following generations. In other words,

two generations beyond, even three generations beyond the 1918 flu pandemic, we are still seeing higher levels of distrust among the descendants of those who are most exposed to that pandemic. So those are sort of constant features of how the landscape is, in a sense, trashed by the dragon's tail, if you will. Brian, you've listed a bunch of fascinating aspects of post pandemic life. I'll just take you right to that first one. You mentioned state intervention. Historians of the 18th century, people I admire, they talk a lot about the development of fiscal military states. So war forges these states that turns them into bodies that are capable of efficiently raising money and spending money on weapons and on the battlefield. And the states that kind of fail that test have

disappeared off the map, but ones like Britain succeeded and did very well at that. And it makes me wonder whether actually there's something else going on here. We should talk about some of the fiscal health state as well, because a lot of these advances in state power, state intervention in the rest of the economy and the society, they've come as a response to these gigantic challenges posed by these pandemics. And do they leave a lasting legacy, would you say? They do. And indeed, as part of that process of centralization of states and the expansion of state power, the military were used not only to fight wars with other nations, but also were used as sort of a general purpose instrument to control the population

so that military forces were called out to quell rebellions, to put down strikes, to enforce quarantines, to close borders during pandemics, to seal off nations. So the military had a much broader role in society, and that role expanded significantly during the time of pandemics, because what rulers were doing even before the modern states is essentially trying to isolate their state, their kingdom, their principality from this dangerous disease. And the way they did that was to basically close the gates of the castle to, you know, pull up the drawbridge and to suspend trade and to prevent people from traveling. That had direct impact on people's lives and livelihoods and that provoked resistance. So the imposition of state control and the resistance to that is a continuing feature of pandemics throughout recorded history.

You listen to Dan Snow's history, talking about what we can learn from previous pandemics. More after this. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends.

Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Another thing you mentioned was the, sometimes the depopulation or the upheavals, they can accelerate change that maybe was already

obvious, but it got accelerated by the pandemic. So for example, the move to working from home in more recent one, or in Britain, we've been sort of messing about with video calls for family doctor appointments for a decade now. And suddenly overnight, we made that happen. The giant immovable bureaucracy just shifted. Is that something that you've noticed as well with previous pandemics, that it won't be kind of 180 degree out of the clear blue sky kind of change, but it can accelerate what was already manifest? So maybe a declining empire under Justinian, for example, was dealt a significant body blow by that plague.

Clearly, there have been. body blow by that plague? Clearly, there have been. And I suppose one of the most striking examples would be during the successive outbreaks of the Black Death in England in the 14th century. Of course, the first wave of the Black Death was in 1348. But there were subsequent waves in 1361 and 1369 and 1375. And that set off a chain of events that both initially benefited, and probably in the long range, benefited the peasants, those at the bottom of the economic pyramid, but it also culminated in the Peasants' Revolt and Great Uprising in 1381, which was really England's first major social revolution. And it worked in an odd way. Depopulation benefited the peasants. It created a labor shortage that accelerated the breakdown of the manorial system. This is where the peasants owed the owner of the land, the barons, goods or money or services in return for the use of the land to grow crops for

themselves. As labor became more scarce, the lords had to compete for fewer workers who gained greater mobility. And what this did was simply accelerate the process of putting them in a better bargaining position. Of course, the barons didn't like that. And under pressure from them, the crown tried to enforce new labor laws, price controls, even sanctuary laws, prohibiting these uppity peasants from dressing as if they were, in a sense, above their station in life. At the same time, the king needed a great deal of money for the continuing war with France, and so he imposed new taxes that really fell hardest on the poorest. And the poll tax of 1380 led to open revolt. The peasants marched on London. They took control of the city. And the new King Richard II met with them. He promised them reforms and the mobs dispersed, but then the movement was crushed and he took back all of his promises. But nonetheless, that rebellion signified the new power of the peasants,

completely over the long run transformed the relationships, the basic relationships in England. What do you see going on around us in the world today that feels familiar to someone who's studied the history of how societies rebuild after these pandemics? also the political differences. Rulers, whether kings of yore or modern presidents and prime ministers, don't like pandemics. They really are not good news for someone with political agendas and political ambitions. They're difficult to deal with. Control measures can probably slow the spread of the disease, can reduce the number of deaths, but the fact is that the deaths continue to accumulate, and it's really extremely difficult to do. So in some cases, what we see in the early stages of these pandemics throughout history is an effort to deny that they're even taking place, even to the point of beginning to manipulate the numbers, the reports, when we

begin to have modern reports. And people sort of accuse government of doing this more recently, that the government was not taking it seriously enough, that it was not reporting the deaths accurately enough. But, you know, if we go back to the cholera epidemics of the 19th century, we can find numerous examples in which governments did precisely that, and in some cases even cooking the numbers, that is, fiddling with the reports to try to pretend that there was not a great pandemic going on. And of course, that then fuels another aspect, which is a recurring aspect, and that is that fuels not only suspicion, but it fuels all sorts of conspiracy theories that we see popping up again and again, not only in previous pandemics,

but in the current COVID-19 pandemic. How nervous are you about, this is always the great question for historians when they're writing history, about predicting the future? I mean, it's useful to get this history to kind of illuminate things that are going on at the moment. Do you feel that you're now armed, you're able to kind of see the way forward here, or as all your studying of the past taught you not to make predictions? I think it's closer to the latter. And it's not just in this particular set of circumstances, writing about this. I've been a researcher for many, many years, and it imposes humility, in a sense about one's ability to predict the future. You know, look, we don't know

how or when the COVID-19 pandemic will end. We're not even sure that it will end. The post-pandemic landscape is really one of uncertainty. That may be its principal feature. What we do know is that the normality that we knew before the pandemic will not return. That is, post-pandemic society, whenever that is, will be very different from the way things were prior to the pandemic. What about going back to your day job, war, conflict, terrorism? I mean, it is interesting that the Russian invasion of Ukraine came after the peak of the COVID pandemic. China has ramped up its aggression against Taiwan. Are these coincidental? Do you think these are related? There probably is a contribution, although the relationship between war and pandemics is difficult to disentangle. I mean, war and pandemics circle each other, revolve around each other like binary stars throughout history. And one of the analytical

challenges is that wars are such a constant feature of history and pandemics are recurring events that it is difficult to find a pandemic that is not, in a sense, in close proximity to an ongoing war. Of course, the Great Black Death took place during the Hundred Year War between England and France. And if we go back through the history of, let's say, modern Europe from the Middle Ages on, it is difficult to find a long period of peace. And so if you were to just randomly distribute pandemics throughout that history, as I say, one would fall on top of a war in close proximity to a war. Now, in some cases, pandemics do create such disruptions that they lead to war. In some cases, we see that pandemics create social stress. In other words, they destroy economies.

They create desperate people. And desperate people can coalesce into rebellions. The desperate poor can go on the move and become migrants into other societies. I suspect that we certainly will see as a consequence of COVID-19 and as a consequence of its economic effects in the developing world, we're going to see increased migration pressures coming from some of these countries that have been not only already impoverished, but further impoverished by the pandemic. And desperate people are going to start trying to get to places like Europe or places like the United States in growing numbers, simply reflecting their circumstances. There already are high tensions in these countries

about the presence of immigrants in these societies, and those tensions are going to increase, and those tensions are going to drive those with white supremacist, with nativist ideologies. So it's not that pandemics directly lead to wars, but they create the conditions, the disturbances, the pressures that in turn can manifest themselves in disorders, rebellions, and warfare. That's a brilliant ending. Thank you very much indeed. What is the book called? Tell everyone they can buy it. Plagues and Their Aftermath. Go and get it, folks. Brian Michael Jenkins, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much.