Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

Author: Jonathan Kennedy

In the words of the author, “the modern world has been shaped by microbes as much as by women and men”.  I was exposed to the importance of germs in shaping our history, through Jared Diamond’s classic “Guns, Germs and Steel”. This book looks at the more recent past and has several examples where history having been written by the victors, did not give due importance to the role that infectious diseases played in determining the outcome.

Jonathan claims that the early Viking explorers like Erikson, were unsuccessful in colonizing the Americas, circa 1000 AD simply because germs were not on their side. It turns out that the Vikings way of life did not result in breeding pathogens, and consequently deriving immunity from them as a weapon.

Europeans early attempts at taking control of Africa were met with similar challenges. “the threat posed by infectious diseases, made it impossible for Europeans to colonize most of sub-Saharan Africa. in 1870 only 1/10 of the African land mass was under European control”, in contrast to the Americas that had almost completely been occupied by Europeans by this time. And Africa was rumored to be chock full of gold since ancient times. Mansa Musa, the 14th century ruler of Mali was said to have given away so much gold to beggars that he ruined neighboring Egypts economy for 12 years through hyperinflation. 

Malaria and yellow fever were pretty brutal and white men couldn’t survive these diseases until the rediscovery of quinine. In 1846 Thomas Thompson, a British Navy doctor, published his findings about the success of quinine in treating malaria in the Lancet. It turns out that quinine was the key for Europeans to open the floodgates to colonize Africa.

Malaria ended up coming to America with the arrival of slaves from Africa around 1500 AD. African slaves were more popular in the South because Malaria was much more prevalent in the South. The mosquitoes that spread malaria couldn’t survive the winters in the north. As a result northern states preferred white indentured servants who were more economically viable than slaves at the time. The author also presents evidence that slaves from malaria infested regions of Africa commanded higher prices. 

There are other interesting tidbits of information like “female anopheles quadrimaculatus mosquitoes should be considered one of the founding mothers of the United States”.  According to the author, malaria killed eight times more British troops than American guns.

Overall, it seems like the author has scooped up all historical events that could be attributed to diseases and put forth his thesis. It gets repetitive after a while, and there’s no easy way to validate the true cause.