The enduring legacies of Covid-19 have been linked to a post- or new-normal era defined by everything from chronic debt to the rise of Big Data and the lingering unease any of us might feel in a crowd. Those transformations are placed in fresh perspective by Sheilagh Ogilvie’s reminder that humanity has experienced a severe pandemic roughly every five generations since the Black Death scythed across Europe for nearly a decade from 1346. ‘History seethes with epidemics,’ Ogilivie writes. Her interest is in how societies have responded across that long time span. What resources have been mobilised to ‘control contagion’? What changed with, and can be learnt from, those cycles in humanity’s extreme if episodic vulnerability to microbes?
Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and institutions from the Black Death to Covid by Sheilagh Ogilvie
Princeton University Press, $69.99 hb, 526 pp
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