Depending on one’s perspective, this blighted year has been the best or worst possible time to pick up a book (properly sanitised, of cours...
Depending on one’s perspective, this blighted year has been the best or worst possible time to pick up a book (properly sanitised, of course) about the history of deadly global pandemics. Chinmay Tumbe makes a strong case for the former.
In The Age of Pandemics, he documents a series of catastrophes which makes the past year look positively benign in comparison. Between 1817 and 1920, some 70 million people around the world died during cholera, plague, and influenza pandemics. Over half of those deaths occurred in India.
How did this happen? And why has this morbid occurrence been so completely wiped away from our collective memory? While searching for answers, Tumbe offers perspectives on our own tryst with Covid-19 – and how we can stay alert for the next pandemic.
Deadly viruses and rogue bacilli have been two relatively unappreciated historical agents. They nevertheless played a decisive role in everything from the ebb of the Roman Empire to the European conquest of the Americas. Tumbe sees pandemics as instrumental in understanding colonial India, too.
Uncanny similiarities
Significantly, India’s Age of Pandemics began just as Western Europe decisively pulled ahead of South and East Asia in terms of wealth and development, what historians have termed the Great Divergence. As Asia’s population contracted relative...
