Kinda interesting that the century of American globalization and the century of Chinese globalization both have a pandemic about 25 years in. I’d date the former to the 1893 Chicago world fair, and the latter to the death of Deng Xiaoping, 1997.

Recent scholarship suggests the “Spanish” flu started in the US (it’s never been clear where it started though scholars least knew that “Spanish” was an artifact of Spain not censoring its press as a neutral in WW1) https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journal-plague-year-180965222/

Wild theory: maybe causing a pandemic is sort of a debutante move as a globalization power. The Black Death appears to have started in Central Asia, around the time arguably Mongols/Turks created the first wave of globalization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death#Predominant_modern_theory

Kinda makes sense. Globalization means you drive a wave of improved communication and transportation infrastructure. So diseases ride the pipes too. The Black Death also appears to have had a climate change component. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Late_Middle_Ages#Climate_change_and_plague_epidemic_correlation

Our time also has climate change, and we’ve already had one climate-related pandemic. It just wasn’t among humans. It was among Saiga deer. Adjacent possible warning. Covid19 has no climate angle that I can see, but the risk of climate change and pandemic risk combing is there.

“In November 2015 Dr. Richard A. Kock...reported that his colleagues and he had narrowed down the possible culprits. Climate change and stormy spring weather, they said, may have transformed harmless bacteria, carried by the saigas, into lethal pathogens.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saiga_antelope#2015–2016_epizootic

Don’t want to overstate/over fit the US origin of Spanish Flu theory. It’s not critical to the pattern. The bigger part is that the waxing global power supplies the new transportation network the disease rides, whatever the origin. https://twitter.com/mattpirkowski/status/1247745705881395202?s=21 https://twitter.com/mattpirkowski/status/1247745705881395202

In fact there’s a strong possibility all 3 big pandemivs (Black Death, Spanish Flu, Covid19) might have originated in China. But this is the first one where China *also* controls half the transportation pathways. Direct airline connectivity to China was the big dispersal factor.

Counterfactual: if the virus had originated elsewhere, I bet the early dispersal hub would still likely have been China.

It’s important to be able to talk of origins dispassionately rather than at “your people gave my people cooties” level. Even if we can’t definitively trace origins especially in historic cases. It’s tempting but analytically a dead-end to study causes with an eye on blame.

Example: on Indian WhatsApp I’ve seen gloating fake claims that no pandemics have ever started in India, and that weird, dirty Chinese with their weird meats are to blame. Not true, lots of 19th century cholera outbreaks were from India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholera_outbreaks_and_pandemics

Among recent epidemics, sources have been Hong Kong, Misdle East, West Africa. Only weird one I can think of from the west is mad cow disease but that had low crossover threat. Higher standard of living and lower density may lower chances of originating diseases, BUT...

Keep in mind that western standards of living are sustained by: Asian manufacturing, middle eastern oil, and west African mineral wealth.

Everybody is complicit. That’s the essence of globalization.

If West Africa hadn’t been looted if it’s wealth by local warlords in cahoots with western MNCs, night it perhaps be a wakanda style paradise rather than the origin of AIDS and Ebola in recent decades?

We don’t know because history never went down that fork.

MERS appears to have jumped the human-camel barrier but would that have been as consequential in a non-oil-dependent world?

So “cooties” approaches to big history thinking around pandemics is just not very enlightening or interesting. But globalization linkages otoh are very interesting. Pandemics as the cost of globalization. Payments due once a century or so.

Pandemic-aware Big History probably needs the Harare/Sapiens treatment. Maybe even Gladwell or Tom Friedman level. There’s a pop-narrative vacuum here that’s being filled by the least charitable speculations rather than the most enlightening.

I generally don’t enjoy that band of authors for their shallow/facile theorizing but I have to admit: they provide a valuable service creating Schelling points of understanding founded in curiosity rather than fear.

And it’s important to reorient around curiosity rather than fear as we come out of this, so the response to the next one — and there will be a next one — is better. Which kind of Big History you entertain now will determine whether you’re part of the problem or solution next time

This might sound like elliptical apologia for China at a time when Trump is going his usual crude demonizing to create convenient enemies. That’s not my intent.

China can and should be held to account for its role here. So should the WHO for their failures. But by credible people carefully considering what happened. Not by the kangaroo court if Trumpist opinion.