Controlling contagion : epidemics and institutions from the Black Death to COVID

Abstract

How do societies use institutions – the humanly devised rules of social interaction – to tackle epidemic disease? Controlling Contagion (Princeton University Press, 2024) addresses this question using evidence from seven centuries of pandemics, from the Black Death to Covid-19. For most of history, infectious diseases have killed many more people than famine or war, and in 2019 they still caused one death in four. Epidemics provide one of our best laboratories for exploring how societies have for centuries tackled externalities – situations where my action creates costs or benefits for others in addition to those that I myself incur. This lecture explores how markets, states, communities, religions, guilds, and families dealt with the negative externalities of contagion; the positive externalities of social distancing, sanitation, and immunisation; and the cross-border externalities of vaccine diplomacy, river agreements, and quarantine. It shows how, long before scientific medicine, human societies coordinated and innovated to deal with biological shocks – well or badly.