Only a Quote

Sometimes a book that I have not read will validate something I have been saying for many years. Of course, this can be predictable, especially when the book in question was vital to the establishment of a field of inquiry in which I have done substantial reading. That is the case with William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (1976). It is a book that I should have read in graduate school, or even undergraduate. I bought a copy in 2008, but it has been sitting on the shelf unread.

I have been working the past couple of weeks on one of my very long posts for Patriots and Peoples, "Pandemic History" and "Pandemic History: The Bibliography" (planned as one, it became two). The bibliography includes annotations of a number of books. I read some of these books a long time ago, some recently, while others have been languishing unread on the shelf, or partially read. My intention yesterday was to race through Plagues and Peoples in a couple of hours--long enough to produce a competent annotation.

I failed. The book has pulled me in. McNeill's vision is broad and interesting. He suggests some provocative metaphors--humans as macroparasites, for instance. I am reading the whole book. This morning's brief passage took me back to something I wrote.

In my post, "Origins of Malaria" (2008), I summed up a point I had been making in college lectures for two decades:

Civilization made us sick, but it also made us more numerous so we could impose our will on those otherwise more fortunate. The maladies that afflicted Europeans contributed in significant measure to their global expansion.

Then, this morning I read in Plagues and Peoples:

When civilized societies learned to live with the "childhood diseases" that can only persist among large human populations, they acquired a very potent biological weapon. It came into play whenever new contacts with previously isolated, smaller human groups occurred.

I agree with McNeill. Maybe he's the one who suggested the idea to me in the first place through the filter of works by other scholars whose work followed his seminal contribution to the subject.