As the world struggles to come to terms with coronavirus and think about its possible consequences, not least in the long term, we might ask whether there are any lessons or warnings we can take from the previous history of pandemics. Infections such as the Black Death of the 14th century are so distant in time that it’s hard to find parallels with the present. There have been very few visitations of mass epidemics on modern societies, on capitalist economies in which most people are engaged in waged labour, and on political systems dominated by political parties and elected administrations.
One such, however, was cholera, a disease unknown in Europe before the 19th century. Endemic in north India, it was spread westward by trade after the British conquest of the region, which opened up trading routes across Afghanistan and Persia and into Russia. UK industrialisation not only stimulated trade with the subcontinent, it also created perfect conditions for the cholera bacillus to multiply in the overcrowded, insanitary and unhygienic towns of the new industrial era. Armies brought the disease with them as they marched across Europe: it’s no coincidence that the great cholera epidemics of the century coincided with periods of revolutionary upheaval and war – the Russian suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830, revolution and counter-revolution across Europe in 1848-49, the Crimean War of 1853-56, and Bismarck’s wars of German unification in the 1860s.
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