A History of the World in Six Plagues: How Contagion, Class and Captivity Shape Us, from Cholera to Covid-19 (Hardback) - Edna Bonhomme

An original, revolutionary new social and scientific history, examining the role that confinement has played in fostering and hindering epidemics

A History of the World in Six Plagues unveils a powerful and unsettling truth: epidemic diseases enter the world by chance, but they become catastrophic by human design.

In this groundbreaking work, Bonhomme explores how six pivotal diseases-Cholera, HIV/AIDS, the Spanish Flu, Sleeping Sickness, Ebola, and COVID-19-have shaped the trajectory of human history. With vivid storytelling and rigorous research, she reveals how pandemics have consistently widened the gaps in racial, economic, and sociopolitical divides, from the slave ships of the Atlantic to today's fractured healthcare systems.

How did a colonial obsession with sugar amplify the devastation of Cholera? Why did sleeping sickness become a weapon of empire in Tanzania? And how has COVID-19 magnified inequities in our modern, interconnected world?

Bonhomme's incisive analysis transforms our understanding of public health, not as a neutral force but as a stage where power, policy, and prejudice collide. Urgent and illuminating, A History of the World in Six Plagues is not just a history of disease - it is a call to reimagine a more equitable future in the face of ongoing global health challenges.

'This book tells the accounts of people who deserved better. It is also a story of redemption, and of the little child in all of us, curled up alone in a huge bed, without her parents, who wants to be healthy and free.'

About the Author

Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science, culture writer and book critic and is a contributing editor for Frieze Magazine. She is coeditor of the book After Sex and her essays have appeared in Esquire, Guardian, The Atlantic, London Review of Books, The Nation and elsewhere. She earned a PhD in history of science from Princeton University. Edna previously held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute, the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the Camargo Foundation, and Baldwin for the Arts. She has received awards from the Robert Silvers Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation. She lives in Berlin, Germany.