Plagues and Peoples

The key to McNeill’s definition of civilization is one of balance between the sort of bodies that live and do work and the sort of bodies who employ force or subterfuge to live off that work. Much of his emphasis is on the nonhuman preconditions for civilization; in a book about disease, microorganisms must, by necessity, take center stage. In this way—and given a sampling size of every human who ever lived (as the scope of McNeill’s narrative allows)—he describes very little variation or individual effect. When humanity is introduced to a new microparasite, therefore, the result is catastrophic within a limited community, and only the totalizing language of human evolution is sufficient to describe the effects. New diseases, then, cause epidemics; should host and parasite evolve resistance to one another over time as their biology and need demand—especially if no other host presents itself as a more fitting house for the parasite, then endemicity is the result. Endemic balance is reached when host populations can thrive in tandem with microparasitic life.

This broad view allows for little nuance, and when speaking in terms of