Global History in 15 Epidemics: Contexts and Cultures

by Andrew Robarts, Laura A. Belmonte (Editor)

Overview

Infectious disease has been the biggest threat to human life throughout history, and specific outbreaks have imprinted themselves upon our collective memory for centuries. Drawing lessons from the past to help us grapple with current and future pandemics, Global History in 15 Epidemics focuses on the social, cultural and political dimensions of humanity's response to the rise and spread of epidemic diseases. Taking a global perspective, this text explores the transnational, environmental and technological factors that promote and sustain outbreaks of epidemic disease.

From smallpox in colonial America to influenza in WWI, tuberculosis in the 19th century and covid-19 in the present day, this book seeks to understand the role played by factors such as climate, migration, imperialism, the environment and human-animal interactions. It also explores the development and evolution of quarantine, public health systems and vaccination to understand state-society responses and the political and legal dimensions of outbreaks. Asking how outbreaks interact with war, racism, cultural memory and social stigma, it takes a comparative approach, exploring how the same diseases were experienced differently depending on their geographical, political and cultural settings. Finally, it asks how these experiences have fed into cultural memory and explores how epidemics and pandemics have been, and continue to be, memorialized throughout time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350325630
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	04/02/2026
Series:	History in 15
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Andrew Robarts is Associate Professor of History at Rhode Island School of Design, USA, where he teaches disease in history. He is the author of Migration and Disease in the Black Sea Region: Ottoman and Russian Relations in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Bloomsbury, 2017).

Laura Belmonte is Dean of the Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences and Professor of History at Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, USA.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Disease and Imperialism; Disease and Migration, Disease and Climate.
1. Smallpox, Imperialism, and the Colonization of the Americas and Australia.
2. Yellow Fever in the Early-modern Caribbean and Latin America.
3. Yellow Fever in the American South.
4. Malaria and Plague in the Early-modern Eastern Mediterranean.
5. Plague and Cholera in the Black Sea Region.
6. Plague and Cholera in the modern Middle East.
7. Tuberculosis in the Nineteenth Century.
8. Influenza and World War One.
9. Zoonosis and the Environment in Africa.
10. Smallpox and Modernity in Japan.
11. Plague in Modern China.
12. Cholera, Malaria, and the Environment in South and Southeast Asia.
13. Race, Society, and Public Health in the Twentieth Century.
14. Polio and Vaccination Campaigns in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century.
15. Influenza, HIV/AIDS, Covid-19, and the Memory and Memorialization of Epidemics and Pandemics.