From the Titanic crashing to the Challenger exploding, from the 1918 flu to the 2019 coronavirus, Ferguson argues that "All disasters are in some sense man-made"-or rather men-made.
More trade meant more networks for the virus to transmit, and it was the cities at the center of those networks-Siena, London, Paris, Avignon, Venice-that saw the most deaths.
The resulting medical revolution, Ferguson writes provocatively, "Is intelligible only in an imperial context." Africa and Asia became "Giant laboratories for Western medicine," which soon improved life expectancy across the world, including the colonized regions.
Ferguson doesn't see the pandemic as a one-off.
The administrative state, Ferguson writes, "Has produced pathologies every bit as harmful, and perhaps in the long run more so, than the virus SARS-Cov-2." One such pathology is the diffusion of decision-making.
Leadership matters too, of course, and Ferguson hardly exonerates Trump, whose gaffes come in for appropriate criticism.
Such decisions happen "Far from the presidential conferences and cabinet meetings that historians tend to study," Ferguson writes.
https://freebeacon.com/culture/more-than-enough-blame-to-go-around/
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