We think of pandemics as something out of the ordinary, a dangerous disruption to everyday life; but the reality is that they are a recurrent, even normal, feature of human history, viewed across the millennia. The process of industrialisation during the nineteenth century brought repeated waves of cholera, typhus and typhoid, all of which spread easily in the crowded and insanitary conditions of rapidly expanding cities that were attracting a constant flow of immigrants, many of whom lived close to the poverty line. Even so, the impact of cholera was not entirely negative. It was soon realised that the solution to its spread lay in better sanitation; the consequence in London was the construction of massive sewers that still serve the city.

Pandemics within modern cities have many antecedents, and not simply within urban societies. Thus we would probably want to include within the category of pandemics the diseases, including smallpox and measles, that wiped out maybe nine-tenths of the native population in the areas of the Americas conquered by Spain and other colonial powers in the aftermath of Columbus’s discovery of the route across the Atlantic. Sometimes this is cast as a European crime against native peoples, and there is no doubt that the heavy physical demands Columbus placed on the native people of his major acquisition, Hispaniola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic) weakened still further what little resistance people had to the European diseases that arrived with the conquerors. But this, along with the devastating effects of the conquest of Mexico and Peru, was not an intended consequence of these invasions: the Spaniards wanted to make use of the manpower of the native population, but as that population died out they had recourse to the importation of black slaves, the beginning of the infamous Atlantic slave trade. One could therefore argue that the trade in black slaves across the Atlantic had its roots in the great American pandemics of the early sixteenth century. 

Europe had experienced its own devastating pandemic a century and a half earlier, with the arrival of bubonic plague in 1347. There is some evidence of small-scale outbreaks of bubonic plague, endemic among small rodents, along the famous Silk Roads that linked the area of modern Ukraine with the vast expanses of Eurasia, as fast east as China. The major Genoese trading centre in the Black Sea, Caffa in Crimea, was under siege by a Tatar army that used the bodies of plague victims as cannon fodder, catapulting them into the city and infecting its inhabitants; from there the disease spread on Genoese ships along the trade routes that led into the Mediterranean, arriving before long in Messina. Setting aside the multiple pandemics in the Americas, just mentioned, the Black Death is thought to have wiped out up to half of the population of Europe and the Mediterranean within about five years. In its pneumonic form it was most lethal – its mortality rate approached 100%. 

Recovery was severely hampered by its return again and again in the fourteenth century, and spasmodically thereafter. Its economic effects were drastic and we can talk literally of economic and social dislocation: large areas of the countryside were depopulated, and survivors often migrated to the towns where demand for workers was strong, significantly changing the balance between the rural and urban population. However, it is important to distinguish the short and long-term effects of the Black Death. Those who inherited wealth from deceased relatives often found themselves better off, with the result that demand for bettr food and for high and medium quality goods, such as cloths, expanded. A new and confident urban middle class emerged. Outside the cities, empty areas were given over to sheep and pastoral activity boomed in areas such as Spain and southern Italy. The Black Death effected an economic revolution. 

People learned to live with plague. Great cities such as Milan might lock themselves down. Quarantine was taken seriously. Plague increasingly became endemic, that is, confined to particular areas, with severe outbreaks in Milan in 1630 (memorably described by Manzoni), in London in 1665 and as late 1720 in Marseille. Europeans had no defence against this disease because it had been absent from the region for many centuries. Although the plague reported by the Greek historian and general Thucydides which took hold of Athens in 430-26 BC appears to have been typhoid rather than bubonic plague, the pandemic that hit the Byzantine Empire in AD 541-9 is now known to have been bubonic plague, and appears to have had similar effects to the Black Death: very heavy mortality, major economic consequences in the countryside as a result of population loss, and the shrinking of towns in parts of the eastern Mediterranean. 

In its pneumonic form this disease was spread by droplets in people’s breath, and many of the worst pandemics have been transmitted in this way, even when the bacillus or virus is totally different. The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-20 is thought to have killed as many as 500,000,000 people worldwide, and its spread was facilitated by the movement of armies at the end of the First World War – it was not in fact Spanish, and Spain had kept out of the war. But wartime deprivation had probably weakened resistance in many of the countries it reached. Mutations in the influenza virus have been watched carefully, bearing in mind events such as the Asian flu of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu of 1968. 

But such diseases can also lose some of their potency, to judge, perhaps prematurely, from Covid-19. A lesson from the history of the Black Death is that a bacterium or virus that wants to survive cannot risk exceptionally heavy mortality for a long period. In such cases it kills not just people but ultimately itself as well, since the presence of many fewer people mean that it loses the opportunity to spread.

L'articolo Pandemics and the course of history proviene da InsideOver.

Why Lebanon? Some years ago the distinguished historian Jonathan Steinberg wrote a book entitled Why Switzerland? And a similar question can be posed for Lebanon which, like Switzerland, is host to several different communities. In the Lebanese case we need to go much further back in time than the thirteenth century AD which saw the birth of the Swiss cantons. Instead, we are looking at the thirteenth century BC. For the coast of Lebanon might appear to be a narrow strip hemmed in by mountains, an unlikely centre of trade and industry, but its original importance lay precisely in the extensive resources of wood. As far back as 1075 BC an Egyptian official named Wenamun set out from the Nile Delta on his way to Byblos (modern Jubayl in Lebanon) to obtain timber for the rebuilding of an Egyptian temple. His adventures, fictional or more probably true, are recorded on a papyrus scroll that has survived till today. The resources in wood of the Lebanese mountains were a vital resource for the Egyptians, who could obtain poor quantities of wood of poor quality in Egypt.

It is therefore no great surprise that the strip of coast that now constitutes Lebanon was the birthplace of trans-Mediterranean trade in antiquity. The Phoenician merchants were easily able to obtain the wood they required for building sturdy ships able to sail to and beyond the Strait of Gibraltar. The merchants of Tyre founded new settlements as far west as Carthage and Cádiz. They also looked eastwards towards the growing power of Assyria, providing luxury goods for the court of the Assyrian kings. They remained a significant presence in imperial Rome, bringing luxury goods from the east. Lebanon was therefore already the crossroads between the landmass of the Middle Est and the entire length of the Mediterranean, a role that it would preserve for most of its history.

In the Middle Ages this same stretch of coast was conquered first by Muslim armies, in the seventh century, and then by the crusaders at the end of the eleventh century. The crusaders held it for less than two centuries, but they eagerly exploited its resources. Near Tyre sugar plantations, many of them owned by Venetian merchants, supplied what was still a rare and costly delicacy to western Europe. The conquest of the coastline by the Mamluk rulers of Egypt in the late thirteenth century was accompanied by the destruction of many of the Levantine ports, but this only gave greater prominence to Beirut, which was preserved and built close business ties to the Genoese and Venetian merchants who operated out of Famagusta in Cyprus. Among the products these traders handled was cotton, exported to northern Italy and transformed into textiles including the famous fustians of Lombardy made out of a combination of cotton and wool.

This was also an area of great ethnic and religious diversity. A Spanish traveller, Benjamin of Tudela, passed through Lebanon in around 1170 and noted the presence in the mountainous interior of the Assassin sect of Shi’ite Islam and of the Druze warriors, members of a religious group that diverged from Shi’ite Islam in the eleventh century and preserves distinctive beliefs and practices; one is reincarnation but others are still kept secret. To these groups should be added the Maronite Christians in the interior, who venerated several local saints and from the sixth century onwards developed loose ties to the Roman Catholic Church as a result of their common theological position, a relationship that was confirmed during the late twelfth century and still holds. The religious map of modern Lebanon is further complicated by the very substantial Shi’ite population living between Tyre and the Israeli border, as well as a large population of Palestinian refugees and their descendants, who are predominantly Sunni Muslim, while the country’s Jewish population, once a significant element, has all but disappeared.

When Lebanon emerged from centuries of Ottoman domination (the Turks conquered the region in 1516) these religious divisions became crucial in determining its future. The Druze and Maronite leaders were already cooperating with one another in the local government of the region during the eighteenth century; but the French mandate in Syria following the First World War and the break-up of the Ottoman Empire at last offered a chance for the ambitions of the nationalists to become real. In establishing a republic of Lebanon within French Syria in 1926, France recognized the exceptional significance of its Christian inhabitants while trying to accommodate the interests of the other groups as well. French attitudes were moulded by a nostalgic affection for the era of the crusader states, which were seen by historians as an early expression of the mission civilisatrice of France in the Mediterranean (not a view held nowadays). An fully independent Lebanese republic came into being in 1943 amid the chaos of the Second World War; its constitution still insists that the president must be a Maronite and the Prime Minister must be Shi’ite.

Since 1948 one of the major issues in Lebanese politics has been the presence of Israel to the south. Lebanon sees itself as an Arab nation and is a member of the League of Arab States, even if it is the only member to contain such a high proportion of Christians, mostly of them descended from the pre-Islamic inhabitants of the Middle East. Although Lebanon joined the Arab attack on Israel that year it tried as far as possible to keep a low profile in the wars against Israel. However, the government has never been successful in limiting attacks on Israel first by the Palestine Liberation Organization (bearing in mind the large Palestinian population in southern Lebanon), and subsequently by the Iranian-funded Hizbollah organization. Following the Lebanese civil war that broke out in 1975 and lasted till 1990, Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, in support of Maronite allies, reaching the outskirts of Beirut, and later occupying a small strip of land across from its northern frontier until 2000. Syrian troops moved into the country – Syria never having recognized the independence of Lebanon – and were only dislodged in 2005.

All this has had a serious effect on the capital, Beirut, In its heyday it was one of the major business centres of the Middle East, and with wealth came a reputation for a hedonistic high life. Its hotels and clubs attracted hordes of visitors from more Puritan parts of the region. However, the destruction in civil war of parts of the city, followed by their rebuilding, followed by their renewed destruction, has helped destroy the economy as well. In 2022 it has been marked by steep inflation, power cuts, food shortages and – of course – renewed political crises. The political influence of Hizbollah seems to be impossible to break. One consolation, perhaps, is that the Bekaa valley still produces excellent wines including those of the prestigious Château Musar; but at the moment the economic and political future continues to look bleak. No longer the bridge between the Mediterranean and the Middle East, Lebanon risks becoming a failed state.

L'articolo The Bridge Between the Mediterranean and the Middle East proviene da InsideOver.

Reportage / Society 02.12.2021

The Mediterranean Sea, a crossroad of civilizations

The Mediterranean only accounts for 0.8% of the maritime surface of the globe, and yet it has had an importance in human history far beyond what its size might seem to merit. Indeed, its relative smallness, compared to the oceans,…

David Abulafia

L'articolo The Mediterranean Sea, a crossroad of civilizations proviene da InsideOver.