There Is No Return To Normal
There Is No Return To Normal The lesson that I want to stress is the importance of time in the writing and analysis of history. Keep in mind the Black Death spread from Asia to Europe in less than a year. The pandemic traveled throughout Europe within another two years and then continued for another four before it was temporarily extinguished. Yet, historians of the West are and were largely concerned with the impact of the pandemic in Europe. They did not follow its duration in Africa, the Middle East or Asia. And they did not record its return in those places. European history ignored the experiences of non-Europeans in its coverage of the plague. The pandemic though changed the course of the western world and impacted the rest of the globe. Two centuries later, a more immune European continent had conquered the world. In English history, the Black Death reframes the monarchy, the economy and the trajectory of the nation towards an empire. Smallpox, not the plague, became the more fe