Pandemics of disease, pandemics of hatred from the Plague of Athens to AIDS. (360G-Wellcome-094158_Z_10_Z)

The project will investigate the socio-psychological consequences of pandemics from ancient civilizations to the present, challenging common assumptions that collective violence inevitably accompanied pandemics. By charting which pandemics tended to spark collective violence, this study will question common explanations usually based on a single pandemic or disease and often for a particular place and time--the Black Death, 1347-52, plague in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, cholera in 1832, AIDS in the 1970s and 1980s. It will be comparative over time, place, and disease in an effort to explain, for instance, why cholera continued to spark class hatred and riots from its first appearance to as late as 1912, while yellow fever did not, even though its symptoms were as horrific, its transmission and pathology took longer to discover, its victims centred more on the poor and recent immigrants and with mortality rates as high as 70 percent. By building databases of pandemics and hatred over two-and-a-half millennia, the project will chart the varied relations between disease and collective violence to discover the significant variables across time, space, and disease. Knowledge of these variables and their mix could prove critical for understanding the socio-psychological effects of future pandemics.