This is a thread intended to explain why @nfergus the historian (not to be confused with the more important @neil_ferguson the epidemiologist) was rather earlier than most commentators to spot the coming pandemic. See here: niallferguson.com/search/results…. 1/10
I started my career working on the history of the city of Hamburg, which led me to read @RichardEvans36 's best book, Death in Hamburg, on the 1892 cholera epidemic. Here's the summary in my own first book. 2/10 
When I turned to the First World War, in The Pity of War, I delved into the evidence that the German army collapsed in 1918 partly due to a surge of illness, possibly due to the "Spanish" influenza pandemic. 3/10
My next detour into the history of disease was in War of the World (2006), which offered a sketch of the impact of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. 4/10
The work I did on empires in the 2000s also involved excursions into the history of contagious disease. Those who criticized Empire as some kind of whitewash of British colonialism clearly didn't read the book very closely. 5/10
I am still waiting for critics of Civilization to engage with the evidence that some colonial regimes meaningfully improved our knowledge of and ability to control contagious diseases. I did not gloss over the brutal methods often employed. 6/10
The Great Degeneration included a clear warning about the dangers of a future pandemic, reflecting the reading I had done on risk, uncertainty and power laws for the chapter on insurance in The Ascent of Money. 7/10
So when I turned to writing the history of social networks in The Square and the Tower, I really had done quite a lot of thinking about contagion. 8/10
No one discipline can tell us all we need to know about the threat posed by SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19. Epidemiologists, network scientists, mathematicians, economists -- all are needed. But historians have a part to play, too. 9/10
Especially those who have spent a part of their careers trying to reach the widest possible audience. Because at this point, that's part of what we need to do. Hence this: pbs.org/show/niall-fer… 10/10 thread ends.
