Conclusion

Chapter 7 serves as a conclusion to the book, bringing together its main threads. Its findings are used to question three areas of the historiography that have either dominated or have started to dominate. In particular, this book rejects the idea that epidemics have the capacity to cause divergences or structural changes within societies, it counters the modernist preoccupation with viewing epidemics as “sub-normal” or “crisis” conditions to be “managed”, and sees the broader recent trend towards using historical epidemics as a template to draw “lessons” from the past as unhelpful. Going forward, this book suggests that as societies and communities tended to “accommodate” epidemics, our attention should not be on how epidemics helped drastically change societies but why so little change often occurred despite substantial amounts of death.