Summary
Teaching professor of history Benjamin Reilly has published his sixth book, Endemics, Epidemics, and Pandemics in World History. The volume provides an interdisciplinary look at the two-way relationship between disease and human development, from the Stone Age to COVID-19. It examines how changing human lifestyles, such as globalization and agriculture, create predictable niches for pathogens, and introduces the concept of the "behavioral immune system" to explain historical phenomena like xenophobia and scapegoating during outbreaks.
DOHA, QATAR – Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar (CMU-Q) is proud to announce the publication of Endemics, Epidemics, and Pandemics in World History by Benjamin Reilly, teaching professor of history. Published by Routledge, Reilly’s new volume offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary look at the two-way relationship between disease and human development, from the Stone Age to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The book argues that changing patterns of human life—including the shift to agriculture, waves of globalization, and industrialization—created predictable and recurring niches for pathogens to exploit.
The behavioral immune system
A key insight in Reilly’s work is the concept of the “behavioral immune system,” a set of psychological instincts that humans evolved to help them avoid infection. The book connects this instinct to historical and contemporary social phenomena.
“We have our regular immune system that protects us when disease is already in the body, but it’s much better to avoid disease in the first place,” explains Reilly. “The behavioral immune system helps us understand why historically, diseases in very different situations lead to similar effects like scapegoating, xenophobia, and often violence.”
In charting the chronological history of disease, Dr. Reilly examines specific outbreaks to illustrate recurring themes. For instance, he discusses how military campaigns often became major drivers of disease spread, leading to devastating non-combat casualties, such as the overwhelming rates of death from malaria and yellow fever among European soldiers in the Caribbean.
He details how seemingly positive advancements created new vulnerabilities. One example was how the demand for polished rice under European colonialism led to massive outbreaks of Beriberi due to the removal of essential nutrients.
The COVID-19 pandemic
To conclude the book, Reilly asserts that the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the enduring themes of human-disease interaction:
“COVID was a new disease, but it fit all the old habits,” he notes. “It arose from human interaction with the natural world, spread by exploiting globalized networks of exchange, helped induce xenophobia, scapegoating and violence, and disproportionately afflicted marginalized and impoverished populations.”
Reilly is the longest-serving faculty member at CMU-Q, joining the campus when it opened in 2004, and an influential voice in the field of environmental history. In 2024, he released Disasters in World History, a companion novel to Endemics, Epidemics, and Pandemics in World History. This is Reilly’s sixth book.
