Plagues and Peoples
William H. McNeill, 1976 — cycles.
The book that installed epidemiology inside macrohistory. McNeill reads civilizations as host populations co-evolving with two classes of parasite — the microparasites that harvest their bodies and the macroparasites, conquering and taxing elites, that harvest their surplus — and shows the great political discontinuities tracking the confluence of previously separate disease pools: Rome and Han China trading epidemics along the silk routes, the Mongol unification of Eurasia carrying plague west to kill a third of Europe, the Columbian exchange demographically annihilating the Americas and handing two continents to their invaders. Published in 1976, it set the base rate the engine's pandemic files inherit: epidemic disease is a recurring macro variable in the historical record, not an exotic interruption of it.
Marked passages
The dual-parasite frame, summarized: every settled society carries two extractive burdens — pathogens and elites — and its trajectory is the running balance of what both leave behind; when either extraction rate outruns the host's capacity to replenish, the society sickens by the same arithmetic.
Extraction accounting as civilizational diagnostics — the same ledger the asabiyyah and elite-overproduction frameworks keep on the macroparasite side of his equation.
The confluence finding, summarized: the great die-offs arrive when transport links disease pools that evolved apart — steppe caravan, sea lane, and in our era the flight network — with each advance in connectivity compressing the interval between confluences.
Connectivity as the pandemic accelerant: the closed system Mackinder announced in 1904 moves pathogens too. The Observatory's pandemic entries score network reach alongside pathogen biology for exactly this reason.
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