How Contagion, Class and Captivity Shape Us, from Cholera to Covid-19
An original, revolutionary new social and scientific history, examining the role that confinement has played in fostering and hindering epidemics

'If everyone read Edna Bonhomme's incredible, humane, insightful book-and I hope they do-we might stand a chance' Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of An Immense World
'Fascinating and thought-provoking' Jonathan Kennedy, author of Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History
'Tender as it tackles some of the most stigmatized subjects of our time' Morgan Jenkins, author of Wandering in Strange Lands

A History of the World in Six Plagues unveils a powerful and unsettling truth: epidemic diseases enter the world by chance, but they become catastrophic by human design.

In this groundbreaking work, Bonhomme explores how six pivotal diseases - Cholera, HIV/AIDS, the Spanish Flu, Sleeping Sickness, Ebola and COVID-19 - have shaped the trajectory of human history. With vivid storytelling and rigorous research, she reveals how pandemics have consistently widened the gaps in racial, economic and sociopolitical divides, from the slave ships of the Atlantic to today's fractured healthcare systems.

How did a colonial obsession with sugar amplify the devastation of Cholera? Why did sleeping sickness become a weapon of empire in Tanzania? And how has COVID-19 magnified inequities in our modern, interconnected world?

Bonhomme's incisive analysis transforms our understanding of public health, not as a neutral force but as a stage where power, policy and prejudice collide. Urgent and illuminating, A History of the World in Six Plagues is not just a history of disease - it is a call to reimagine a more equitable future in the face of ongoing global health challenges.

'This book tells the accounts of people who deserved better. It is also a story of redemption, and of the little child in all of us, curled up alone in a huge bed, without her parents, who wants to be healthy and free.'