Five years ago, the world was waking up to the dangers of a tricky little airborne microorganism that attacks the upper respiratory tract,

sets the systems of the human body on fire.

The coronavirus pandemic claimed millions of lives and resulted in millions more chronic illnesses and disabilities.

It brought the global economy to its needs.

Illness in general and pandemics in particular can be seen as universal human tragedies,

but like so many so-called great equalizers, it revealed just how deep the inequalities go.

The path the virus tore through our societies revealed vast social divides, historic injustices

and governmental failures as many people across the world were effectively abandoned to the disease

with very little protections. And prisoners were some of the most exposed populations,

with infection rates sky high in cramped conditions. It was not the first or the last

time where containment and contagion went hand in hand, or when a pandemic had an outsized role

in deepening inequality. In a new book, A History of the World in Six Plagues, Edna Bonhomme explores the interconnected

histories of two inescapable facts of modernity, mass confinement and mass infection.

The political history of epidemics can tell us a lot about how the world we know was made,

from their spread to their research, their treatment,

their policing, the conspiracy theories and rumours that spring up in their wake. Edna Bonham

is a historian of science, a culture writer and a journalist. She's a contributing writer for

Freeze magazine and the co-editor of After Sex, an anthology about reproductive justice.

Her writing has appeared widely in outlets including The Atlantic, The Baffler, The Guardian,

London Review of Books, The Nation, and the Washington Post.

We talked about cholera, Ebola, sleeping sickness and COVID-19,

about plantation medicine, prison organizing, fascism and

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