Apple warned last night that his results were going to be amputated because of the epidemic of Coronavirus, as Beijing tightens its quarantine measures. And that makes us take back your history books …
Yes, imagine that at all times, viruses have developed with capitalism. And not only dramatically. The famous epidemic of black plague for example, which started in Europe in 1346, literally ravaged the European population by killing at least a third of the inhabitants. In Italy, half the population has even disappeared. As for France, it did not recover the number of inhabitants before the epidemic until the 18th century, several hundred years later!
This epidemic was the indirect cause of the greatest increase in the standard of living in the Middle Ages. Wages have indeed exploded due to the shortage of workers. It is at this point that serfdom, this form of economic slavery, disappears as a result of competition between employers to attract employees. And at the same time, rents are collapsing due to falling demand.
The virus has taken the Silk Road
You will not believe it: the black plague came from Hubei, the Chinese province whose capital is Wuhan, exactly where our coronavirus epidemic started, benign in terms of mortality if we compare it to the bubonic plague. Thehe virus then traveled by the Silk Road, which linked China to Europe for the fur and spice trade. Viruses have always taken the routes of money and commerce, they prospered thanks to globalization, including in its primitive forms of the Middle Ages. And it is also by means of these viruses that the West has taken control of distant Americas.
All European explorers took with them diseases like smallpox, measles, polio, which literally exterminated the large populations that inhabited the Americas. They were carrying animals carrying these germs when the Aztecs and the American Indians were not immune.
This explains why very small armed bands, of a few hundred adventurers, like that of the Spanish Cortez, could have taken control of an empire of several million inhabitants in South America. In a short time, the population of what is today Mexico has been divided by ten because of smallpox. Later, during the conquest of the Wild West, it was the railway that brought the viruses and killed the Indians, freeing up the territory for the Whites.
Domestication of animals questioned
These diseases appeared when humans became sedentary and that he invented agriculture, and in particular the domestication of animals, because many of the microorganisms causing these diseases actually come from animals. Their ravages were all the more important than with productive agriculture, we were able to build cities where men lived more and more in crowded conditions favoring contagion. A contagion which has further increased with the first trade routes, those of the Roman Empire in particular, and which has always occurred at the speed where man was traveling, that is to say more and more quickly. The epidemic is a misfortune for homo economicus.
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