Fighting the First Wave

Peter Baldwin is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. His previous publications include Disease and Democracy: The Industrialized World Faces AIDS (2005), Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (1999), and The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle (2014). His latest book, Command and Persuade: Crime, Law, and the State across History is forthcoming in the fall of 2021.

• Introduction: One Threat, Many Responses; 1. Science, Politics, and History: Do They Explain the Variety of Approaches to Covid-19?; 2. New Dogs, Old Tricks: Fighting Covid-19 with Ancient Preventive Tactics; 3. The Politics of Prevention: How State and Citizen Interacted, Battling the Virus; 4. What Was Done? Act One of the Pandemic; 5. Why the Preventive Playing Field Was Not Level: Geography, Prosperity, Society; 6. Where and Why Science Mattered: Traditional Chinese Medicine, Herd Immunity, Asymptomatic Carriers, Superspreading, and Masks; 7. From State to Citizen: The Individualization of Public Health; 8. Who is Responsible for Our Health? How Prevention was Enforced; 9. Difficult Decisions in Hard Times: Trade-offs between Being Safe and Solvent; Conclusion: Public Health and Public Goods: The State in a Post-Pandemic World; Acknowledgments; Notes; Index.

'In this compelling guide to the coronavirus pandemic, Peter Baldwin shows that the varied state responses to COVID-19 cannot be explained by science or politics alone but depend on range of historical, social and cultural factors. Likely to be read long after the first wave is over.' Mark Honigsbaum, author of The Pandemic Century: A History of Global Contagion from the Spanish Flu to Covid-19