William McNeill was one of the 20^th century’s leading big-picture world historians. Interconnectedness is a major running theme of his work. This title applies McNeill’s interconnectedness emphasis to disease as an engine of world history.

This is of obvious interest in the wake of COVID-19. What can we learn from how other societies have dealt with plagues? What were mistakes we can avoid? What things worked that we can adapt to our own time?

Upon its original publication, Plagues and Peoples was an immediate critical and popular success, offering a radically new interpretation of world history as seen through the extraordinary impact--political, demographic, ecological, and psychological--of disease on cultures. From the plague of ancient Athens, to the 14^th-century black death/bubonic plague in Eurasia, to the conquest of Mexico by smallpox epidemics as much as the Spanish, to the 1918 global flu pandemic, the history of disease is the history of humankind. With the identification of AIDS in the early 1980s, another chapter has been added to this chronicle of events, which William McNeill explores in his new introduction to this updated edition.

Thought-provoking, well-researched, and compulsively readable, Plagues and Peoples is that rare book that is as fascinating as it is scholarly, as intriguing as it is enlightening. "A brilliantly conceptualized and challenging achievement" (Kirkus Reviews), it is essential reading, offering a new perspective on human history.