Plagues, liberal society and the future after Covid

The extraordinary leap in wealth and wellbeing of the last two centuries came about also from the political order based on independent states set from the Treaty of Westphalia and the English Revolution, both in 1648. Yet these landmarks came also from the outcome of a plague, not too different from the present Covid.

The last great plague of the Western world occurred in 1630, in the middle of the Thirty Years’ War. Some Swiss mercenaries paid by the Habsburgs passed through Milan and northern Italy, and on their way spread a deadly virus. Over a quarter of the total population in northern Italy, some one million people, died because of the epidemic in one year.

After that, the war took an even more bitter turn. The Habsburgs, who were the lords of Milan, then the richest part of Europe, hurt badly. They withdrew from their trade with China and poured American silver not into the purchase of Chinese vases and silk but into weapons for their fight.

After imports of Mexican silver halted, the Chinese economy suffered massive inflation that in ten years quadrupled the value of silver, starved millions of peasants, and kindled the Li Zicheng’s uprising that toppled the Ming dynasty then ruling China.

In Europe, the flow of Mexican silver proved insufficient in plugging the loss of the Italian economy. The Habsburgs basically lost their bet in affirming their rule over Europe and the Mediterranean and had to come to an agreement in Westphalia in 1648 that essentially set the basis for the modern world and modern capitalist development that for the first time in human history created a progressive quantum leap in economic, technological and social progress.