- The fallout from and opportunitues presented by the Black Death offer valuable lessons in pandemic recovery
- Peter Frankopan lays some of these out in The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
As a path out of the Covid-19 crisis slowly begins to emerge, thoughts are fixed firmly on the future. But investors wondering what a post-coronavirus world might look like – and how it might inform events and trends still unforeseen – should not overlook the past.
In one key respect, the disease we are currently battling is unlike the second plague pandemic, better known as the Black Death. As with Covid-19, there was no known treatment for the bubonic plague when it began to spread across central Asia in 1346. But it was far more virulent, killing up to 90 per cent of those who caught it.