This chapter shows that COVID-19 death rates were more than twice as high in areas of high deprivation as in less deprived areas. This is due, firstly, to a greater likelihood of contracting COVID-19 and then, secondly, to a greater vulnerability to its effects. Those with lower incomes are more likely to be key workers and to use public transport, exposing them to greater risk. This is compounded by a greater vulnerability to serious illness as underlying health conditions linked to deprivation – cardio-vascular disease, obesity and diabetes – interact with the virus. These co-morbidities often affect whole families, including those living in multi-generational households, increasing disease transmission. The higher death rates of the BAME population are discussed, alongside the structural discrimination and potentially direct racism that may have played into this.

The chapter continues with an analysis of the inadequacies of the benefit system as an insurance against hard times, and the likely long-term consequences of the poverty and destitution that will follow, especially in more deprived northern regions. It then focuses on the ‘COVID generation’ scarred by the loss of education and work, by unequal access to home learning, and carrying a mental health burden into the future.

This chapter provides a historic survey of pandemic responses over the last 650 years from when the plague first became endemic in Europe after 1347. It will show how the role of the state – initially Italian city-states and then the British and other nation-states – changed radically in response. Superseding the appeal to divine intervention for help, governments became involved in protecting and controlling their citizens at the most minute level. Across Europe and elsewhere the full range of tools of pandemic control from surveillance, tracking, quarantine, border patrols and economic support for those unable to work have in fact existed for hundreds of years.

It will argue that it is commerce, trade and war that historically have enabled pandemics to spread – they are not random events, but substantially man-made occurrences. By 2020, we had, in our quest for ever-expanding global markets and trade, created the perfect breeding ground for a new pandemic disease to emerge as we increasingly disturbed the habitats of other species. And we had also provided it with the perfect conditions to spread with our increasingly connected world. COVID-19 was always a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’.

Chapter 6 argues that businesses, especially large companies receiving government funding, should expect there to be conditionality attached to this. Other European countries have, unlike the UK, built in to their COVID-19 support packages requirements for environmental targets, protections for jobs and put caps on the interest rates banks can charge on government-backed loans. It will discuss the missed opportunity to secure a payback after the 2008 banking crisis and the moral hazard that the large-scale bailouts engendered. It will suggest that the loosening of monetary policy, both then and now, will, if not managed properly, continue to funnel money to the rich.

It will look at proposals to learn from past mistakes to secure a ‘pandemic payback’, for instance if the government were to take advantage of historically low interest rates to purchase equity stakes in businesses that face challenges but are fundamentally sound. It will look at international voices calling for a fundamental change in how companies are governed so that they serve a broad group of stakeholders, and proposals for changes to the law to make it the duty of directors to promote the long-term success of a company in place of short-term shareholder interest.

The historic perspective of Chapter 1 will inform a critique of the comparable responses to COVID-19, questioning why, with the clear warnings of SARS, MERS and Ebola, the UK was so unprepared for an event that had been anticipated for so long. It will explore the deficiencies of leadership in the lead-in to and especially during the response to COVID-19. It will look at whether decisions over lockdown in the UK were dangerously delayed and examine failures ranging from the provision of personal protective equipment (PPE) to the inadequate track and trace infrastructure. It will reveal the U-turns, loss of authority over the stay safe messaging and panicked decisions that contributed to further misery and confusion.

It will end by reviewing the astonishing achievement of the scientists who developed new vaccines against COVID-19 in just a few short months. By 15 February 2021 the UK had met its target to vaccinate 15 million of its most vulnerable citizens, thanks to the efficiency of the NHS and supportive community volunteers. It will show the desperate race against time as the vaccination roll out coincided with escalating infections, a third national lockdown and one of the highest death tolls in the world.

None of the rulers from the time of Abdur Rahman’s death until the communists seized power in 1978 had his reputation for violence, and the country enjoyed a long peace from the 1930s through the early 1970s. Our theory can explain why despite substantial political order, property rights did not develop much: the rulers who made minor progress in establishing legal property rights had very little state capacity and could not maintain political control, and there was never much progress in establishing political constraints. The communist governments faced even fewer constraints and were largely insulated from local institutions, which contributed to a massively unsuccessful effort to redistribute land, while the Taliban, despite providing some semblance of order and recognizing the importance of customary and traditional institutions, were largely unconstrained and without much administrative capacity to implement any sort of reform. Together, these developments illustrate a key implication of the theory: meaningful progress in establishing property rights requires a monopoly on coercion, high state capacity, strong political constraints on rulers, and inclusive political and legal institutions. Weakness of any of these elements can prevent the emergence of private property rights.

Chapter 2 presents our theory of property rights. The chapter begins by reviewing the literature on property rights, including all relevant theoretical perspective on the emergence of property rights. In our theory, property rights require definition and enforcement. Unlike political theories of property rights, which view the government as the source of property rights, we recognize that organizations whose authority lies outside the state often have an organizational structure comparable to governments. Unlike existing theories of informal property rights, we highlight that the emergence of self-governing property rights requires overcoming dilemmas like those confronting governments. Thus, states and non-state organizations, such as customary council or a tribe, confront similar challenges in establishing property rights. In our theory, property rights protection is more likely when the organization in question has a monopoly on authority, administrative and enforcement capacity, constraints on organizational decision makers, and decision-making institutions are inclusive. We use the theoretical discussion to clarify situations when property rights to land are provided as a public good, the success of self-governance at securing property rights to land, and when legal titling improves social welfare. The chapter concludes with clear empirical predictions that will guide the empirical studies.

In much of the developing world, legal titling – the registration of land ownership through a formal, judicial process – is viewed as a path to economic development and political order. The introductory chapter explains why legal titling is unlikely to fulfill this promise. It begins by making a case that the new institutional economics and public choice, which were developed and applied to date in mostly Western contexts, are useful in understanding political, economic, and social institutions in the Islamic world. We then introduce our theory of emergence and change in property rights, which explains the situations when we expect the government to define and enforce property rights, when self-governance of property rights can work, and why it is unlikely that legal titling will be feasible as a development strategy in a typical fragile state. We conclude by introducing our empirical study of Afghanistan. The highlights of the empirical study include fieldwork conducted by one of the authors in thirty villages in rural Afghanistan, which resulted in hundreds of interviews with ordinary villagers, customary village leaders, and local government officials.