This article explores a smattering of thematic questions that criss-cross the articles in this special pandemics issue; it signposts some reverberations, overlapping responses, and problematic comparisons currently (mid 2020) being made between past pandemics and the tense experiences (and projections going forward) of COVID-19 across the world. The historical pandemics covered here offer an entry point to a fruitful set of genealogies, chronologies, epidemiologies, trajectories, and imaginaries linked to a host of issues: what makes a pandemic ‘global’? What does a global history perspective bring to the table? How does examining germs and genomes shed light on imperialism as a/the pandemic driver? Where do animals, the environment, and ecology fit in and why are they so often excluded from pandemic histories? What counts as medical humanitarianism when health knowledge, know-how, and cooperation ‘from below’ are sidelined? And what came/comes first: a pandemic or a changed world?

The COVID-19 pandemic presents opportunities and challenges for historians working on the global history of health and disease. This article argues that the history of disease will benefit from interdisciplinary work that brings together historians, microbiologists, and archaeologists. Genomes are historical archives, in two complementary ways. Palaeogenomics provide direct access to genomes of the past, while phylogenetics furnish historical insight from evolutionary relationships. Both palaeogenomics and phylogenetics have already contributed enormously to the history of disease, helping us understand how human ecological transformation drives the evolution of our microparasites.

The Black Death is a secure feature of European and west Asian history; in Chinese history, by contrast, the record of mass epidemic outbreaks over the same centuries is not. As a step towards integrating these two zones into a global history of disease, this article establishes a timeline of roughly a thousand major outbreaks in Ming–Qing China during the century 1567–1666. On the basis of these data, comparison is made of how pandemics were received and interpreted in two delimited zones, the Chinese province of North Zhili (now Hebei) and Tudor and Stuart England, with particular attention to differences in their literary incorporation, religious meaning, and political resonance.

This article explores the tensions between well-intentioned humanitarianism and coercive colonialism during smallpox outbreaks in eighteenth-century Guatemala, when the state extended inoculation programmes to its predominant, culturally diverse Maya communities. Evidence from anti-epidemic campaigns shows public debates broadly comparable to the current COVID-19 crisis: debates about the measurably higher mortality rates for indigenous people and other marginalized groups; debates about the extent of the state’s responsibility for the health of its peoples; and debates on whether or not coercion and violence should be used to ensure compliance with quarantines and public health campaigns. While inoculations provided medical assistance and material help to Maya communities, and resulted in demonstrably lower mortality rates from smallpox, at the same time they functioned as avenues for the expansion of colonial power to intervene in the daily lives of people in those communities, characterized by colonial actors as necessary for their own good, and for the broader public good.

This article revisits the origins of internationalism in the field of health and shows how the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century, much like the current coronavirus crisis, brought global differences such as social inequalities, political hierarchies, and scientific conflicts to the fore. Beyond drawing parallels between the cholera epidemics and the current crisis, the article argues for combining imperial and social histories in order to write richer and more grounded histories of internationalism. It explores this historiographical and methodological challenge by analysing the boardrooms of the international sanitary conferences, Middle Eastern quarantine stations catering for Mecca pilgrims, and ocean steamships aiming to move without delay during a worldwide health crisis.

The goal of this article is to demonstrate the value of a global perspective on pandemics for understanding how global pandemics caused by novel viruses can unfold. Using the example of the 1918 influenza pandemic, two factors that were central to the evolving pattern of global pandemic waves, connectivity and seasonality, are explored. Examples of the influences of these factors on pandemic waves in different locations are presented. Viewing the 1918 pandemic through the lens of compartmental models of infectious diseases, our analysis suggests that connectivity played a dominant role in the initial stages. With the passage of time and the progressive infection and consequent immunization of more and more people, however, the role of seasonality increased in importance, ultimately becoming the driving force behind the emergence of future waves of infection. Implications of these observations for pandemics caused by novel viruses such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic are discussed.

This article will argue that the memory of the great ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic of 1918–19 played a significant role in the preparedness and response of Australia and New Zealand to the COVID-19 pandemic, and may help to explain their success compared with Europe and North America. An obvious alternative explanation for the success of Asian states such as China, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan would be their experience of the SARS outbreak in 2002 and the H7N9 influenza outbreak of 2013. However, this explanation does not apply to Australia or New Zealand. All of these states had pandemic plans, initially developed with encouragement from the World Health Organization after the SARS outbreak, but only Australia and New Zealand appear to have directly incorporated ‘lessons’ from 1918–19 into their pandemic plans.

Recognizing that serious pandemics call forth explanations which go to the heart of beliefs about why natural disasters occur, this article examines three pandemics over the last 200 years (cholera from 1817, Spanish influenza in 1918–19, and COVID-19) to establish whether such explanations have changed significantly over time and, if so, why. What it finds is that this period saw a watershed in which the dominance of traditional religious explanations declined in many parts of the world in the face of the ascent of explanations based on biomedical science. Tracking this momentous change across several faiths and regions globally makes it possible to put into telling historical perspective the stances taken by faith-based communities in response to the current COVID-19 pandemic.

This article traces the diffusion of the 1968 Hong Kong influenza pandemic against the backdrop of scientific and global health developments, a global wave of social protests, and Cold War tensions between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Although the outbreak was far less severe than the 1918–19 ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic, the ease with which influenza spread globally between 1968 and 1970 contributed to a reformulation of global health that emphasized the need for enhanced preparedness and rapid vaccine production. From the 1950s through the 1960s, the scope of disease surveillance expanded, with China increasingly identified as the global epicentre of viral threats. In so arguing, the article challenges histories of global health that suggest that this was a period when concerns for infectious disease receded, in contrast to the final two decades of the twentieth century that saw the ascendancy of an ‘emerging diseases worldview’.

This article focuses on the politics of epidemics, health and development in the years between two pandemics of influenza in India, the so-called ‘Asian’ flu (1957) and the ‘Hong Kong’ flu (1968). I explore how public health and risk-focused cosmologies were constructed about urban life, and anchored in economic priorities about development planning, industrial productivity, and self-reliance in a modernizing Indian nation. How were pandemics ‘seen’ and identified among urban populations that were already suffering from endemic risks? Were they viewed as a continuum of local, natural hazards or through wider geopolitical insecurities? The influenza crises were characterized by incapacitation and absenteeism from work rather than high mortality rates in Indian cities, causing worries about industrial plans. The Indian state intervened minimally, and articulated ideas and rhetoric about individual responsibility and ‘cooperative citizenship’ that set the stage for later manifestations of neoliberalism.

The COVID-19 outbreak of 2020 threatened years of effort by the Chinese authorities to extend its influence around the world. This article seeks to enhance understanding of China’s defensive engagement with global health agencies, and more broadly of the relationship between pandemics and soft power, through an analysis of Uganda’s evolving response to HIV/AIDS. As with COVID-19, HIV/AIDS presented a fundamental threat not only to countries’ internal social stability and population health, but also to governmental legitimacy and nation-states’ international reputation. HIV, however, also provided Uganda with an opportunity to enhance its global standing, influence international policy, and achieve national reconstruction. This case study highlights the importance of viewing international affairs from the perspective of the Global South. It argues that the very weakness of Uganda, and the structural marginality of HIV/AIDS, provided the leverage which would in the end deliver radical shifts within global health.

This case study focuses on two epidemic diseases in Sierra Leone. Ebola in 2014–15 drew international response, but was contained within the Upper West African region. COVID-19 reached Sierra Leone in April 2020 as part of a global pandemic. Local social knowledge has been an important factor in shaping responses to both diseases. In the case of Ebola, infection was concentrated in families, and responders needed a good knowledge of family interactional dynamics. COVID-19 is a more public disease. Responders have to assess risk factors in workplaces, markets, and places of worship. Comparing and contrasting the two cases also draws attention to different aspects of the historical context. Ebola response indexes Sierra Leone’s history as a humanitarian project associated with the abolition of the slave trade. The pandemic challenge of COVID-19 draws attention to Sierra Leone’s nodal position within a global diaspora rooted in Atlantic slavery and emancipation. Responders are forced to consider the ways in which the two infections articulate different aspects of calls for global social justice.