Kyle Harper > Quotes

“And the connections we have progressively built between human societies not only link old germ pools, but more profoundly they have turned separate groups into a metapopulation for roving killers to explore. The main drama of disease history has been the constant emergence of untried germs from wild hosts, finding human groups linked in ever-larger pacts of mutually assured infection.”
― Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

“Wine, like sex, was an immanent divine force, and the wash of its warm ecstasy was experienced as a communion with Dionysus. It is hard for us to appreciate the invisible but ubiquitous effects of wine in the Roman Empire.”
― Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity

“We must approach our ancient accounts with a healthy balance of respect and caution.”
― Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

“Germs have a selfish interest in their natural host’s survival, but in spillover species, that selfish restraint is missing.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“Exactly one century lies between the capture of Rome by Belisarius and the retreat of the empire’s armies behind the lightning advance of the Islamic conquests. Over that span of time, the Roman state exerted itself, with all its might, against the inexorable pull of the tides.”
― Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

“The huge question of the Antonine Plague in the Roman Empire is a problem 3–4 feet in size, repeated millions of times.”
― Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

“Justinian was the first deadbeat emperor.”
― Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

“The state feeds on disposable bodies.”
― Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

“The “scramble for Africa,” the sudden onset of direct colonization, brought new forms of exploitation and violence. Among the worst effects of modern globalization was the introduction of unfamiliar veterinary diseases, the rinderpest virus above all.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“Although we might not imagine England as a hotbed of malaria, in fact the marshes and fens of Kent, Essex, and Sussex were notorious for their “agues.” The prevalence of the mosquito vector Anopheles atroparvus in the soggy English lowlands created an extension of the vivax malaria zone. The first settlers—at Jamestown, at Plymouth—carried Plasmodium vivax across the Atlantic in their blood.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“No present-day hunter-gatherer society is a Pleistocene time capsule.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“[...] paradoxically, the “catchment area” of tuberculosis was expanded by the prolongation of life achieved by the control over other diseases. [...] The eighteenth century created a kind of tubercular society.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“The Huns were armed climate refugees on horseback.”
― Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

“The chill severity of Christian sexuality was born not out of a pathological hatred of the body, nor out of a broad public anxiety about the material world. It emerged in an existentially serious culture, propelled to startling conclusions by the remorseless logic of a new moral cosmology.”
― Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity

“The Roman Empire was an unintended experiment in mosquito breeding.”
― Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

“There has been a classic debate over whether the spread of agriculture was a “demic” or “cultural” diffusion—that is, whether farming populations replaced hunter-gatherers or hunter-gatherers adopted farming technologies. The pendulum has swung back and forth, and the truth clearly involves some mixture of both. But as ancient DNA has come to loom large in the debate, the demic explanation has found strong support.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“Our story, and the story of the planet, are inseparable.”
― Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

“Agriculture is a way of harnessing the photosynthesis of digestible plants to convert sunlight into people.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“The hominin family has been aptly compared to a braided river, its streams overlapping, combining, and running dry until only one rivulet still runs—us.

[...The braided stream analogy was proposed by Xinzhi Wu (e.g., Athreya and Wu 2017).]”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“To look at human energy consumption in another way, in a developed society today, every individual consumer is the rough ecological equivalent to a herd of gazelles.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“In tandem, life-giving medicine and death-dealing machine guns opened the interior of Africa to European exploitation.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“The German medical historian Alfons Labisch aptly described the hygiene revolution as the rise of Homo hygenicus,/i>, likening it to the evolution of a new being. We are a species whose personal habits and domestic spaces are committed to the project of disinfection.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“The plague did not just disappear on its own—it was disappeared, by human design. Better construction and the use of brick instead of timber created microenvironments less hospitable to rodent infestation. It has also been argued that the rise of arsenic mining and the creation of a rat-poison industry helped bring rodent populations under control. But by far the most persuasive explanations center on the institution of quarantine.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“The age of plague also reconfigured political incentives and military technologies. In particular, the sudden shortage of manpower incentivized the use of labor-saving devices, especially those that concentrated great violence in a few hands.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“Population pressure can crowd the finite countryside and crunch resources. But demographic abundance is almost always a boon to the state. The state feeds on disposable bodies.”
― Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

“The use of Peruvian bark radiated outward from Seville and Rome in the second half of the seventeenth century, but its efficacy was controversial, and its association with Catholicism slowed its uptake in Protestant Europe.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“When Captain Cook arrived in 1778, he ended a long period of isolation. The islands were home to more than half a million people. Westerners introduced syphilis and gonorrhea, and in the following years came typhoid, dysentery, whooping cough, measles, and smallpox. The tragedy played out in miniature in 1824, when a royal delegation from the island including King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamamalu traveled to London on a whaler to seek a British alliance; they were received with polite fascination in England, but within a month measles struck the royal party. Both the king and queen died. The lopsided disease exchange meant that within a century of European contact, the indigenous population of Hawai‘i declined by more than 90 percent.”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History

“From the time of the plague, the Roman Empire faced an ultimately irresolvable conundrum. It could not field the army its imperial geography required, and it could not pay for such an army as it was able to muster.”
― Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

“Because aggressive haircuts were the best means of delousing, wigs were much in fashion [...].”
― Kyle Harper, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History