Sir Richard J. Evans, the provost of Gresham College, in London, is one the preëminent scholars of the Third Reich and modern Germany. Best known for his trilogy about Hitler and the Second World War, Evans has also extended his scholarship to numerous other areas, including pandemics. In 1987, he published “Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years (1830-1910).” More recently, he gave a series of lectures at Gresham College titled “The Great Plagues: Epidemics in History from the Middle Ages to the Present Day.”

I recently spoke by phone with Evans in the hope of bringing some historical perspective to the coronavirus pandemic—in particular, to understand how leaders throughout history, including those with authoritarian leanings, have reacted to health emergencies. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how new technologies, from the railways to modern medicine, have shaped outbreaks, the different ways in which the United Kingdom and the United States have responded to the coronavirus, and why, even under different forms of government, “it’s the epidemic that’s calling the shots.”

What is your biggest takeaway when you consider how epidemics have shaped human history?

Human society has always been subject to major epidemics, and has dealt with them in quite similar ways over the centuries, even over the millennia. Of course, human society itself has also changed the way in which epidemics work. William H. McNeill, the great world historian, wrote a book called “Plagues and Peoples,” where he made a powerful argument for the impact of plagues upon human society. Take the Black Death, for example, in 1349, which killed maybe half the population in Europe. The economic effects were absolutely profound, when you think of the labor shortage, for example—too few people to work the fields—and the change in social relations and social structures.

But I think it’s also a two-way process. For example, in the Middle Ages or even in the late Roman Empire, plague spread fairly slowly, and you could deal with it by quarantine, unless societies weren’t well organized enough to do that. Then you got a big acceleration in the nineteenth century that comes with the railways. Cholera was a disease that hadn’t been known outside northeast India, but the British Empire, conquering North India, opened up trade routes. Railways spread the cholera very rapidly when it got to Europe. Steamships across the Atlantic, and of course, industrialization, with massive overcrowding and poverty, made it much easier to spread it in cities and towns. It is a two-way process. That’s first thing that occurs to me.

What was it about Hamburg that made you want to study that city, and why did you think that case study was so interesting or important?

Well, it’s the only city in western Central Europe that had a large-scale cholera epidemic in 1892. It’s more or less vanished from most of Europe, apart from tsarist Russia, long before that stage. There isn’t an epidemic in Great Britain, for example, after 1866, and so I wanted to know why this one occurred so late, and why is it so bad—I mean, ten thousand deaths in about six weeks. That’s what really made me look at it.

Also, I hesitate to do this, but let me quote Lenin, who says that there are certain events that open like a flash of lightning across a landscape. They make you see all kinds of things that you wouldn’t otherwise see. Everybody who lived through the cholera epidemic in 1892 in Hamburg and wrote letters or diaries or newspapers or whatever—they all wrote about it. The source material is fantastic. It can enable you to see the whole structure of the city and the nature of politics and society. Then it’s just in the statistical age, so you’ve got a lot of very good statistics that you can use to look at things like social distribution of disease, for example.

Then there’s a bigger question, which is that Hamburg, of course, was the second city in Germany. It was a major seaport, one of the biggest in the world. It was an autonomous city-state within the German Empire, and it ran its own affairs. It was run by merchants, who suppressed the news of the arrival of the disease from Russia, because they thought that quarantines would be imposed and that would damage trade.

I think we can see some parallels there in the present day. The coronavirus began in China, and initially China’s authorities tried to suppress the news. When it got out and they couldn’t contain it anymore, then they changed their course. You can look at the way in which society interacts with epidemic diseases and you can see certain similarities across the centuries.

Do you see differences across the centuries, too? Do you think people have gotten smarter about these things, or is human nature just what it is?

There are differences. First of all, medical science has got a lot better at identifying disease and a lot better at developing preventive measures. We are confidently expecting, in eighteen months or so, a vaccine for the coronavirus. Well, in the nineteenth century and before, medical science had very little idea of what caused disease, and for a very long time it was thought, for example, that cholera was caused by a miasma or a kind of invisible gas, rising from the ground and poisoning people.

It was only the development of germ theory by Pasteur and Koch, in the late nineteenth century, that made people realize that it was spread by a bacillus. Because of the development of the microscope, you could see these different organisms. It’s different from a virus, and in some ways you combat it by acid and disinfection, but, in particular, by clean water. Cholera is carried in water, and so if you can get clean water, filtrated water, purified water, then people can use that and will not get infected. Also, hygienic measures are somewhat similar to today. Again, washing your hands, particularly after you go to the bathroom, was a very big way of preventing the transmission of cholera, because it’s a disease of the digestive tract.

One difference is that, in the nineteenth century, people had all kinds of theories about how diseases spread, but it’s only in our own time that the science has become sophisticated and precise enough to pin it down and to develop, in an astonishingly short time, a preventive measure. There was no known cure for cholera or bubonic plague or any major disease, really, for a very, very long time, not really till the twentieth century. The second major difference is very striking. It’s what some have called the medicalization of society. If you look at cholera in the nineteenth century, whether it’s in Britain in 1832 or in Naples in 1884 or in many other countries when it arrived, the authorities tried to impose quarantines, isolation, and, later on in the nineteenth century, disinfection and so on. There were riots because people objected to the state interfering this way. Now we’re clamoring for preventive measures, so we’re clamoring for the state to intervene to try and control the disease. We accept medical science in a way that it was not accepted at a popular level in the nineteenth century. I think that’s very good, that we do now listen to the medics more than people did in the nineteenth century. Then, of course, in the nineteenth century, medicine, as I said, was not very effective at killing disease, and there was a lot of confusion about what caused it.