Class struggle is not actually the engine of history. Disease is. Disease kills more soldiers on the battlefield than combat. Disease kills more workers and owners than class struggle. Tuberculosis continues to kill over a million and a half people per year, despite its known cure. While conflicts between classes, elites, and economic groups have certainly shaped political movements and social change, many of the most dramatic turning points in human history were triggered or accelerated by biological forces that transformed populations, economies, and systems of power.
Disease has repeatedly disrupted the assumptions of civilizations. The collapse of the Roman Empire, for example, cannot be explained only through political corruption or class tensions. Epidemics such as the Antonine Plague weakened the empire’s population, strained its military capacity, disrupted trade, and reduced the tax base needed to maintain its institutions. Social conflicts existed before the crisis, but disease changed the conditions under which those conflicts unfolded.
The same pattern appeared during the Black Death in the fourteenth century. The plague killed a large portion of Europe’s population, creating a severe labor shortage. This shifted the balance of power between workers and landowners because surviving laborers could demand higher wages and better conditions. In this case, what looked like a class struggle was partly the consequence of a biological event that altered the supply of human labor. The disease did not merely influence class relations; it reshaped them.
Disease has also influenced the rise and fall of empires. European conquest of the Americas was not driven only by weapons, political ambition, or economic competition. Smallpox and other infectious diseases devastated Indigenous populations who had little prior exposure to Eurasian pathogens. These epidemics weakened societies, disrupted political structures, and made colonization easier. The outcome of global power struggles was shaped not just by armies and rulers, but by microbes.
Even modern history shows the same pattern. The influenza pandemic of 1918 affected societies already destabilized by World War I, influencing labor markets, public policy, and political attitudes. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed weaknesses in economic systems, changed patterns of work, accelerated technological shifts, and intensified debates over inequality and government r
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