A single surviving file detailing the medical history of 654 Chinese mine workers repatriated from the Rand compounds in 1905 after only a year’s work underground offers us comparative, albeit tangential, evidence of how severe was the medical onslaught on workers of colour. All the workers had undergone repeated medical examinations prior to their departure from China, during the voyage to South Africa and after their arrival on the Witwatersrand, and 99 per cent of them were between 20 and 39 years of age.

By the time the mining industry repatriated them, after barely 12 months’ underground labour and compound incarceration, their disorders were said to fall into two broad categories - the bodily and the social. Not surprisingly, just over 18 per cent of the repatries were suffering from respiratory diseases such as silicosis and tuberculosis; 12 per cent had developed musculoskeletal deficiencies; another 10 per cent had been either seriously injured or blinded while working; while yet another 6 per cent has become infected with syphilis. Crudely staed, around 46 per cent, almost half of those repatriated, had been reduced to bodily wrecks - many, perhaps most, never to recover.

In Britain, the Health and Safety Executive reported in 2018 that close to 15 million work days were lost as a result of workplace-related stress, depression, and anxiety, and that among a total workforce of 26.5 million, nearly 600,000 individuals self-reported suffering from work-related mental health issues that year.

The Novo Nordisk Foundation, which owns a controlling stake in the Danish drugmaker, is the largest charitable foundation in the world, and the Wellcome Trust, by far the biggest educational endowment in Britain, as funded British science to remarkable effect. Thus two of the four largest charities globally are the result of the philanthropy of the leaders of the pharmaceutical industry: the Danes August Krogh and Harald Pedersen and the British Henry Wellcome.

Leslie Hannah, an eminent business historian, has shown how the ‘rationalisation’ of industry, which was favoured by the British Government (represented by the Bank of England), set the stage for the new ‘corporate economy’ which would characterise Britain for decades. The 1920s saw the creation by merger of ICI (chemicals), the Distillers Company (Scotch whisky) and Unilever (soap and margarine). A similar wave of mergers in Germany established IG Farben and Vereinigte Stahlwerke as the dominant chemical and steel producers respectively. (Both these companies were dissolved by the victorious Allies in 1945.)

You can’t say how much information a human being is taking in and reacting to at any given time, but you can easily observe the difference between a human being that is coping and one that is overloaded. That’s my diagnosis of what led to the series of connected political eruptions between the financial crisis and the pandemic. The hypothesis set out as early as 1970 by Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock turned out to be correct: the number of people who were no longer able to cope with the modern world reached a critical mass.