Shutdown, historian Adam Tooze’s new book—which carries the somewhat premature subtitle How Covid Shook the World’s Economy—is billed by its publishers as “a deft synthesis of global finance, politics and business . . . a tour-de-force account of the year that changed everything.” Whether the coronavirus will, when all’s done, have “changed everything” remains to be seen, but Shutdown is well worth reading as an intriguing, thought-provoking study of a period made unique not by a disease—our species has weathered many—but by how we dealt with it.

“Never before,” writes Tooze, “had there been a collective decision, however haphazard and uneven, to shut large parts of the world’s economy down.” He could have taken a more rigorously questioning look at the rights and wrongs of that decision, one of several missteps in the book that range from his cursory examination of the different course adopted by Sweden to his failure to consider whether prolonged shutdowns would have been justifiable had vaccines not been developed so quickly. The vaccine breakthrough casts the draconian measures taken by authorities in a more favorable light than they may deserve. For how much longer would we have had to shelter at home? Years?

But then Shutdown’s author makes no secret of his preference for strong state action…