Like everything in 2020, these two events will seem odd given the restrictions we’re now used to living under. They will be dubbed “historic” and in time we may draw lessons from them.

When the results are in, we will continue to argue about the best ways to reopen our societies and economies under the cloud of COVID-19 and before any certainty may come from a future vaccine.

As both a business leader and a student of history, I can’t help but look to the lessons of history to guide us on a pathway to a growing economy and a return to prosperity for our nation. One aspect I believe will be crucial is the opening of borders and renewal of international trade in the face of scepticism, fear and nationalism in some quarters.

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It is understandable why such fears exist. Trade routes have historically been the highways on which pandemics travel.

A series of plagues that devastated Rome and beyond in the first two centuries of the last millennium were transported along the rich trade routes the empire had conquered.

The Black Death swept out of the Silk Road in the 13th century, wiping out half of Europe’s population. Scientists now believe a strain of that same plague travelled back along trade routes into Asia from Europe in the 19th century, killing millions more.

Thirteenth-century Venice was the first European city to close its port to ships; any permitted to enter were forced to quarantine – the word itself derives from the Italian quarantena (40 days).

Fast forward to COVID-19, when our hyperconnected globe meant a small localised outbreak became a global pandemic in a matter of weeks. We understand today why societies move quickly to block their trade and transportation highways, but history shows how dangerous this can be if prolonged.

The Roman Empire’s continual shuttering of its trade routes and borders to manage pandemics fed a cycle of falling incomes and decline that weakened its social fabric and contributed to its eventual demise. This played out over many decades, but the impact today of shutting borders, raising tariffs and closing economies to new ideas and services will be equally dramatic and come to pass much more quickly.

The World Trade Organisation (WTO) is predicting global merchandise trade volume in 2020 will drop by 9.8 per cent from 2019 levels.

Those figures do not include global services trade, which the WTO estimates will decline by 23 per cent peak-to-trough during the current recession.

Australia is particularly exposed to services trade due to the relative strength of its financial, educational and professional (including legal) services. Our services sector employs four out of every five Australians and accounts for 40 per cent of our export revenue.

We may see trade in Australia as the heavily laden iron ore ships sailing north but it’s our nation’s intellectual knowledge that is an increasingly vital commodity. Even a small blockage of those intellectual cross-border trade flows will have severe economic impacts for our and all other nations.

Working as a part of a global services business, my law firm’s response to COVID-19 has been made far more effective by openly sharing across our offices everything from the best safety protocols to how to keep clients’ cross-border supply lines flowing. An “every nation for themselves” response would have poorly served our people and our clients.

In the Great Depression global trade dropped 65 per cent as nationalism in the form of tariffs and other barriers exacerbated the economic downturn. A similar trade slump now would be generationally disastrous. For while older Australians are most at risk from the health impact of COVID-19, it’s those coming into our workforce who have the most to lose long-term from the economic fallout.

Of course, today’s technology means we don’t need to take the health risk of physically passing across borders to build or maintain trade relationships. Those virtual services relationships in turn open up new and diverse opportunities for merchandise trading agreements.

Again, history serves as a signpost.

The aftermath of the European plague saw the growth of a more socially mobile merchant class, the end of highly centralised feudalism and a trade in services and ideas that helped drive the Reformation and the emergence of the Renaissance.

History shows that we can ill afford the rising rhetoric about a retreat behind national borders. Rather, it is an open exchange of goods and services that is the economic cure we need for our modern-day plague.

Alison Deitz is the Australian managing partner of global law firm Norton Rose Fulbright.