The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe by James Belich

Abstract

Was plague a significant agent of global historical change within the last millennium? Belich argues that catastrophic human mortality from the Black Death (1346–1353) affected only western Eurasia and Mamluk Egypt, killing half or more of all humans in these regions before returning unpredictably in murderous local or interregional epidemic waves. “Why Europe?” he asks anew. His answer is Yersinia pestis (2). In the wake of Western Europe’s staggering population losses, survivors devised (or invested in) labor- and cost-saving ways to boost their new-found fortunes at home and abroad, even though population numbers remained well below pre-plague levels. By the 1400s, the reorganization of production and transportation technologies was well underway, and by the 1500s, maritime polities began a spider-like diaspora that led to the Industrial Revolution.The upshot of Belich’s argument is that the swerve to Western European global dominance resulted not from cultural practices, governing institutions, or religious convictions (in his terms, those of a “One-God world”), nor even from the technological edge that powered early expansion and resource extraction; it happened because the peoples west of the Volga River uniquely faced one of the “random curveballs from nature” (2). Calling it a history-determining first “strike” (Belich never deploys the language of epidemiology or ecology), he effectively reprieves a Cold War–era trope of plague as an exogenous destructive agent that left infrastructure and other material wealth intact. Meanwhile, because the peoples of once-dominant eastern and southern Asia escaped plague, they did not similarly transform their economies, not even later when they benefited from the windfall stimulus of Western Hemispheric silver and staple food crops.Belich’s meticulously researched economic history will be indigestible for many readers not already familiar with its central claims. In this respect, his book is a critique made of recent, theory-avoiding global histories. The book further recycles Belich’s own prior scholarship—including a cogent precis of how the Black Death figures into his overall argument in The Prospect of Global History (New York, 2016) and a slight updating of the wide-ranging introduction written with fellow-editors John Darwin and Chris Wickham. The intention of that essay collection was to provide models of global studies that situated premodern eras in expansive global, semiglobal, or “sub-global” studies. Human successes across semiglobalized Eurasia, from the Bronze Age to the Black Death, in this new work serve fundamentally to purify the current study from the taint of Eurocentrism that the early modern “Great Divergence” carries and thus to “un-reify, or de-exceptionalize” Europeans’ path to the Industrial Revolution (22).The World the Plague Made is nonetheless useful in the multidisciplinary effort to re-think the role of pandemic disasters in human history. Belich claims, rightly, that economic history has not occupied sufficient analytical prominence among historians in general, though it is “the very guts of history. Whether they had food in their bellies, clothes on their backs, and roofs over their heads mattered to people in the past, and it should matter to us” (446).Most historians of medicine, infectious diseases, disaster studies, and public health still pay insufficient attention to the economic drivers of epidemic mortality in premodern eras, including the structural and differential costs of huge endemic health challenges. But Belich himself avoids entangling his own thesis with recent scholarship from historical demographers, zooming out instead to delineate an unsuccessful struggle to repair human numbers only during the “first plague era” to c. 1500 and a renewed impoverishment of home-front working populations in the “second plague era.”Laborers typically benefit in the aftermath of great epidemics. Does the shifting burden of morbidity and mortality to working people reflect a return of full economic power to investors and landowners? Or do regional great plagues and other disease curveballs determine winners and losers within the regions selectively felled by the Black Death?Belich is not convinced by recent environmental and climate histories that challenge his construction of a geographically uniform spread of Y. pestis in the initial Black Death wave, indifferent to local nonhuman ecological parameters. His characteristically granular arguments also unfold with a fascinating but fully eclectic reading of available documentary evidence constrained by selected scientific evidence. The text is unrelieved by graphic or tabular summation, partly compensated by splendid maps. Overall, his synthesis, resting on written evidence validated by some scientific “answers” to a set of long-standing historical debates about the Black Death, highlights the epistemological chasm between plague scientists and traditional plague historians.