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

"Belich, unlike the authors of the two preceding books, is very much a historian. His interest is in the early history of globalization and the expansion of European settler economies. He takes this into studying the Black Death and its consequences. One paradoxical but widely-held view among economic historians is that while the Black Death was an absolute calamity in the short run—killing as much as half of the European population in the worst affected regions—it had positive long-run economic effects. Belich’s book is the most comprehensive survey and coherent theory of how economic development—in particular, the differentiation of Europe from the rest of the world—may have resulted from the Black Death. His argument revolves around the stunning figure that 50% of Europeans died of the plague, revised upward from earlier estimates of a third or 30% mortality. That doubled the number of things that people owned per capita and this doubling of disposable incomes drove economic development from the demand side. People demanded more luxury goods: silk, sugar, spices, furs, gold, and also slaves. Demand for these things led to the expansion of trade from Europe because many of these goods are not found in Europe and needed to be sought from Asia and, eventually, the Americas. Manpower shortages, meanwhile, induced the development of labor-saving technologies, such as the water mill. These forces of innovation and globalization helped to turn Europe into a prosperous and commercialized society and he ties that in, at least in origin, to the Black Death. Economists have long held that there are diminishing marginal returns to the application of any factor of production—so the more workers you have in agriculture, the less additional output each new person creates. In some regions of Europe, the centuries preceding the plague had seen an economic and demographic boom, with population densities increasing markedly from the low levels of the early Middle Ages. This mass of surplus labor meant lower demand for agricultural labor and reduced incomes for the workers themselves. Indeed, living standards declined to such an extent that it’s possible that the plague’s severity was exacerbated by poor nutrition. The loss of labor did, in some places, lead to a reduction in the cultivated area, but that effect was outweighed by increased worker productivity and greater demand for labor, which both served to increase real wages—which, in England, were greater than at any point prior to at least the eighteenth century. Secondarily, Belich also argues that mortality created incentives for the adoption of labor-saving technologies that substituted for human activity, helping to fill the gap. And the change in the relative price of labor merely meant that it paid to use more animals for plowing, transport, and milling, and to raise sheep rather than cultivate cereals."

"This is a wonderfully ambitious book. It’s meticulously researched, which is one of the criteria for the prize. It’s also very well written, which often isn’t the case when you’re dealing with subjects like this, which are quite technical and where some of the material is quite dry. Jamie Belich has done a phenomenal amount of research and written it out in a very engaging way—or as engaging as one can be when one is talking about the Black Death. No, he’s a Professor of Imperial and Global history—that’s the chair he holds here at the University of Oxford. But I think it’s in the nature of that kind of research that you have to have a good command of economic material and economic data. That is one of the other things that attracted our attention. Although it is very much centred on economic history, it’s also a book about the plague, and he discusses it at some considerable length. The book’s capacity to draw on different disciplines is something that we thought was very impressive. Then there’s the grand sweep. With history books , sometimes you say they’re ambitious when they cover fifty or a hundred years. This is a book that starts in 1346 and makes an argument about the impact on the globe that stretches right into and up to the Industrial Revolution and beyond. This really is grand history, in the good old-fashioned sense of the term. Yes, and the reason why this is important in a wider sense is that one of the things that global history has tried to do, since its emergence, is to move away from the obsession with Europe and the idea that everything that has been important and significant in the world has been important and significant because it happened in Europe or has come from Europe. One of the striking things about this book is that, in talking about the Great Divergence, he acknowledges that part of Europe does end up pulling ahead. But it’s not just Europe. There’s also what he calls the Muslim South—the Middle East and North Africa—and they are part of this movement too. And it’s not for any institutional or cultural reason, but simply by the arbitrary fact that those were also the places where the plague struck very hard. To put it starkly, the argument of the book is that wherever the plague hit, these are the parts of the world that eventually benefited and prospered, and those places where the plague didn’t strike—India and China—ended up falling behind. He’s saying this is not about culture, this is not about institutions, this is not about religion—it’s the plague. He’s laid out the argument in as convincing a way as he can. If you push him—and there are places in the book where he acknowledges it—he accepts that the plague is not the only factor. What he’s really arguing, if one had to summarise it in a schematic way, is that while all these other variables mattered, the plague is the only thing that is common across the board, and therefore, the plague is the most significant factor. “You want a set of books that are going to broaden our intellectual and cultural horizons” The book is in four parts. I’m not a specialist in this period, but the bits that were illuminating for me were Parts Three and Four, where he’s talking about the Middle East and North Africa. Forgetting about the plague, just the way in which he demonstrates that these areas were also growing at that time, is very impressive and innovative. That’s where the major contribution of the book comes and Parts One and Two were just necessary to build that up. That’s also why it’s so long. What did they say about Schubert’s Ninth Symphony – ‘the heavenly length’? It does go on, but that’s what it takes to make and sustain this thesis."