This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

---

The sudden appearance of COVID-19 in 2020 and its ramifications since have understandably led to renewed public interest in the history of disease in general, and of pandemics in particular. Indeed, in the US, the advent of Covid generated a mini-industry in hastily written op-ed pieces explaining why the new pandemic was either just like the Black Death or nothing like it, depending on how much time the journalists concerned had to read up on the subject. For good reason, agents and publishers went in keen pursuit of new takes on old diseases, many of which are now starting to appear in print.

James Belich’s The World The Plague Made should not be counted among these. Rather, this wide-ranging and thought-provoking work is the culmination of many years of research and re-assessment of the emergence of the Black Death, which first struck Western Eurasia in the 14th century, and its historical impact on both Europe and the wider world. It will generate much debate in what is already an intellectually lively field.

There has been a long-standing tendency on the part of some historians to seek to downplay the impact of the Black Death, both in the short and longer terms. This position tended to be most stalwartly asserted by hard-line Marxists, to whom only internally-generated class struggle could provide an ideologically acceptable explanation for processes of historical change. “Plague denial” remains fashionable in some circles, but it is becoming increasingly intellectually untenable in the light of mounting scientific evidence. 

We now know for absolute certainty, on the basis of ancient DNA extracted from the teeth of plague victims, that both the Black Death and the earlier “Justinianic Plague” of the 6th century were bubonic in character. Until the advent of modern antibiotics, bubonic plague was one of the most deadly and terrifying diseases known to mankind, capable of wiping out something over half of any population, with the death toll scaling still higher if the disease developed a pneumonic strain. 

The Black Death devastated rural communities as well

Some societies were more vulnerable than others, but mounting archaeological and archaeogenetic evidence has shown that the Black Death was capable of having a devastating impact on rural communities as well as urban ones. Ground-breaking research by the archaeologist Carenza Lewis (of Time Team fame), for example, has revealed the extent to which the plague led to very large-scale rural depopulation in eastern England in the Later Middle Ages, something scholars had hitherto failed to spot.

Belich makes it clear from the start that he has no truck with the plague deniers. The starting point of any study of the Black Death, he rightly stresses, must be an acknowledgment of the horror and misery which the arrival of the Black Death and its subsequent recurrences down to the 18th century inflicted on those who encountered it. His emphasis, however, is much more on the net-positive impact the consequences of the plague had on the lives of many of those who survived, and on those states which most successfully contained the ravages of the disease. 

It has long been argued, for example, that one of the results of plague in late 14th century England was to increase the bargaining power of those who sold their labour, as localised labour shortages allowed workers to demand higher wages or lower rents. Greater per capita income fuelled the ongoing commercialisation of the economy and helped reshape life in both town and country. In various places and at different moments in time, these gains in living standards would be rolled back, leading to rising social tensions, but the overall trajectory was clear. 

Belich’s study develops and expands this model, accentuating the net-positive impact of the plague to help explain a number of key features of West Eurasian economic development from the 14th to the 18th centuries.

He argues that labour shortages encouraged greater mechanisation, including the more widespread dissemination of water and windmills and a host of innovations which would have wide-ranging social and economic consequences. The spur to proto-industrialisation and mechanical innovation that the Black Death constituted would prepare the way for both the Industrial Revolution and the “Military Revolution”, whereby states developed more advanced forms of arms manufacture and warfare. 

Belich is a global historian, who likes to think outside the box of Western Europe

It also facilitated the invention of the printing press, whilst the greater disposable income that populations got used to enjoying for a period of time in the initial aftermath of the Black Death helped spur the rise of consumerism. Alongside advances in naval engineering, this would feed into the “expansion of Europe” and the rise of European colonialism in the New World, Africa and beyond. 

The Black Death, in short, would make a fundamental contribution to the making of the modern world to a far greater extent than has hitherto been appreciated. In particular, the impact of the Black Death in Western Eurasia would set in motion a series of processes which would lead to the West’s later economic ascendancy over China, in a phenomenon that historians have come to refer to as the Great Divergence.

Belich is by background a global historian who likes to think outside the box of Western Europe. One of the most admirable features of this book is the space and consideration he gives to the Ottoman Empire, Muscovy and Novgorod, as well as other West Eurasian societies which tend to be ignored by historians who think that even Byzantium is too exotic for them. As a result, there is much to learn from this carefully considered book.

But will it convince? Inevitably, the more the author moves from what he believes to be the medium- to longer-term effects of the plague, the more contentious and circuitous his arguments become. Personally, I am willing to buy quite a lot of what is proposed here, although I remain sceptical of some of Belich’s arguments with respect to the Great Divergence.

We now know on the basis of the genetic evidence that Central Asia was essentially “ground zero” for the lethal form of bubonic plague from which both the Justinianic Plague and the Black Death derived. Given the long-standing history of connectivity between Central Asia and China, is it really likely that the Black Death did not affect China, too? The more it did, the less tenable that aspect of Belich’s argument becomes. 

As he knows, the brilliant and polymathic historian of medicine, Monica Green, has recently argued that the Black Death emerged earlier and reached further than we have traditionally thought, and the distinguished historian of China, Robert Hymes, has teased out a growing body of evidence from the Chinese sources for the impact of the plague. Belich politely begs to differ, but each of these scholars has more to say on this subject, so interested readers would be well advised to watch this space. Much of the rest of Belich’s analysis can hold, even if, in the end, his Great Divergence argument proves not to.