The Global History of Black Girlhood edited by Corinne T. Field and LaKisha Michelle Simmons

Abstract

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.