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) laborand cost-saving ways to boost their newfound 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 “OneGod 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