The World the Plague Made
The Black Death and the Rise of Europe
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- 41,99 €
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- 41,99 €
Publisher Description
A groundbreaking history of how the Black Death unleashed revolutionary change across the medieval world and ushered in the modern age
In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering, but it also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed. The World the Plague Made is a panoramic history of how the bubonic plague revolutionized labour, trade, and technology and set the stage for Europe’s global expansion.
James Belich takes readers across centuries and continents to shed new light on one of history’s greatest paradoxes. Why did Europe’s dramatic rise begin in the wake of the Black Death? Belich shows how plague doubled the per capita endowment of everything even as it decimated the population. Many more people had disposable incomes. Demand grew for silks, sugar, spices, furs, gold, and slaves. Europe expanded to satisfy that demand—and plague provided the means. Labour scarcity drove more use of waterpower, wind power, and gunpowder. Technologies like water-powered blast furnaces, heavily gunned galleons, and musketry were fast-tracked by plague. A new “crew culture” of “disposable males” emerged to man the guns and galleons.
Setting the rise of Western Europe in global context, Belich demonstrates how the mighty empires of the Middle East and Russia also flourished after the plague, and how European expansion was deeply entangled with the Chinese and other peoples throughout the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sweeping study, University of Oxford historian Belich (Replenishing the Earth) contends that the bubonic plague was crucial to the emergence of the modern world and the rise of western Europe as an economic and political power. Although the Black Death claimed a 50% morality rate in many places, it also led to a "plague boom" from 1350 to 1500, as the same natural resources were now essentially available to half as many people. The collapse of the feudal system because of labor shortages and urban migration led to a sharp increase in real wages, the transformation of the desperate poor "from a large majority into a large minority," and a building spike in London, Paris, and other metropolises. Belich also examines the plague's effects on Russia, the Ottoman Empire, eastern Europe, and the Muslim world, yet as he travels nearly five centuries from the emergence of the Black Death in the Black Sea/Volga region in 1345, his arguments for its central role in the establishment of racial castes in Latin America, the development of Siberia, and other far-flung matters grow more tenuous. Readers may also find themselves overwhelmed by the deluge of economic and other data. Still, this is a provocative and impressive history of an earth-shattering event.