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

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. (July)