If you’ve been paying attention these past few years, you may have noticed that our ongoing shared experience of the CoVid-19 pandemic has changed a few things about our lives. While there has most assuredly been genuine pain and suffering – both personal and economic – as a result of this present pandemic, many of the immediate smaller day-to-day changes have fallen somewhere within the range of irritating to inconvenient.
However as history teaches us, widespread and prolonged outbreaks of disease can be followed by paradigm-shifting effects upon societies. Indeed, even though the mortality rate of the CoVid-19 pandemic has so far been far lower than those that were caused by some of the great pandemics from centuries past, there have already been some significant changes to how we live and work experienced from our present pestilence that could be only the first of even greater alterations both for the worse as well as perhaps the better to economic and social systems around the world.
In his new The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe, Prof. James Belich examines one of the most famous of history’s plagues: the 1346 outbreak of the bubonic plague in Europe. In a relatively short period of time, this pandemic literally cut populations in some areas in half, leaving unimaginable suffering in its wake. However this sudden dramatic population change also, as Prof. Belich explains “revolutionized labour, trade, and technology and set the stage for Europe’s global expansion.”
Over the past few years, and motivated by an interest in discovering how people in the past reacted to pandemics and if similar patterns could be seen in contemporary behaviors (hint: yes), I’ve done a fair amount of reading about the history of plagues and the effects they wrought upon their societies. Consequently, I’m particularly keen to learn more about what Prof. Belich has gathered together about the subject and presents in this new book.
