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

“With history books, sometimes you say they’re ambitious when they cover fifty or a hundred years. This is a book that starts in 1346 and makes an argument about the impact on the globe that stretches right into and up to the Industrial Revolution and beyond. This really is grand history, in the good old-fashioned sense of the term…To put it starkly, the argument of the book is that wherever the plague hit, these are the parts of the world that eventually benefited and prospered, and those places where the plague didn’t strike—India and China—ended up falling behind. He’s saying this is not about culture, this is not about institutions, this is not about religion—it’s the plague.” Read more...

The Best History Books of 2023: The Wolfson History Prize

Sudhir Hazareesingh, Political Scientist

“His argument revolves around the stunning figure that 50% of Europeans died of the plague, revised upward from earlier estimates of a third or 30% mortality. That doubled the number of things that people owned per capita and this doubling of disposable incomes drove economic development from the demand side. People demanded more luxury goods: silk, sugar, spices, furs, gold, and also slaves. Demand for these things led to the expansion of trade from Europe because many of these goods are not found in Europe and needed to be sought from Asia and, eventually, the Americas. Manpower shortages, meanwhile, induced the development of labor-saving technologies, such as the water mill. These forces of innovation and globalization helped to turn Europe into a prosperous and commercialized society and he ties that in, at least in origin, to the Black Death.” Read more...

The Best Economic History Books of 2022

Davis Kedrosky, Economist