Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Notes on Contributors
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Ebola: The Plague of 2014/2015
- 2 Plagues and History: From the Black Death to Alzheimer's Disease
- 3 Plagues and Medicine
- 4 The Nature of Plagues 2013–14: A Year of Living Dangerously
- 5 Plagues, Populations and Survival
- 6 Plagues and Socioeconomic Collapse
- 7 Silicon Plagues
- 8 The Human Plague
- 9 Plague as Metaphor
- Index
- References
6 - Plagues and Socioeconomic Collapse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 March 2017
By
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Notes on Contributors
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Ebola: The Plague of 2014/2015
- 2 Plagues and History: From the Black Death to Alzheimer's Disease
- 3 Plagues and Medicine
- 4 The Nature of Plagues 2013–14: A Year of Living Dangerously
- 5 Plagues, Populations and Survival
- 6 Plagues and Socioeconomic Collapse
- 7 Silicon Plagues
- 8 The Human Plague
- 9 Plague as Metaphor
- Index
- References
Summary
‘Civilization both in East and West was visited by a destructive plague that devastated nations and caused populations to vanish’, the Arab traveller and philosopher Ibn Khaldûn wrote in 1377. ‘It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out.’
Ibn Khaldûn lived through the Black Death that had begun ravaging the Middle East in 1346, and clearly knew what he was talking about. By 1377, the plague had killed between one-third and one-half of the people in China, the Middle East and Europe (although it seems scarcely to have touched Japan, Southeast Asia, India, sub-Saharan Africa or the Americas). ‘As far as can be found in written records’, the Florentine chronicler Matteo Villani concluded, ‘there has been no more widespread judgment by mortal illness from the universal Deluge to the present, nor one that embraced more of the universe, than the one that has occurred in our own day’.
And yet, nearly seven centuries later, humanity has not just survived the Black Death; it has positively flourished in its wake. There are now roughly seventeen times as many of us on the planet as there were in 1346. Each of us, on average, lives roughly twice as long as our fourteenth-century ancestors and produces, on average, fifteen times as much wealth per year. We live in an age of abundance that would have seemed like a magical kingdom to the people who endured the Black Death.
Any lecture series on plagues would need to ask how and why this happened, and when the Master and Fellows of Darwin College invited me to come back to Cambridge and suggest some answers, I jumped at the chance. Ernest Gellner's Darwin Lecture on the origins of society, delivered in the very first series (back in 1986), permanently changed the way I think about the past, and I could not possibly turn down this extraordinary honour. That said, the invitation was also intimidating, not least because the way I like to look at such big questions – through the lens of long-term history – has hardly been very prominent in previous Darwin Lectures. On reflection, however, that seemed to me all the more reason to accept.
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- Plagues , pp. 136 - 167Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2017
References
1. , Muqadimmah 1.64, cited from . (1976) The Black Death in the Middle East. Princeton: Princeton University Press. All dates in this essay are AD unless marked BC.
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82. I stress ‘definite examples’ because there are cases – such as the disintegration of the Indus Valley civilisation after 1900 BC, the East Mediterranean breakdown after 1200 BC and the Classic Maya collapse after AD 600 – about which we just do not know enough to specify the role of disease.
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