The black death that ravaged through Europe and Asia in the 1300s is estimated to have killed up to 200 million, completely altering the course of history. My question is, what would the world look like if it had never occured?
Idk
Wasn't it proposed that the decline of feudality started with the decline of the general population of plague-stricken Europe?
I guess the result would be no/later age of enlightenment, a stunted scientific revolution, and a postponed industrial revolution.
Oh, and Poland would've been f*cked much earlier/differently than it was in our history.
It's difficult.
Europe had been going through something of an early renaissance. The Medieval warm period had happened, states had sort of figured out their "natural" borders and boundaries, trade was flourishing along with guilds and universities.
And then bam, the plague kills 50% of Europe.
And yet, the change in demographics resulted in much less peasantry which created a huge social upheaval resulting in much more freedom and rights for the peasantry and was the beginning of the end for it, at least in terms of a legal class with little rights, the majority of the population would still remain farmers for centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_of_the_Black_Death#Social.2C_environmental.2C_and_economic_effects
Humans are odd, out of every disaster we make something good. If there had never been any catastrophes since the dawn of man we'd still be little Africans living in trees.
>>1402840
Europe would never have had the renaissance or capitalism without the massive shifts in social mobility brought on by the plague. We'd have durdled along with our rigid feudal systems, eventually becoming a caste bound society like India. Eventually industrialism will happen, but maybe not in Europe (Egypt is a good candidate, as are India and China), but in general we would be way behind where we are now in technology, and in social progress we'd be further behind still.
>>1402840
Feudalism would have taken longer to die out
>>1402937
>Humans are odd, out of every disaster we make something good. If there had never been any catastrophes since the dawn of man we'd still be little Africans living in trees.
Not to undermine our achievements, but it's all simply explained by natural selection.
>>1402952
Eh. Europe was still way ahead of all those places.
Europe was going through a population and economic boom at the time. The mendicant orders were created because they reflected the new spiritual needs of an increasingly urban society with a greater degree of division of labour than had existed since the fall of Rome.
Essentially you had a lot of things there already that could have caused Early Modernity. Some regions were already becoming what the Netherlands (the first Early Modern state) would later become: they were producing only one product -- Auxerre was producing pretty much just wine, for instance -- and buying their other goods from elsewhere. This is much more efficient and increases money-flows.
However, the black death wasn't all bad. It elevated the common people (like the Miller in Chaucer) because there was a massive skills shortage. It made the artisans and so on who survived richer, at least for a time.
>>1403180
No it wasn't. It was backwards and poor as fuck. The Islamic civilisations were falling, sure, because of the Mongols, but other civilisations were far more advanced. Simple things like grain and rice yields prove this: 1 grain got you 3-5 back in Europe; in China, one grain of rice could get you 200 back. They had paper money, specialised crops, an efficient bureaucracy... They were so advanced that nobody ever believed European merchants and priests who visited China. They thought it sounded outlandish.
>>1402840
hungary would be switzerland
>>1403382
Woah radical dude!
>>1403180
Not in the 13th century it wasn't, the labor saving systems and early industrialism were directly driven by the huge shortages of labor following the plague. China, which never suffered such devastation, continued to rely on the "throw more peasants at it" school of economics while Europe was forced to innovate.
>black death = peasant shortage = social mobility = progress
this meme again
I bet the commies are behind this.
>>1403527
>Biggest increase in real wage until the industrial revolution
>Economic shift to North Sea area
>Gigantic GDP per capita income
>quadruple book production until Gutenberg took it to a next level
Oh yeah and tons of writers describing exactly what you put in greentext.
>>1402840
Byzantines would've not suffered - and kept dominating west Rome.
>>1403576
dumb /pol/fag
>>1402840
More contamination and shitty
>>1402840
That was not even the first time that Yersinia pestis did that to Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian
The plague was the best thing that happened to Europe. It put a damper on Roman-German extraversion, ended the cretinous tribe-empire pendulum, increased spirituality and humility, and delayed colonialism.
>>1402840
More population = More ideas = More scientists/philosophers.
We would be way advanced today. Blame the faggots that threw a diseased body from their catapults.
>>1404250
Sure that's why Asia has been a beacon of progress for the past 1000 years...
>>1404311
it was until the mongols (again)
>>1404311
If I state my reasoning, you will call me a /pol/tard.
>>1404326
Not him, but try to convince me
>>1404352
Europeans were simply better at innovating compared to Asians. It's mostly because European culture values science and maths more than any other continent. I'm not saying "hurr european masterrace", I'm talking about culture. e: War was a culture of mongols, invading was culture of ottomans, those people admired invaders, europeans admired scientists and philosophers, it's simply cultural and people want to be admired just like them and it goes on that way. Of course European culture that admires scientists/mathematicians and philosophers had it's up and downs depending on political circumstances of the continent, but in average Europeans were more interested in science and maths than Asians back then. Again, it's not about dna or some shit, East Asians score higher at IQ tests, Mesopotamians are very same people that created the civilization, but their culture has changed and they stopped producing anything.
Also with earlier advances in Europe and Middle east, Europeans had more access to resources(books etc) and they were good at archiving. As science is simply "learning the solution of a problem and trying to create a better solution", europeans got way more sources to learn those old solutions.
I couldn't describe it decently I know, but bear with my English. Also again, I'm not a /pol/tard and I disagree with most of their opinions.
>>1403799
>delayed colonialism
how is this a good thing?
>>1403606
you're confusing black death with justinian plague from ~800 years earlier
>>1404404
I have to agree, but wonder if there are other reasons other than culture to historically make them more used to innovate. I've once read that the political fragmentation of Europe was the main cause behind it, competition and fear of being wiped out of the map caused this innovation in the peninsula, which sounds like a good reason to me.
>>1404451
>I've once read that the political fragmentation of Europe was the main cause behind it
Explain why India didn't go thru the same process.
>>1404404
The romantic view that since the collapse of the Roman Empire Europeans teetered about the ruins for 100s of years wondering what went wrong and how to rebuild, first putting aside barbarism in favor of christ before finally stumbling across Renaissance reason and humanism and eventually exceeding the classical world in achievement is just a meme.
In reality Europe developd new agricultural techniques and became a swathe of high population plopped right next to the Mediterranean which had always been a hub of trade and civilization plus the Atlantic trade routes and Hanseatic league which opened up in the 13th century. During the 15th century new technology suddenly meant that being a few decades ahead of your competitors gave you an enormous advantage and Europe was a little ahead of the curve due to geography and ahead of Mediterranean powers like the Ottoman empire that lacked large amounts of the kind of productive agricultural land you might find in Northern France.
>>1404451
It may be the case, also danger make people work harder, like even existence of Ottomans cause Europeans innovate more to defend themselves etc. Then Europeans rivaled each other, and tried to produce more than each other and the race became more competitive day by day.
Also not discrediting anything but luck is always relevant in history and science.
India and China basically shot themselves in the leg with cultural and legal practices that prevented commerce from naturally growing.
The Chinese hateboner for merchants and business people knows no bounds.
>>1404404
I respect the effort, but I have to disagree sharply. There wasn't anything innate to either European or non-European cultures that valued this or that more than other things. It's not as if Europeans didn't culturally value war and conquerors themselves, or that non-Europeans didn't culturally value the arts and sciences. Asia was a huge place, and steppe nomad warrior elites were a tiny fraction of that populace who didn't value war or invasion over other pursuits (which is why they left these things or were overrun by Turkic invaders in the first place).
If the notion that more population leads to more ideas and science were true, and if we accept that it is only true for Europe for reasons of culture, then we would have seen an incredible amount of it during the height of Rome. Something else is at work here, and that something is the rise of a scholarly, scribal class independent of government or religious patronage and control, which is itself the result of the rise of independent merchants based in cities geared for trade and law above bureaucracy and military governance.
This is what allowed for a flourishing of intellectualism not only in Medieval Europe, but in the Islamic World prior to the upheavals of the nomadic invasions and T'ang China. Culture is merely the shadowy reflection of that underlying social structure, and it's because that structure changed elsewhere but not in Europe that caused the divide.
Black Death did huge favour to the agricultural class in Europe. At least in Britain I remember reading that the death of so many people, freed up much more land for farmers to use actually enabling them to gather income rather than just do meager farming to stay alive.
Before Black Death, Europe was in many places almost overpopulated, especially when combined with the tradition that when a man died, his farming land was split between the remaining sons often, leading in to smaller and smaller farming patches as generations continued until the farmers were barely able to support themselves.
>>1404478
>The Chinese hateboner for merchants and business people knows no bounds.
>t. I simply read confucianism and every Chink followed that 100%
A lot of societies disliked merchants but that doesnt mean merchants were discarded nor played no vital role in society. Fucking Romans had a hateboner for merchants as well. But still they made society run around and were vital members of it, even if some morality considered them low-status.
Not to mention here in SEA Chinese Entrepreneurship is a fucking centuries old meme. While the Chinese Imperial Government did not participate nor fund colonialist projects, merchants families did, setting up a string of tradeposts from China all the way to India to be their foot in the door of trade, funding their own ships and even - in Indonesia- setting up private colonial states called the Kongsi "Republics." in some of the islands. And the Chinese state benefitted from these activities even though they did not espouse them.
Let's even add to the fact that many of the Chinese scholar-bureaucrats from the common classes belong to merchant families who funded their studies.
>>1402840
>>1403180
The sudden massive redistribution of wealth caused by all that death lead to nearly everyone suddenly being able to buy proper clothes and linen. Suddenly underwear became commonplace.
But linen doesn't last very long, so all that extra linen was converted to paper. Leading to an excess of paper.
All that extra wealth was making jewelers extremely popular as well, which lead to advancements in metallurgy and made signature press seals a regular thing for even the lowest class of merchant.
The advent of widely produced signature seals, the excess of jewelers, and the excess of paper, coupled with all the new mass production techniques for assembling clothes combined to lead to the invention of the PRINTING PRESS. Which lead to mass printings of the Bible, granting access to the layman, and all the religious revolutions that followed, as well as shitloads of other knowledge previously only available to a few.
So, yeah, without all that death there is every likelihood that the renaissance and industrial revolution that followed may have happened somewhere else first, or never would have happened at all. It took a whole boatload of cultural and technological coincidences to lock together in place to kick that whole thing off, and The Black Plague, was probably the largest of all those many pieces.
So next time you see a rat, remember to thank him for modern civilization.
