When the Black Death reached Europe and the Mediterranean in 1346-47, Egypt and England were roughly comparable economies, with similar populations and income levels.
In both countries, the plague’s effects were devastating: with the first wave alone killing 30 per cent to 40 per cent of their inhabitants, the population was soon halved. And as the labour force shrank, agricultural production collapsed, leaving contemporaries to despair at unharvested fields and crumbling dwellings.
By 1500, however, England’s gross domestic product had fully recovered, while per capita income had soared to more than twice its level before the “Great Pestilence” struck.
In Egypt, on the other hand, total income and income per capita remained 60 per cent below their initial levels. Racked by fiscal crises and political instability, the Mamluk Sultanate finally succumbed in 1517 to the Ottomans’ onslaught.
Looking at the two countries in 1346-47, that outcome would scarcely have seemed likely.
Still scarred by the terrible famine that began in 1315, and suffering from falling agricultural productivity levels, England had just embarked on the Hundred Years’ War, which would further strain its resources.
Meanwhile, in Egypt, the long reign of Sultan an-Nasir, which stretched from 1294 to 1340, had been a period of rising prosperity, marked by large-scale irrigation investment, a near doubling in the area under cultivation and sustained growth in trade and commerce. As agricultural output rose, architecture and the arts flourished, with the Mamluk emirs living in a style vividly captured by the Thousand and One Nights.
However, Mamluk Egypt had a crippling weakness: its economy was centralised and politicised.
By centralising control, an-Nasir had extracted the agricultural surplus needed to finance massive infrastructure projects. At the same time, so as to keep rival military commanders on a tight leash, he had stripped land ownership (traditionally vested in those commanders) of all security and converted ownership rights over geographically unified estates into rights to the income from widely scattered fields.
As the historian Stuart Borsch showed in his path-breaking analysis of Mamluk agricultural records, the effects, once the plague struck, were disastrous.
Lacking secure property rights, Mamluk landlords had neither the incentive nor the ability to invest in the changes needed to cope with the dramatic reduction in labour supply. Fearful of being arbitrarily dispossessed, they instead concentrated on squeezing more out of the peasantry, while converting whatever rents they could secure into readily hidden assets, such as gold coins.
As irrigation channels were allowed to rot, a vicious spiral was unleashed in which declining yields provoked even harsher repression, a massive flight of peasants into urban areas and further output declines.
But while property rights were being undermined in Egypt, in England they were being strengthened. Magna Carta had restricted the monarch’s ability to expropriate; at the same time, the ever-greater reach of the common law and the formalisation of manorial law brought greater clarity and enforceability to ownership claims.
Those better-defined rights underpinned a burgeoning market for land, in which new, simplified, forms of leasehold developed that allowed a sweeping restructuring of landownership in the wake of the catastrophe.
The immediate result, according to English medievalist Peter Coss, was that the great lords “handed over to their farmers the management of a fifth to a quarter of Britain’s agricultural land”. Every bit as important, as the most successful tenants became owners, a new class of independent farmers emerged — the fabled English yeoman.
Indeed, agricultural historian Bruce Campbell estimates that by the 15th century, “40 per cent or more of the land was owned by the 20,000 minor landlords, whose combined landed income very probably exceeded that of the greater landlords”.
Together, those tenants and minor landlords led the way in adapting to an economy racked by chronic labour shortages, reshaping what was grown and how. And with agricultural output from the new farms booming, the real earnings of English peasants and wage labourers nearly trebled, reaching heights not bettered until the 1880s.
For sure, the English nobility, like its Mamluk counterpart, made strenuous efforts to deal with labour scarcity by forcing peasants to stay in place. Yet despite repeated attempts at enforcement, the Ordinance of Labourers (1349) and the Statute of Labourers (1351) could not overcome individual owners’ interest in putting their land to efficient use.
With landlords competing vigorously for the best tenants, and tenants making equally vigorous use of the law to secure their rights, serfdom was doomed — not so much by rebellions, which, like that of 1381, were easily suppressed, as by the overwhelming incentives well-defined property rights created for landlords, tenants and peasants alike.
As Cardinal Gasquet so brilliantly showed, in the first major English study of the plague, published in 1893, those changes induced countless others, including greater individualism and a new, if still grudging, acceptance of social mobility.
But no change was as far-reaching as the elevation of ordinary, diligent labour — which had traditionally been viewed as a curse — into a calling with profound spiritual dignity.
First articulated in Meister Eckhart’s influential sermons on the Gospel of Luke’s parable of Martha and Mary, and then magnificently expressed in Langland’s Vision of Piers Plowman, which was written during the period from the late 1360s to 1388, this change — which had no parallel in Islam — dethroned the monastic and ascetic ideals that had dominated medieval Christendom and began the uniquely Western sacralisation of hard work, thrift and aspiration.
The transformed attitude to labour did not only alter social mores; it also helped fuel an “industrious revolution” that gave England’s recovery from the plague even greater impetus. Many contemporaries lamented what they viewed as the common people’s descent into the vices of drinking, gambling and sport. In reality, work effort rose greatly, encouraged by higher real wages and by the conviction that diligence was a form of godliness.
Obviously, none of that should be read as placing medieval England, with its horrors and injustices, on a pedestal. But the Black Death was a defining moment that, perhaps for the first time, brought into stark relief the crucial role of secure property rights, strong incentives and unshackled ambition in determining whether economies can overcome even the most devastating crises.
Now, as our own year of hard shocks draws to a close, whether the West still understands that lesson, which painful experience has confirmed time and again, may prove the most important question of all.
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