June 19, 2023

Please stop saying the Black Death ended feudalism and launched capitalism

That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

Modern Medieval

by David M. Perry and Matthew Gabriele

Last month, a fascinating study revealed that scientists had found the aDNA of Yersinia Pestis in the teeth of individuals who died about 4000 years ago in what is today Somerset and Cumbria in England. You can read read the study in Nature Communications, as well as a good write-up in The Guardian.1 The research and its reporting are just one more example of the way this type of work is expanding our understanding of the past.

But we’re writing today because of a different essay on the study that uses its findings to undermine racist ideas about “Englishness.” Jonathan Kennedy, the author, is a global health and politics professor, and writes, “All this should be a reality check for notions of where people are “really” from, and how we measure who is entitled to settle where in the world. The white British population are certainly not the indigenous people of the British Isles. They are the descendants of immigrants who arrived on boats. And it is likely that they were only able to settle here because the humble Yersinia pestis bacterium cleared the way for them.”

Here’s the problem: while the contemporary politics match our own and the ancient history is fascinating, a couple of those zombie myths about the Middle Ages crops up in the lines being drawn between past and present. Kennedy writes:

We know that more recent plague pandemics have affected society in ways that are still evident. The Black Death, which killed more than half the British population in the mid-14th century, triggered a struggle between lords and serfs that led to the collapse of feudalism and the emergence of capitalism.

None of this is really right.

Yes, the Black Death did change Europe inexorably, but it didn’t cause the collapse of feudalism, because feudalism - as a coherent pan-European organized political and economic system - never existed. It’s a construct that may seem useful for teaching purposes, but as Peggy Brown wrote a long time ago (this may be another newsletter post), “To advocate teaching what is acknowledged to be deceptive and what must later be untaught reflects an unsettling attitude of condescension toward younger students.” Feudalism just never existed, at least in any sense that matters.

But this myth won’t die and became common as an argument during the Covid pandemic either to hope that this period of suffering will undermine the depredations of capitalism, or to explain why modern capitalism is more entrenched than medieval feudalism.

Some examples (note that authors do not write titles, but titles are important in our assessment of how these myths propagate. In most cases, the authors are more careful than the titles).

Salon: “The Black Death led to the demise of feudalism. Could this pandemic have a similar effect?”

The plague, in combination with a host of other related and overlapping crises, delivered a death blow to Medieval Europe, ushering in a new age — the Renaissance and the rise of so-called agrarian capitalism — and ultimately setting the stage for the Industrial Revolution and the modern world.

Foreign Policy: “The Bubonic Plague Killed Feudalism. COVID-19 Will Entrench It.”

Although cycles of plague were a common feature of life in late medieval Europe, the impact of the Black Death on the labor market was so devastating that it spelled the end of feudalism, the defining institutional system of the Middle Ages.

Foreign Policy in Focus: “THE BLACK DEATH KILLED FEUDALISM. WHAT DOES COVID-19 MEAN FOR CAPITALISM?”

The Black Death depopulated Europe, killing as much as 60 percent of the population in the middle of the fourteenth century. Feudalism depended on lots of peasants working the land to support the one percent of that era. By carrying off so many of these workers, the Black Death made a major contribution to eroding the foundations of the dominant economic system of the time.

NBC: COVID-19's death and suffering could lead us to rebirth, as the bubonic plague did in Europe

The plague further contributed to the collapse of feudalism, depleting the labor force on which it depended and slicing the value of land, which now lay fallow. Formerly little better off than slaves, serfs could now sell their work for money that the lords had no choice but to pay. The seeds of free market capitalism were planted. Previously beholden to the nobility and the church, artists and scholars flourished in what soon became the Renaissance, and freethinking priests spearheaded the Protestant Reformation. From the Old World, a more open and vibrant one became possible.

The Indian Express: Black death: The great plague that killed millions, and feudalism

In Europe though, the catastrophic plague eventually played out to be a boon for some — the serfs who were legally committed to providing labour to landlords in exchange for allowing them to live and work in their lands. The impact of the plague was such that it put an end to the feudal system of economy that persisted in Europe for centuries, allowing the serfs to move up the social and economic ladder.

And there’s so much more. “How pandemics past and present fuel the rise of large companies” or “Western Europe’s feudal system was on its way out — an inflection point that opened the way to the Reformation and the even greater worker gains of the Industrial Revolution and beyond” or “The peasants’ revolt after the 14th-century plague saw off feudalism. After COVID-19, will it be the turn of capitalism?”

Or there’s this that flips the modality, but still relies on a construct that didn’t exist, “COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many things, but also accelerated America’s descent into a new form of feudalism.”

The problem with these kinds of articles that they turn history into a just-so story. Or to put it another way, these easy comparisons are another version of the “rainbow connection” (even if perhaps not as nefarious as in other instances). What these stories do is not only lead us astray in trying to imagine a better world today, they cloud our understanding of the past.

The second plague pandemic is not solely responsible for changing economic systems from 1300-1500, nor changing cultural and intellectual norms (i.e. “the Renaissance”) from 1300-1500. To put 2 things people “know” about the Middle Ages next to one another and say they’re related is another example of the bad history that we’re working so hard to shift. During the pandemic, we wrote:

It has been said that bad history does violence to the past. Allow us to gently disagree. The long dead can no longer be harmed. The real danger of bad history is that it does violence to the future. The study of the past, at its best, is filled with the potential of prophecy. History, at its best, opens up possible worlds.

Did the second plague pandemic change things? Yes, absolutely. But there is a rich and complex, multi-variable, history of change in which the Black Death plays an indelible role. That history deserves so much more than “ended feudalism; launched modernity.”

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