The Black Death in Egypt and England: A Comparative Study

by Stuart J. Borsch

Throughout the fourteenth century AD/eighth century H, waves of plague swept out of Central Asia and decimated populations from China to Iceland. So devastating was the Black Death across the Old World that some historians have compared its effects to those of a nuclear holocaust. As countries began to recover from the plague during the following century, sharp contrasts arose between the East, where societies slumped into long-term economic and social decline, and the West, where technological and social innovation set the stage for Europe's dominance into the twentieth century. Why were there such opposite outcomes from the same catastrophic event? In contrast to previous studies that have looked to differences between Islam and Christianity for the solution to the puzzle, this pioneering work proposes that a country's system of landholding primarily determined how successfully it recovered from the calamity of the Black Death. Stuart Borsch compares the specific cases of Egypt and England, countries whose economies were based in agriculture and whose pre-plague levels of total and agrarian gross domestic product were roughly equivalent. Undertaking a thorough analysis of medieval economic data, he cogently explains why Egypt's centralized and urban landholding system was unable to adapt to massive depopulation, while England's localized and rural landholding system had fully recovered by the year 1500.

Genres: Egypt

207 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2005

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you thought the Black Death in England was bad, in Egypt it was utterly apocalyptic. Borsch explains how Egypt's land-holding system which, as opposed to England, was very much *NOT* hereditary, coupled with the Egyptian method of irrigation (ie, Nile floods as opposed to rain), proceeded to destroy the rural economy that was the backbone of Egypt's success.

It's a challenging read for anyone who, like me, stopped taking economics classes after high school, but i broaches a very interesting topic: what were the effects of the Plague outside of Europe? The Black Death ravaged the known world, but we only really know about what happened in Europe.