How the Black Death Radically Changed the Course of History
By: Steve Levine
Tags: Society, Coronavirus, Culture, History, Health

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the world had become more interconnected than it had ever been. Never was there the volume and scale of commerce and people among nations. That age closed with the two world wars but resumed on steroids over the past three decades — a period of massive globalization in which manufacturing parts seem to come from everywhere and undergo assembly anywhere.

Now, in a new lurch back, the world of Covid-19, far more suspicious of dependence on supply chains, seems likely to be a new turning point, a trigger of fateful social and economic change that we can only ponder. One thing that seems certain is that the virus will accelerate forces already in play.

Even before Covid-19, the U.S. and Chinese economies had been decoupling, driven by the Trump-instigated trade war. There was resistance: Members of the intellectual and corporate classes argued that while globalization had eliminated swaths of U.S. jobs, it had also lifted hundreds of millions of people around the world out of poverty and created vast wealth. It seemed mindless and immoral to throw out the whole system when tinkering could relieve inadvertent inequities. But the post-virus United States seems likely to shun such ambivalence and favor self-reliant production located within reach. “We start breaking back into little pieces,” Paul Saffo, a futurist at Stanford University, told me.

This does not mean that China’s footprint will shrink. Rather, the post-coronavirus world seems likely to feature a taller China, convinced of its superior resilience. Behind it is likely to be Europe, resentfully let down by a go-it-alone United States that, unlike in prior global crises, has pulled in and not led the world response. Regardless of who follows Trump to power, Europeans will not want to subject themselves again to that geopolitical vulnerability. Already, says Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, the virus has transformed China into a “softpower superpower.” Sam Brennan, director of the risks and foresight group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, adds, “This really could be a decline-of-the-West moment.”

As an unexpected catalyst for geopolitical change, the transformation would unfold over many generations. Branko Milanovic, a professor at the City University of New York, told me that it took two centuries for the Western Roman Empire to disintegrate into feudalism, “and that was under the pressure of war, plus two plagues.”

In the bigger social picture, the past two centuries have been all about a dramatic economic shift in which people largely stopped crafting and growing goods at home and instead congregated for work in factories and offices. In the 1810s, when weavers were automated out of their jobs, they arose in what became known as the Luddite rebellion. Britain put down the uprising by hanging some of its members and shipping off others to Australia.

The coronavirus is vastly speeding up the latest wave of automation. Robotization is going ahead faster in restaurants, factories, warehouses, and other businesses, all in a frenzy to reduce risk and save labor costs, the Brookings Institution said in a report last week. All of that is postindustrial. But we are also experiencing a shift back to the pre–Industrial Age, with large parts of the economy based in homes — and vehicles. Both workers and their employers are becoming accustomed to the work-from-home movement, and much has already been said about how this jump seems permanent. What has been discussed less is the coming reverberation in cities, built up over centuries into metropolises of gigantic office and residential buildings whose valuations could change dramatically. It is hard to imagine a repeat of the age of the plague, when the answer was that poor people from the countryside moved in. But new uses will have to emerge for lesser-occupied if not abandoned office buildings.

With the return to the home, we are asked to acquiesce to a different kind of intrusion: software that allows companies to monitor who is actually working. That is no accident. The post-virus world is likely to be ever more Orwellian. For the first time in history, governments can actively surveil and respond to everyone and punish those who defy public ordinances — such as health orders. Just as people have come to expect cameras recording their movements on the street since 9/11, Americans in the post-Covid-19 world may see nothing unusual about more intimate measures like public monitoring of their temperature and blood pressure.

Samuel Pepys, the 17th-century English diarist, wrote of a London epidemic in 1665, “The plague makes us cruel, as dogs, one to another.”

Public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari, writing in the Financial Times, pushes back on this coming world of heightened surveillance. We would achieve control of pandemics, he argues, but also empower governments to know too much. In places like North Korea, for instance, police could monitor public attitudes to a speech by leader Kim Jong Un. If you are boiling over with rage, he writes, “you are done for.” What is to prevent so-inclined future American leaders from abusing the system to gauge and respond to their own public resonance?

“Revolution sucks,” Stanford’s Saffo told me, and a number of thinkers say the transformation we are living through won’t be different. During the plague, Jews were massacred across Europe, falsely accused of poisoning wells. In an outbreak of disease in 4th-century BC Athens, people “became contemptuous of everything, both sacred and profane,” wrote the historian Thucydides, quoted by Charles Mann in his book 1491. Samuel Pepys, the 17th-century English diarist, wrote of a London epidemic in 1665, “The plague makes us cruel, as dogs, one to another.”

Today, says Noel Johnson, an economics professor at George Mason and co-author of a paper last year on the Black Death, loathsome behavior lives on in the scapegoating and attacking of Asians and immigrants. He predicts that pogroms could follow in the virus and post-virus era, running “the gamut from expulsions to overt violence that is either implicitly or explicitly sanctioned by governments. I would expect the persecution to be more prevalent in places with a history of anti-Semitism or anti-immigrant behavior. I would also expect it to be worse in places with weaker state capacity — though I definitely wouldn’t be surprised to see it in places like the U.S. or Western Europe.”

But plenty will also happen peaceably. The expansion of the homebound gig economy is already spurring a din of minimum-wage workers demanding sick pay and safety. This could broaden into a new labor movement that insists on restoring gains lost over the past several decades, including far higher salaries for nurses and elder-care workers, newly grasped as central to virus-era survival. The at-once palpable, life-or-death demand for robust public medical care could put fresh bipartisan propulsion behind national health legislation.

During the plague, what changed was the seemingly unchangeable, especially for people who until then had been largely invisible. What had been fixed in place was, all at once, not. As we try to discern the shape of the future, this phase of history is increasingly looking like that one.