Plagues in World History (13 page)

Finally, there is the differential economic impact of the plague in Europe and the Middle East. This is a question that recent scholars have tried to tease out from the thorny issue of how differences in religious culture between Christianity and Islam played themselves out during the plague, although, as we will see, economic factors cannot be so easily disentangled from other considerations such as the social and political makeup of societies.156 Mortality during the Black Death is thought to have been at least as severe in the Middle East as in Europe: even though considerably fewer archival resources are available in the former region, enough has been recovered from sources such as cadastral surveys in Egypt to suggest that the two were comparable.157 Traditionally, the assumption then followed, largely based on chronicle accounts, that the economic trajectory of the Middle East followed that of Europe’s in the aftermath of the Black Death, despite the fact that, by the end of the Middle Ages, Europe, and England in particular, had emerged with its economy poised to take full advantage of the benefits of a new, capitalist-based system, while that of the Mamluk dynasty in Egypt, for example, lay in ruins.158 New research on Egyptian sources such as endowment deeds and chancery manuals that supplement narrative chronicles has greatly revised this comparative picture.159

A comparison of England’s economic response to the plague with Egypt’s over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries reveals that the two were diametrically opposite: in England, the long-term economic impact of the massive depopulation caused by successive waves of the plague led to growing prosperity in the population at large (with the significant exception of the landholding class), since, in general, wages of laborers rose, prices of agricultural necessities fell, and rents declined, all tending to raise peasant incomes and spelling the end of the oppressive manorial system; however, in Egypt, the reverse was true, with wages falling, grain prices rising, and rents increasing, all leading to the collapse of the economy based on
fellahin
labor. A simple comparison of the agrarian GDP (gross domestic product) in the two countries by the early sixteenth century, after they had started out on roughly equivalent terms before the Black Death during the early fourteenth century, dramatically illustrates the disparity: Egypt’s fell by nearly 60 percent during this period, while England’s recovered and actually increased by 7 percent, so that England’s GDP was by this time double that of Egypt’s.160

Obviously, a catastrophic mortality from the plague occurred in both countries that triggered these changes but not with the same result since very different 60 y Chapter 1

social and political circumstances then interacted with and responded to the demographic decline. In Egypt, the Mamluk military elite that ruled the country from Cairo owned the
iqtā‘
landholdings in the countryside (which were
not
the same as fiefs in Europe) on a nonhereditary, unstable basis and administered them through an elaborate bureaucracy that discouraged personal supervision and control. Furthermore, the Mamluk caste of soldiery was able to respond to the disruptions caused by the plague as a cohesive, unified body, or “collective bargaining unit,” that successfully suppressed any attempts by the
fellahin
to take advantage of greater demands for their labor that was now much more scarce in the aftermath of the Black Death. Additionally, the complex irrigation network that maintained Egypt’s agricultural estates along the Nile River valley was a highly labor-intensive system that inevitably suffered from population declines inaugurated by the plague but that was now largely administered by emirs pursuing their private self-interest instead of by the central government of the sultan.

This irrigation system also suffered from Bedouin incursions in the outlying districts. Thus, a combination of unique political, social, and geographical circumstances led to the decay in Egypt’s agriculture throughout the late Middle Ages in response to the Black Death.161

By contrast, in England and elsewhere in Europe, feudalism ensured a decen-tralized, local control over landholdings such that, despite the aristocracy’s best efforts at passing labor legislation in national parliaments, peasant communities were the ones who were able to bargain more effectively as a collective unit by taking advantage of landholders’ rivalry and economic competition with each other. Despite the fact that, from the elite’s point of view, Egypt’s autocratic response was far more preferable, in the long run and with hindsight it was Europe’s seemingly chaotic, socially undermining response that held the greatest overall economic benefits for its population, one that set the stage for its rise and dominance over the Middle East in the modern era. The economic winners and losers from plague were therefore determined not just by the disease’s mortality itself but also by its interaction with a whole host of factors that were unique to each society, ones not necessarily bound up with its religious culture. These economic benefits and costs were also not necessarily intended or foreseen at the time; in fact, a society or culture may have been straining for exactly the opposite result. There is some question remaining, however, as to whether a comparative case study such as that between Egypt and England can hold true for entire regions or continents, that is, Europe versus the Middle East. Were Egypt’s circumstances the same as those in Syria or Iran?162 Was England’s drive toward a renter, capitalistic economy by the fifteenth century mirrored in Spain, Italy, or Eastern Europe? The evidence suggests rather that even within a geographic entity that shared a similar set of cultural values, such as Christian ethics and feudal and Plague y 61

manorial landholding systems, variations could still occur in terms of the economic impact of the Black Death. But at least it is clear now that Europe and the Middle East could differ dramatically in terms of their respective responses to plague in more ways than just along the religious divide traditionally demar-cated between the two cultures.

A last legacy of the Second Pandemic of plague to consider is how both Christian and Muslim chroniclers personified the disease in their writings, perhaps as an indication of just how feared the plague was by premodern societies. An anonymous doctor writing from Lübeck in Germany in 1411 called plague the “[evil] stepmother of the human race” due to the way it carried off “too many”

of his friends and fellow citizens; rather than characterizing the disease as an “illness,” he called it simply a “death.”163 He and another fifteenth-century German doctor, Primus of Görlitz, also portrayed plague as an enemy to be fought and hopefully conquered by their regimens; in the former case, the physician’s victory over plague apostemes was compared to banners raised on castle turrets to signify surrender.164 In his more poetic passages, the Muslim Syrian writer al-Wardī

compared the Black Death variously to a lion, a silkworm, a storm, a taxpayer, a king who “swayed with power” on his throne, and a lover who poisons her victims as she kisses and embraces them. In another passage, the plague enters a house as if it were the agent of the
qadi
, or religious judge, announcing that it was there to “arrest” all those within.165 Clearly for our ancestors, plague had become all too personal and real. Their fear of the disease stemmed not only from its high mortality but also from the horribly painful way in which it killed (at least in the bubonic form) and the sudden swiftness of its grim harvest (particularly in the pneumonic and septicemic forms), which left precious little time for preparation for the afterlife. This literary treatment of the plague set it apart from all other diseases and accorded it a special place in human history.

The Third Pandemic of plague apparently began as early as 1854 in the Yun-nan province of southwestern China, spreading from there to other Chinese provinces until it eventually arrived at the ports of Canton and Hong Kong in 1894.166 Two years later, it called at the port of Bombay in India and then spread particularly to the northern and western regions of the country and decimated approximately twelve mil ion of the native population by 1930, comprising 95

percent of the world’s mortality from the pandemic. Another major outbreak in Asia came in Manchuria in northeastern China, where the disease manifested itself as exclusively pneumonic plague and swept away 60,000 inhabitants in 1910–1911 and 8,500 more in 1920–1921. By the turn of the twentieth century, largely through the power of modern steamship transport, plague made its way around the world, infecting and establishing new endemic centers in Madagascar and South Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, Russia, and Australia, often in 62 y Chapter 1

defiance of local quarantine measures.167 In 1900, plague called at San Francisco and from there spread throughout the western United States, where it has an endemic presence down to the present day, as shown by the case of Tull and Marker mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. The continued relevance of plague is also demonstrated by recent epidemics in Surat, India, and in Madagascar, where a new, antibiotic-resistant strain of
Yersinia pestis
has emerged.

The Third Pandemic presented microbiologists with an unprecedented, golden opportunity to study plague using the new tools of modern science, in this case, that of bacteriology and the germ theory of disease, as inaugurated earlier in the nineteenth century by such pioneers as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. A student of Pasteur’s, Alexandre Yersin, is credited with being the first to discover the bacillus that causes plague in both rodents and humans (hence its name,
Yersinia pestis
). The rat-flea nexus that spreads the bacteria in cases of bubonic plague was then explained by another protégé of Pasteur’s, the French bacteriologist Paul-Louis Simond. Special research bodies were also set up to study the disease and publish their results, including the Indian Plague Commission, which issued a Minutes of Evidence
and
Report
in 1900–1901, supplemented by annual articles in the
Journal of Hygiene
between 1906 and 1937, and the North Manchurian Plague Prevention Service, which came out with three
Reports
on the plague in Manchuria between 1914 and 1922. However, it would be a mistake to assume that these “scientific” reports on the Third Pandemic are al entirely trustworthy or characterize the behavior of the plague in al places and at al times. Like any other document, they are a product of their specific historical context, and some of their assertions, such as that plague was communicated through the soles of the feet or that “one of the safest places during an epidemic is the ward of a sanitary plague hospital,” were motivated primarily by political or racial considerations and are therefore misleading or outright wrong.

Of more interest to scholars of the Third Pandemic have been the cultural conflicts that emerged between colonial authorities such as Britain who were trying to implement modern, Western-style plague controls and medical ideas in their empires, and the native subjects in India and elsewhere who bore the brunt of this so-called disease imperialism.168 Some of the issues here also crop up in the British government’s handling of other diseases that threatened India, such as smallpox and cholera (chapters 2 and 4), but plague presented a unique con-catenation of circumstances: the Third Pandemic proved to be an intriguing intersection of a long history of dealing with plague in both Europe and Asia combined with a new knowledge and awareness of how the disease was actually caused and spread. Imperial powers such as Britain wielded the weapons of modern medical science almost like a club, determined to bludgeon its Indian empire into health on the conviction that it could now finally eradicate an age-old dis-Plague y 63

ease. Yet, this newfound and arguably unprecedented determination to collectively cure a nation came up against an equally determined native resistance in India, and to some extent this was also true of the response of Chinese authorities to the pneumonic plague outbreak in Manchuria.169 While scholars have typically explored the Third Pandemic for its political ramifications in terms of Britain’s and Europe’s colonial policies, our concern here is more strictly epidemiological: did the modern “scientific” effort against plague work, and if not, why? Somewhat to their surprise, British authorities discovered that their ener-getic efforts to combat the plague—which initially included compulsory hospitalization of all patients who had come down with plague, segregation of contacts, house-to-house searches and disinfection of all homes where plague occurred, and inspection of plague corpses—could be stymied by the bitter opposition of natives, which was bolstered when a recrudescence of plague occurred during the late summer of 1897 despite the apparent success in temporarily halting the 1896 outbreak. This required a new policy from the British government by 1898–1899 of accommodation to native customs and sensibilities, which proved to be a more effective response to the disease.

Nonetheless, some larger questions remain: Was the British failure to contain the epidemic in 1896–1897 simply a function of insensitive imperialism, or were its policies, which had much in common with those adopted by European health boards during the Second Pandemic, when the disease was understood to be miasmatic rather than microbial in character, truly suited to fight the spread of plague germs? Could native responses, such as evacuation and flight from areas where plague (as well as its oppressive controls) occurred, have actually been more effective in breaking the chain of the flea-rat-human connection that spread bubonic plague? How did this dynamic play out in China, where Western medical approaches were implemented by native ruling elites after 1894 (osten-sibly in order to co-opt foreign interference) and where there was a more straightforward, human-to-human contagion of pneumonic plague? Was the native popular resistance to antiplague measures, whether in India or China, motivated by colonial resentment toward a Western imperialist foreign influence, by a traditional distrust of modern innovations, or simply as part of a “generalized panic” in response to a truly horrific disease like plague? And what lessons do all these issues hold for current efforts to fight our own emerging pandemics, such as avian influenza or swine flu?