Plague Depopulation and Irrigation Decay in Medieval Egypt

Plague and Lethal Epidemics in the Pre-Industrial World

“…They are often identified as crucial turning points in history that sometimes led to the collapse of societies and sometimes paved the road for impressive growth. It is no surprise then that plague features conspicuously in some debates in social and natural sciences: from traditional narratives on the rise of Europe (e.g., North and Thomas 1973) to the social and demographic impact of Ebola (e.g., Ó Gráda 2015). Pre-industrial epidemics are useful illustrations of large-scale mass mortality caused by infectious diseases.…”

“…Recent developments suggest that it is time to reassess the economic implications of plague and other infections (e.g., Cohn 2007a; Bosker et al 2008; Campbell 2010a, 2016; Alfani 2013a; Ó Gráda 2015). Indeed, given the importance for social science of understanding both the determinants of mortality and its consequences (Cutler, Deaton, and Lleras-Muney 2006), increasing interest in the role of disease in determining the path of economic development (Diamond 1997; Acemoglu, Robinson, and Johnson 2003; Nunn and Qian 2010) focuses attention on major epidemics.…”

The Economic Impact of the Black Death

“…We also considered the impact of the Black Death on the economies of the Middle East. While the impact of the Black Death on the Egyptian economy has been studied in detail by Borsch (2005Borsch ( , 2014, this is an area that would benefit from further research as numerous scholars have dated the period when Europe eclipsed the Middle East to the centuries between 1200-1500 (e.g. Blaydes and Paik, 2020).…”

“…From these accounts, however, it was not clear why the demographic decline caused by the Black Death was also associated with an economic decline. 23 Borsch (2005) has argued that in Western Europe, because agriculture was largely rain-fed, the shock of the Black Death led to marginal land being abandoned and saw an increase in labor productivity and in real wages. However, the opposite happened in Egypt, where agriculture relied on irrigation rather than rainfall and there was a fixed cost associated with the maintenance of infrastructure.…”

The Anthropology of Plague: Insights from Bioarcheological Analyses of Epidemic Cemeteries

“…1 The epidemic killed tens of millions of people in Europe alone within a very short period of time (Benedictow 2004;Cohn 2002;Dols 1977;Wood, Ferrell, and DeWitte-Avina 2003). This disease initiated or enhanced social, demographic, and economic changes throughout Western Eurasia and Northern Africa (see, for example, essays by Borsch 2014, Carmichael 2014, Colet et al 2014, and Green 2014, and thus has attracted the interest of a variety of researchers for decades. In addition to its importance in shaping events hundreds of years ago, the Black Death continues to be of interest today, in part because the epidemic was caused by the same pathogen that causes modern plague, the bacterium Yersinia pestis.…”