The Black Death and Consequences for Labor
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12791857 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Cohn (0000-0002-4490-5034, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 14-29 |
| Publication date | 2023-05-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1547-6715 • E-ISSN: 1558-1454 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/15476715-10329778 |
| OpenAlex | W4381294794 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 29 |
From the perspective of the Black Death, the economic consequences for laborers in our unfolding pandemic, COVID-19, might come as a surprise. Instead of labor shortages benefiting workers, especially the unskilled, and narrowing the gap between rich and poor, our pandemic has sent economic inequality racing forward across the world with laborers’ health and material well-being plummeting. However, a closer examination of the Black Death suggests that the consequences for labor of the two pandemics may not be as different as first assumed. This essay explores the silver lining for labor after the dramatic crash in population caused by the Black Death and subsequent waves of plague during the second half of the fourteenth century. By first turning to Europe as a whole and then concentrating on Italy, this essay challenges notions that labor conditions and standards of living improved immediately after the Black Death's halving of populations and that these changes were almost universal across Europe or even within city-states, such as Florence, or in rural areas hosting different sorts of agricultural workers. In Italy, where real wages have been calculated, the Black Death's silver lining for laborers failed to arrive until two or three generations after 1348. Moreover, compressing economic inequality from the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth centuries spurred reactions from elites that wrought new inequalities in other spheres of activity
Ancient history · Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19 · Development economics · Economic history · Economics · Fifteenth · Inequality · Pandemic · Plague (disease · Political science · Population · Sociology · Surprise · Demography · History · Medicine · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies · Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research
Creating the Florentine State
The condition of the rural population
Tyranny under the Mantle of St Peter
A History of Florence 1200–1575
The Building of Renaissance Florence
The development of the Florentine silk industry
The Florentine Oligarchy and the Balie of the Late Trecento
The Disadvantaged and the Hussite Revolution
The Enforcement of the Statutes of Labourers During the First Decade After the Black Death
Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe
Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe
Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe
Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe
The patron's payoff
Death by the Lake
Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434
| Highly cited | No |
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