The Bubonic Plague In Fourteenth Century East Asia
Over a million Americans have died as a consequence of the current global pandemic, and over 6.5 million worldwide. The impact to society, economy, infrastructure, and the interdependent functioning of the world has been enormous and will be inter-generational. But it’s unfathomable to try and place this in context of the bubonic plague’s impact in the mid fourteenth century, where it killed a third of Europeans, and halved the population in China to 65 million. That’s a staggeringly devastating scale ten times the global size of the current pandemic, and isolated to a single country.
Campbell motivates the connection between the seismic upheavals brought by the Black Death and the resultant systems of servile labor developed in the Indian Ocean. Destitute and desperate, Chinese parents sold daughters to those who could feed and clothe them, and adoption was common as a last resort to ensure survival. What’s striking here is that such debt bondage, while leaving the individual little alternative, was voluntary as a means of economic survival for a family, and indiscriminate in who participated. Broad and diverse slices of the impacted populations across East Asia, as Campbell argues ‘entered debt bondage or slavery in return for subsistence as a survival strategy’. The cost of food, clothing and lodging was tied to paying off interest on loans to which the debtors had contracted into servitude. As Campbell describes, such debts could become permanent, and even inter-generational, at which point there is little material distinction between debt bondage and slavery.
As the politics of climate, energy and health accelerate in the modern era, there are obvious parallels to what has gone before in terms of risk and consequence. The debts owed by those impacted by natural disasters or those countries simply unable to cope with the rapid spread of contagion don’t just have immediate human cost, but longer term economic and political implications of cultural debt bondage. And while charitable efforts aspire to help, it’s hard not to paint a bleak picture about the long-term economic means of repaying foreign credit.
If we lean on the Chinese impact of the bubonic plague in the fourteenth century to motivate speculation around parallel potential impact in a modern American context, it’s the same consequence as if the pandemic had halved the American population from 330 million to 165 million, an impact over sixteen thousand times worse than COVID-19. Every other person in the country would perish, and those fortunate to remain left devastated and destitute. Such a Black Swan event would change everything. Who would help? Who could help? What would that aid look like, and what would the cost be?
I’d always thought of The Black Death as a particularly European phenomenon, a likely consequence of a western education of course, and certainly not one with similar origins to the current pandemic. Considering the scale of the human consequence of the bubonic plague in East Asia is staggering and challenging to comprehend. But it’s also a fascinating insight into the highly resilient means by which families will do anything to survive.
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