The Black Death in Egypt and England is an ambitious study that asks an important question: against the same backdrop of demographic crisis wrought by plague, why did England expand economically, with its peasantry benefiting over the long run, while post-plague Egypt slumped, with peasants' wages falling, rents rising, and the land deteriorating? This is not the first time a historian has asked why the Black Death was the pivotal moment of Middle Eastern decline, but earlier attempts were mere asides within larger books and pointed to culture and religion to explain broad differences between “Islam” and “the west”. At the outset Borsch rejects these explanations as an “Orientalist trap”. He also wishes to reject any explanation that smacks of “geographical determinism”, one that emphasizes Egypt's dykes, canals, irrigation, and the control of the Nile's annual flooding as the key. Borsch turns instead to differences in landholding systems between Egypt and England to explain their divergent post-plague trajectories.
The Egyptian landholding system under the Mamluks (1250–1517) was unique. A caste of “slave soldiers” ruled Egypt with a system that prevented hereditary rule and ownership of the great landed estates. As a consequence, the Mamluks were absentee landlords with little incentive to invest in their estates and instead sought to maximize short-term profits at the expense of the land and the peasantry. After the Black Death this system led to over-exploitation and the disintegration of the vital infrastructure of canals, dykes, and dams. Peasant autarky and Bedouin infiltration ensued. Before the Black Death, however, this same system of landholding and political control had had the opposite outcome. The peasantry flourished (especially in comparison with their demographically hard-pressed counterparts in thirteenth-century England); Bedouin tribesmen were pushed to the margins, the irrigation system greatly expanded, and land under the plough increased by 50 per cent. While increased population had worsened the economic and social plight of the peasant in pre-plague England, in Egypt (1250–1348) these same demographic trends had benefited the peasant, the land, and the overall economy.
Despite Borsch's predilections against stressing geographic variables, Egypt's peculiar geography emerges as the key in his analysis for understanding this change of fate before and after plague—the country's reliance on the flooding of the Nile. Before 1348 (or according to the chronicler Al-Maqrizi, circa 1400), Egypt's surplus agricultural population (unlike England's) was easily absorbed by the labour-intensive work of dredging canals, building dykes, and expanding the irrigation system. After the plague, the countryside no longer had the human resources to maintain these systems, and the failure to maintain them led to water-logged soil, massive declines in productivity, the retreat of the peasantry from markets, and Bedouin occupation.
As Borsch states at the outset, Egypt's system of Mamluk landholding was unique, but was the decline of agriculture in the Middle East unique to Egypt? Further comparative work needs to be done, but as Michael Dols's The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, 1977) suggested, the problem of a long-term, post-plague economic downturn was more a territorial problem common to the Middle East than one that was unique to Egypt, where the Mamluks held their lands. As Marc Bloch taught us long ago, local causes cannot be relied on to explain larger regional differences. Furthermore, if landholding were the explanation, why did these conditions persist long after the Mamluks had been ousted in 1517? Finally, how would differences in the landholding system explain changes in culture from the Sultan Hasan mosque where secular studies in medicine and astronomy flourished before the plague to post-plague potentate cultural institutions “that contained almost nothing related to secular studies” (p. 114) and that endured to the nineteenth century? Further, why did medical plague tracts in the west change dramatically from those in the plague's immediate aftermath that saw all causation and cures of the plague as rooted in God's whims, to ones that boasted about doctors' own skills, experience, and experimentation in “triumphing over plague” by the end of the fourteenth century, while in the Middle East, the tracts developed in the very opposite direction? From stressing natural causes and pinpointing specific cases of plague, they became abstract theological texts.
Unfortunately for the readers of this journal, Borsch makes no attempt to compare descriptions of plague by contemporaries in Egypt and England or to speculate on epidemiological differences or similarities. Only the first nine pages concern the disease at all, and these are under-researched. He shows a misunderstanding of Yersinia pestis, suggesting that flies can be its vector and all forms of cattle, its carrier. None the less, Borsch's comparative work is a welcome breath of fresh air to plague studies, but, as he suggests, further comparative work is needed. Let's hope others will follow his lead.
