[P2P-F] Fwd: Eh.net Book Review: The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World

Wed Feb 8 14:44:43 CET 2017

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From: EH.net <newsletter at eh.net>
Date: 8 February 2017 at 05:31
Subject: Eh.net Book Review: The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and
Society in the Late-Medieval World
To: rasigan at ieri.org.za

Published by EH.Net (February 2017)

Bruce Campbell, *The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the
Late-Medieval World*.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.  xxiv +
463 pp. $35 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-521-14443-8.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Eric Jones, La Trobe University.

The cathedral that stands unfinished in Siena marks how abruptly the
expansion of the High Middle Ages was brought to a halt, although maybe the
failure to complete it during the recovery that began in the fifteenth
century is more surprising.  Until the fourteenth century the expansion had
been remarkable, with population doubling or trebling since the late
eleventh century, cities multiplying, international trade routes linking
up, and cultural output soaring, with a thirteen-fold increase in the
annual output of manuscripts for example.  The climate was benign and the
burden of disease modest.  What could go wrong?  Bruce Campbell’s 400
tightly-packed pages tell us about what might be termed the Great
Disruption.

He is chiefly interested in climatic and biological forces, and the cascade
of political, economic and social woes that arose in the “Perfect Storm”
when they all seemed to go wrong at once.  Much of Eurasia was afflicted by
the same malign, “quasi-autonomous,” turn of events.  The book concentrates
heavily on England, which is better documented than other countries, but
stretches across Europe to the Middle East and Asia as far as China.  It
takes in the irruption of the Mongols and the cramping of options for the
Vikings of the North Atlantic; indeed it takes in everywhere and every
phenomenon.  Ingenious proxies are introduced.  The text is backed up by an
extraordinary array of attractively drawn graphs and bar diagrams, although
I have qualms about the unstated implication that all sources are equally
reliable.  The reader is usually obliged to take the underlying numbers on
trust.  Occasionally models are cited incautiously and objections to them
scouted, for instance where falling interest rates are assumed to have
determined capital investment in peasant farming.  Similarly, the costs and
benefits of political fragmentation are dealt with a little ambiguously.

Medieval economic history is nevertheless more valuably expounded in the
long central stretches of this volume than anywhere else.  In principle it
is standard stuff, but here it is impressively digested, made sharper and
brought right up to date by its use of advanced scientific findings about
influences on the climate and human and animal health.  Over fifty years
ago the Hampshire County Archivist told me that she had some sleepless
nights after cutting her finger on a parchment of the Plague Year.  Well
she might. Yet it is only this minute, so to speak, that DNA from the
dental pulp of exhumed skeletons has confirmed what the disease organism
really was.

The Perfect Storm of climate and disease was a gigantic shock but it was
still an asymmetric one.  In the long term not quite everything did go
wrong.  The Black Death, Campbell states, worked to England’s advantage by
relieving the burden of poverty and facilitating structural reform.  This
is a thesis of growth by disaster, a sort of neutron bomb that counteracted
the morcellement produced by intense demand for land: a considerable
proportion of capital-in-land was not exactly untouched but was at least
reusable.  Extra-somatic sources of technical knowledge also survived.

The achievements of description and analysis in this hefty volume are
incontestable and we should move on to consider its interesting method or
rather scope.  There are lessons here for economic historians to ponder.
To my mind, Campbell overstates his case by presenting the book as the
first to integrate physical and biological processes into historical
narrative and its originality as a study of so much of the globe.  He
rather sweeps most predecessors aside.  What is new is the extent to which
his work rests on an upsurge of research by his contemporaries, something
he does admit, just as he acknowledges the impetus from research on global
warming.  The Great Transition marks the shift into a world of ample
funding (not merely in the United States but now in Europe too), of the
compiling of vast new sources of data, of enormous international chains of
scholars, and of the arrival in economic history, natural science-like, of
publications with very long lists of contributors.

Economic historians will henceforth be obliged to treat as normal the use
of scientific articles, scientific data and wholly unfamiliar proxies.
Tree-ring counts are a recognizable tool but here we run out to something
as indirect as a nine-fold increase in the purchase of sealing wax by the
English Chancery in just forty years of the thirteenth century.  And what
of a “precipitation index based on the band widths of a speleothem from
Cnoc nan Uamh Cave, A.D. 900-1500” or the citation of articles like one
entitled, ‘Antarctic Last Millennium 10BE Stack and Solar Irradiance
Reconstruction”?  How will colleagues in general history or economics react
to innumerable unfamiliar terms such as these?

Campbell was educated as a geographer and it shows — in the best possible
sense, in that he is totally aware of the physical, climatic and biological
worlds and open-minded enough to scour them for ideas and evidence.  But,
as he says, he learned the hard way how resistant historians can be to
venturing off what they believe to be piste.  I was myself admonished by a
famous cultural historian not to use the simile of tectonic plates grinding
“because historians will not understand what you mean.”  The scholarly
world may be advancing beyond such obtuseness but the acceptance in general
narratives of integrated natural science and history will still come
slowly.  Nor are economists likely to greet with glee what might be called
“deep environmental history.”  There is no gainsaying the fact that many
prefer building *a priori* models to slow-motion wrestling with ground
evidence from the natural world.

Both Marxist and neo-classical interpretations of the past are accordingly
dismissed in this book but without fully stating the objections.  Campbell
simply replaces them with a bold set of very complicated social, political
and ecological interactions.  Nevertheless he swallows whole the
fashionable neoclassical-style assertions that labor-saving inventions and
innovations were induced by low interest rates and dear labor.  Because
something was logical does not mean it actually happened for that reason.
Barely a word here about the human and cultural circumstances involved in
the response, though there is something about the providential emergence of
institutions to capture the rents from expanding commerce during the High
Middle Ages.  Yet these issues can be taken forward by others and they are,
in the vulgar phrase, “pimples on a side of beef” compared with the
stupendous effort in charting the course of medieval economic history that
this book represents.

Eric Jones, Emeritus Professor, La Trobe University, and former
Professorial Fellow, Melbourne Business School, is the author of *Locating
the Industrial Revolution: Inducement and Response* (World Scientific,
2010), *The Fabric of Society and How It Creates Wealth* (Arley Hall Press,
2013) [with Charles Foster], *Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic
Critique of Culture* (Princeton, 2016, paperback) and *Middle Ridgeway and
its Environment* (Wessex Press, 2016) [with Patrick Dillon].

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