The media loves being in a permanent state of anxiety, and willing to pass that fear on to their readers and viewers. This month's hysterics are the Avian Bird Flu "epidemic" which has taken a few lives, but to read from the media, it is waiting to wipe out civilisation. Despite being sensationalist, this goes against the role of pandemics in world history; the occasional pandemic has often led to quite revolutionary and positive change. None more so than the Black Death which ravaged Europe in the 1300s.

Medieval Society

The Middle Ages saw great inequality in wealth. Agrarian societies are heavily dependent upon property for wealth. All production and rent stems from property. In England during 1340, ninety per cent of all wealth was in land. Of this the King and aristocracy owned approximately forty per cent of. Another thirty per cent was held by the church and corporations, while thirty per cent was held by the upper middle class, and two per cent was owned by a new class; the land owning peasant, or yeomen.

The Kings and aristocracy lived a life of excess; halls, retinues, drink, food, clothing, riches and sex. It was an expected part of their lifestyle as the heirs to fortunes, protected by the divine right to rule, and the class deference from peasantry and gentry. The land had been kind to both landed, and peasantry in the preceding centuries, producing copious crops and productivity. But this had led to a population explosion, particularly amongst the peasants.

By 1280, the population in England was six million people, having tripled in the space of a century. England would not reach that population again until the 1800s. This population explosion placed pressure on the land to supply all these new mouths. Previously marginal land was now put under the plough, and forest cut down to provide more land for cereal crops and cattle. Despite these measures, the 1320s were a period of great famine; crops failed from heavy rains. Peasants, gentry and the middle class often starved, living from meal to meal.

Black Death

Humanity originated from Africa. So too have many pandemics, including the bubonic plague. It appears that the Greeks and Mediterranean cultures were familiar with the plague, in particular the bubonic variant which is denoted by big black poscules (buboles) in the armpits and groin. Constantinople, and southern Europe was also hit by a bubonic plague pandemic in 500 AD. Constantinople imported considerable amounts of grain through sea-trade. A common source of spreading of the fleas, who usually reside on rodents, and then transmit the disease to humans by biting them.

The Black Death originated in China, and through trade spread to the Mediterranean and then Europe. It came in several waves, the first reaching Europe in the 1340s. Europe was in the grips of the Hundred Years war between England and France which was wreaking havoc on agricultural production in western France. Europe was also contending with the crop failure and famine of the previous decade. The result was catastrophic.

Europe's population in the 1340s was approximately seventy-five million, a scant decade later it was fifty million. It has been suggested that the Black Death was not purely the result of the bubonic or pnuemonic plague, but also from anthrax transmitted by eating infected cow meat. They have similar initial symptoms, but anthrax kills much faster. In a population weakened by famine, and a pandemic, it is likely that many other diseases would have got a look in that otherwise would have been resisted by a healthier population.

Supply and Demand

It took about a generation for the over-supply of peasant labour to be reduced by the pandemic. By the 1370s large landholders had more land than they had workers. The sudden and dramatic drop in the population of Europe also meant there was a smaller market for grain, so demand dropped off drastically was well. The free peasants began demanding their own salaries. Land owners ran off to parliament seeking legislative recourse to keep wages down. This contributed to the Peasant's Revolt of 1381 .

More entrepreneurial land owners decided to lease out their lands, rather than directly cultivate the fields through hired labour. They split their land up into blocks and leased it to the peasants on their land that were wealthy enough to pay for it, and enterprising enough to run an agricultural production business.

This was aided by Edward III breaking the cycle of serfdom to fiscally support his campaigns in France. He could raise more taxes by dealing directly with free peasants, rather than having a lord raise taxes from the peasants in his serfdom. Lords had a habit of skimming from those revenues before giving it to the king. Peasants who wanted to, were quickly converted to yeomanry by the courts.

It was not to be until the 1800s that Europe's population would return to what it had been in the 1200s. The shortage of labour in the aftermath of the first wave of the Black Death led to many of the institutions and interactions between capital, labour and entreprenueralism that are necessary in a society that supports a prosperous middle class. Much of property based common law comes from this period of English legal history. The Black Death not only made the Renaissance possible, but also the more equitible economic structure of a dominant middle class.

Pandemic-onia

The world has been hit by numerous pandemics, and it continues today with AIDs having reached pandemic status in Sub-Saharan Africa. In no case has the pandemic destroyed civilisation, or resulted in technologies being lost or forgotten. They have not destroyed civilisation despite their destructive effect on populations. This has not stopped the government and media going overboard in their claims on the current disease bogeyman ;

The Prime Minister, John Howard, said yesterday the consequences of a bird flu pandemic would be "enormous", as Australia agreed to a request from Indonesia's Health Ministry to fund the purchase of 10,000 doses of the antiviral drug Tamiflu.

In Japan, the Ministry for Agriculture said it was about halfway through the slaughter and incineration of 1.5 million chickens as it tries to contain the virus. Thirty-one poultry farms, all involved in egg production, remain under quarantine after testing positive during recent sweeps.

The virus is estimated to have infected more than 10 million birds in Indonesia.

I can recall similar hysteria from Legionaires disease, West Nile virus etc etc. It is this constant drum of the media super-fearification that led many in New Orleans to ignore the media and government calls for evacuation. Pandemics are a natural cycle of the living process, which despite being tempered by technology in their reach and effect, is also part of the human process of adapting to change and new challenges to the immune system's integrity.

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