Many historians assert that the Black Death, or bubonic plague, largely helped bring about the end of the Feudal system, by killing such a vast percentage of the population.
Will AIDS in Africa see a new world order there? And if so, what is it likely to be and what impact will it have on the rest of the world?
Searches on AIDS in Africa tend to bring up more microcosmic data: eg the number of orphans, but there is little analysis (that I have managed to find) as to what this actually means. Eg: less adults=loss of education? Or, less people=more resources to go around? etc.
No because Black Death and Bubonic Plague were spread in manors people didn’t understand. That was before Pasteur and Germ Theory.
Today in Africa, the world’s 10 poorest states cohabitate in a grand bastion of sickness. The problem isn’t knowledge anymore, but governments. Remarkably, dictatorships have a wonderful record of surviving while the people perish. Such is the case in Africa, and nothing will be solved by the current stance of daily aid and continued indirect support for evil despotic regimes.
Read Tuchman’s book “A Distant Mirror”. She concludes that very little changed due exclusively to the plague. Feudalism was on the decline be for then. As people began to align themselves more and more with nationalities instead of localities. That is Normans became French or English and so forth. Remarkably she found that virtually every social structure survived each of the plague’s occurances.
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*Originally posted by elucidator *
Whaddaya wanna bet that GeeDubua thinks Barbara Tuchman is a liberal Jewish bitch with big tits who sings in Las Vegas?
But if certain African countries lose literally millions of people, won’t that cause major social change? Will there be enough workers to create food and supplies? Alternatively, will less mouths to feed mean a lessening of famine?
I just find it difficult to accept that hundreds of millions of people could die without having a massive impact and change on their culture and society.
I agree. I found it hard to understand as well. But in the 1300s something like 30% of the population of Europe died. Lots of interesting things happened. But life as we know it was going on before the plague and it did so after the plague. One of the stories I remember had to do with the marriage rate. There was a tradition in many areas that couples could not mary until they could affor a home. Before the plague this had become difficult. After the plague there were ready cleared farms waiting for occupants. The laws of supply and demand simply moved resources around to accomodate the population changes.
It seems counter intuative. I agree. But it seems to be true.
The links between AIDS and the labour force and the food supply are being studied extensively. Famine, for instance, is caused not by a shortage of food, but by not having the infrastructure to produce and deliver it. When half your population is either sick or is caring for people who are sick, supply lines run out and no one can get food.
African companies are also starting to realize the costs of having a labour force that is at such a high risk of infection: you have to keep hiring and training people to replace the ones you’ve lost.
Well, AIDS can take quite a while to kill you, and is not transmitted except by exchange of bodily fluids.
The Black Plague, on the other hand, killed you right quickly, and was transmittable through a variety of methods, although the rats got the most publicity.
See for example the work of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, who argued that famines don’t happen in democracies (note the crucial difference between famine, which has to do with the availability of food, and drought, which has to do with the ability to grow food).
sure, but it’s still a death sentence. the OP asks what the effect will be from millions of deaths in a single region - in that respect they are the same thing.
Too bad Barbara Tuchman didn’t live to write a sequel to "The March of Folly From Troy to Vietnam. She would have had much to say on the events of the intervening years between then and now!
Actually, I’m not so sure. She prefered to let history become history before she wrote about it. She put a preface in “Bible and Sword” to the effect that she did not feel comfortable updating the historical involvement of Britain with Isreal because the issue was still too close to home. That is too contraversial.
I’m not sure she would have found enough instances of documentable folly between 1984 and now. The Gulf War I would have qualified as historical in the last couple years, but I’m not sure it would have qualified as folly. Remember that to qualify a policy has to have documented evidence that the policy is counter to the acting polity’s interest. And that the acting polity had to be aware of this evidence. It’s not enough that the policy is contraversial or that it is silly. It’s not even enough that the policy was counter to self interest.
Although, after writing this, you might be able to make a case that terrorism itself is a form of folly.