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Blame the Gerbils
In The World the Plague Made James Belich has a hard case to make, and a somewhat heartless one: that the Black Death...
It’s hard to know exactly how much effect this initiative had on the growth of financial institutions throughout Europe – central banks, joint stock companies, tradeable public debt – but Belich suggests that capitalism unquestionably had its roots in post-plague northern Italy. Belich notes the creation of ‘contiguous empires’, where the acquisitions and the homelands weren’t physically separated at all: the Russian takeover of Siberia and (not usually regarded as ‘imperial’, though one has to ask why not) the American expansion across a whole continent, with an even more dramatic suppression of the Indigenous inhabitants. A factor in Holland’s successful fight for independence was the pirate fleet of ‘Sea Beggars’, said to be staunch Calvinists but with a dreadful reputation for brutality and plunder: ‘this looks more like plague-incubated crew culture than Protestant piety.’
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