A “Global” History of the Black Death: New Narratives for the Islamicate World, Monica Green
Abstract:
In February 2021, I presented to this group a talk, “Bringing Dols and Conrad into the Genomic Age,” which laid out how and why work from genetics (both paleo- and phylo-) was transforming what could be known about the geographic and even temporal scope of the late medieval plague pandemic we have come to know as the Black Death. My argument was that this expanded definition of the 2nd Plague Pandemic made the Islamicate world central to the whole larger phenomenon. Thus, approaching the question from a “global” perspective that spanned political regimes and even linguistic and cultural borders was essential.
I am now completing my book, The Black Death: A Global History, and wish to return to the question of the centrality of the Islamicate world in how narratives about the pandemic should be framed, not only for research purposes but also (and even especially) for teaching, whether in the context of Islamic Studies or in general historical surveys. The COVID Pandemic has made very clear the need for “pandemic thinking”: conceiving of pandemics in ways that go beyond accretions of stories from sometimes random documentary accounts to multidisciplinary syntheses that attempt to explain how all the elements that go into creating pandemics—microbial, ecological, climatic, and of course human—fit together to move a disease across vast distances, landscapes, and cultural settings. In other words, this work needs to be scalar and it needs to be global.
For this talk, I will focus on three elements: 1) the importance of recognizing the uninterrupted cultural history of plague in the Islamicate world, from its 7th-century origins on; 2) the new ways in which the Mongol Empire fits into the story of the Black Death; and 3) the ways in which historiographical accretions in both the Islamicate world and Christian Europe, starting in the 14th century, have occluded key insights that now need to be peeled away in order to recognize the pandemic in all its magnitude. I will conclude with some desiderata for future work.