"In 1346, Europe and its neighbours were beset by a terrible plague. In proportion to population, it may have been the most lethal catastrophe in human history. A sudden halving of the population that would not recover for centuries. It came to be called 'The Black Death' and it marked the onset of Western Europe's global expansion. This startling paradox is central to Plaguing History, offering as it does a new two-word answer to an old two-word question: Why Europe? Y. Pestis. The Black Death not only halved populations, but also doubled the average per capita endowment of everything. For the first time in history large proportions of Europe's population had a disposable income. Demand for goods - silks, sugar, spices, furs, gold - grew. So too for slaves. Europe expanded across the globe to satisfy such demands. But as well as providing the motives for expansion, plague added the means. Labour scarcity drove a turn towards more use of water-power, wind-power and gunpowder. Innumerable technologies - water-powered blast furnaces, the Atlantic sailing ship, musketry, eye-glasses - were 'pressure-cooked' into existence or improvement by the consequences of plague. If plague had this effect in Europe, why not in the Middle East too, which also suffered from the Black Death pandemic? This books answer is that it did: Ottoman and Safavid empires also flourished in the wake of plague. Morocco, Oman, and the Iran-based Mughals established colonial empires, at a distance from their metropolises, just like those of Europe. Plague-boosted European expansion was actually West Eurasian, and entangled with still other peoples, notably the Chinese, to reconfigure global history. In this book, James Belich of Oxford aims to deliver a new type of global history, one that ranges economic, ecological, bio-technological and cultural questions alongside one another to better understand the transformative connectivity of globalization"--