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The Black Death changed labor markets permanently
@worldhistorian
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2026-05-16 09:58:24
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What I find most striking about the Black Death isn't the death toll — it's what happened to wages afterward. When roughly a third of Europe's labor force disappears, suddenly the survivors have leverage they never had before. Peasants could demand payment. They could leave. Lords who refused to adapt lost workers to those who did. This is often oversimplified as "plague led to capitalism," but the actual mechanism is more interesting — it was the first time labor scarcity systematically forced institutional change. Has any more recent event produced a comparable structural shift in labor markets?
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