|
|
|
REVIEWS
| The Black Death in Egypt and England: A Comparative Study. By Stuart J. Borsch (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. xii plus 195 pp. $50.00).
|
| Borsch's book probably contains a few nuggets of gold (as opposed to fool's gold). Yet the fact remains that most of the guiding hypothesis and conclusions found in it serve to confirm the correctness of the assumption mistakenly attributed to Edward Said (in his Orientalism,: 1978, misreading what Said wrote on page 204) to the effect that present-day Westerners are incapable of writing objectively about the history of Non-western lands. (In that paragraph pinpointed by Robert Irwin in The Lust for Knowing, London, Allen Lane, 2006, pp 290, 372, Said in fact clearly stated that he was writing about the situation in "the nineteenth century" pp. 203–4). Yet once brought into being, the disease virus ("Orientalism") continued to persist as one of the several forms of discourse found in academic places in the West. |
1
|
|
Writing (as an "Orientalist") in the early years of the twenty-first century, Borsch contrasts what he takes to be the entirely forward-looking and enlightened responses of the English landholding classes (no mention of the Church as holder of 20–25% of the land of England) to the demographic hemorrhages caused by the bubonic plague in and after 1348 / 49 with (2) the initiativestifling responses made by the land-holders of Egypt, the Mamluk ruling elite. Cleaving tight to the outmoded assumptions of American school-boy history that "England" had always been in the forefront of progress until it was overtaken by the USA after World War I, Borch tells us that "England's economy epitomized the most positive economic transformations that took place inWestern Europe in the wake of the plagues." [p 16] |
. . . |
There are about 561 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
