In parts of Eastern Europe, labor shortages after the plague led to a ‘second serfdom.’

Andrew Stuttaford collects sources arguing that the depopulation that followed the Black Death of 1348 had a silver lining:

In 1300 England’s population had been around six million. In 1350, two years after the plague had first struck it was . . . some two and a half million. . . . Black Death survivors saw a 30 per cent increase in their disposable income compared to the pre-plague years. . . . Experts now agree that real wages rose after the Black Death, at least from 1375, and stayed higher than before the plague until about 1500. . . . With a smaller workforce to manage the land, technology also had to advance, to save time and energy. Iron replaced wood: the traditional sickle was replaced by the heavy scythe, able to cut through a crop at a much faster rate. Wind and water power were harnessed using wind and water mills. [Quotations omitted.]

That’s how things worked out in England and, indeed, in much of Western Europe north of the Alps. It accelerated the development of free labor that dated back to the end of the Roman Empire, whose economy was pervasively grounded in slavery enforced by state power:

European slavery fragmented after Rome fell, as slaves cannot be held in large numbers without coercive government power. The Latin servus became “serf.” While slavery evolved into feudal serfdom elsewhere — in Eastern Europe, China, and India — Western Europe north of the Alps saw slavery and serfdom die out by the twelfth century, replaced by free peasantry. Labor scarcity after the Black Death ended the feudal order, and free labor ushered in modernity. As The Cambridge Economic History of Europe summarized, “to custom succeeded competition, to status contract.”

Things were different in Italy and Spain:

No Muslim society existed without slavery before the mid 19th century, and polities closer to Islam’s borders retained slavery well into early modern times. Slavery was still pervasive in parts of Italy during the Renaissance, and it persisted into the 17th century. The same was true in Portugal and Spain. . . . While slavery died out north of the Pyrenees, Iberia was the frontier between Christendom and Islam for centuries. In the religious wars between the eighth and 15th centuries, Muslims enslaved captured Christians, and Christians enslaved captured Muslims. Slavery was a living institution in Iberia in the 15th century, when it was already long dead in England and France.

They were also different in Eastern Europe. Andrew notes that the growing bargaining power of workers led to some instances of backlash, including efforts at wage controls and social control of workers who tried to rise above their social station. But that process was much more dramatic in places such as Russia, Prussia, Poland, and the Habsburg lands. In those areas, shortages of labor in the centuries after the Black Death (which recurred in plagues into the mid-17th century) led instead to a “second serfdom” that often resembled slavery more than it resembled Western feudal peasantry, let alone post-feudal Western contract labor. Slavery was formally ended in Russia by the 16th century, only to be dramatically reimposed later in the century in a system of serfdom that was barely distinguishable from enslavement with all its horrors. The new bondage of Russian peasants coincided with the rise of the first tsar, Ivan the Terrible (who ruled from 1547 to 1584), and was formalized in law by 1649. Economic historian Evsey Domar’s influential hypothesis drew a parallel between the 16th-century rise of Russian serfdom and the 16th- and 17th-century rise of slavery in the Western Hemisphere, arguing that these arose from a common economic cause: an unusually low cost of land accompanied by an unusual scarcity of labor with which to capitalize on that land’s value.

One half of Domar’s equation — cheap, plentiful land — was absent in the England of the 1350s. But the dramatic difference between Eastern and Western Europe also illustrates the importance of political and economic culture. Even by the 14th century, English institutions were different. It would take until the 1848 revolutions to end serfdom in the Austrian Empire and the old feudal institutions in Prussia. Only in 1861 did Russia end serfdom. The bargaining power of workers, the dignity of labor, and the impetus toward technological innovation were always more than just a matter of demographics.