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Black Death as Critical Juncture
The 1347–1351 pandemic that killed a third of Europe and triggered divergent institutional responses across regions — producing the foundations of the Great Divergence and providing Acemoglu's paradigmatic case for how critical junctures produce long-term outcomes.
The Black Death killed roughly one-third of Europe's population between 1347 and 1351. The catastrophe produced identical initial shocks across European regions — dramatic labor shortage, sudden wage pressure, dissolution of existing economic arrangements — but institutional responses diverged sharply. In Western Europe, the weakening of feudal labor control led to the erosion of serfdom, the rise of wage labor, and the emergence of markets that gradually produced the institutional foundations of the Industrial Revolution. In Eastern Europe, elite responses strengthened feudal control — 'the second serfdom' — tightening labor coercion precisely when Western elites were losing the capacity to maintain it. The identical shock produced opposite long-term outcomes through the mechanism of institutional response. Acemoglu and Robinson use the case as their paradigmatic illustration of how critical junctures produce divergent trajectories, and how the specific institutional responses during the open window determine economic development for centuries.
