>> The reality is if a black death like disease hit the modern world civilisation would likely more or less totally collapse.
Ehhh, depends what you mean by "like". The bubonic plague itself is not rare today; it is more or less expected in wild armadillos, for example. But it is not the calamitous disease to us that it was to medieval Europeans. Modern whites have seen a certain amount of selection for resistance to the plague.
> Why do believe that? It didn't collapse medieval European civilization.
On the other hand, I can't support this. The plague very much did collapse medieval European civilization; the accepted structure of society completely disintegrated. Wages for poor laborers skyrocketed. Panicked nobility passed new laws forbidding peasants from leaving the land they worked, and the peasants ignored them. The total loss of so much of the labor force meant that those who survived were much richer -- wheat fields didn't suffer from the plague! -- and radical adjustments to society followed quickly.
I was aware of those effects of the black death, but I guess I don't see it as a "collapse". Maybe I'm wrong or my definition of "collapse" is different from the one accepted by historians.
The nobility still remained the nobility for centuries afterward. The church retained most of its power for another century, until the reformation. Standards of living declined for some time but not that long. A collapse (to me) would have been rather more drastic.
Ehhh, depends what you mean by "like". The bubonic plague itself is not rare today; it is more or less expected in wild armadillos, for example. But it is not the calamitous disease to us that it was to medieval Europeans. Modern whites have seen a certain amount of selection for resistance to the plague.
> Why do believe that? It didn't collapse medieval European civilization.
On the other hand, I can't support this. The plague very much did collapse medieval European civilization; the accepted structure of society completely disintegrated. Wages for poor laborers skyrocketed. Panicked nobility passed new laws forbidding peasants from leaving the land they worked, and the peasants ignored them. The total loss of so much of the labor force meant that those who survived were much richer -- wheat fields didn't suffer from the plague! -- and radical adjustments to society followed quickly.