>>30203363You've got the effect right but not the cause, anon. The plague didn't devastate the upper nobility and feudal lords, it mostly just killed peasants. A lot of peasants. A LOT.
Except, they weren't peasants, they were worse. Serfs. Quasi-slaves. And they died in droves and droves and droves.
But for the ones that lived? The fact that so many of them died ended up being a positive thing for the survivors. Because they were not in an environment where feudal lords had a large concentration of capital, but no ability to actualize that capital, because the labor market they could use was actually fucking destroyed. Meaning, the value of a peasant worker rose from "worth very little, individually" to "worth a fucking ton, individually." And once that happened, well, suddenly the peasant had a hell of a lot more bargaining power, since he couldn't be easily replaced.
That's how they got freedom of movement, instead of being bound to the land. Because feudal lords started offering better pay to other peasants, and the market had to compete for them. And once people could move around more, they congregated off of large farm estates, and started congregating towards the urban environments where the highest wages could be found, and then the exchange of information that came with such a high mass of people kick-started everything. Then industrialization came, and that process hyper-charged in Europe and the USA from "late Medieval/early Colonial mercantilism" to "industrial scale mercantilism" to "industrial scale market-based economics" and now here we are, after vastly simplifying things.
