From Ada Palmer’s guest post on John Scalzi’s blog (promoting her new book):

The whole idea of dark ages and golden ages is propaganda—propaganda born in the Renaissance and applied first to the Renaissance, then multiplied out from there into other histories, and textbooks, and political propaganda, and fantasy and science fiction world building, all repeating the assumption that there are such things as golden ages, and falls, and dark ages, and rebirths, and great Cycles of History.

It’s very narratively satisfying to believe in such things, so we keep repeating them even though we have thousands of fresher histories confirming that just isn’t how history worked even in the supposed original Dark Age and Renaissance which were the source of the idea. I think it’s because I’m both a historian and a science fiction writer that I can see, when I put on both hats at once, how much the way we retell history and the way we narrate imagined otherworlds are interlinked in both simultaneously advancing claims about how historical change works, and about who has power in history.

…

The real answer to “What did the Black Death do to the economy?” is that it was totally different in different places depending on local actions and local policy. Some places did see the fabled increase in wages and empowerment of the working classes due to labor shortage. Other places saw oligarchs entrench and pass new laws restricting labor freedom and creating the first debtors’ prisons.

…

[A]s a historian, [I] see history actually working, not as big inhuman forces that grind on, but through exclusively human forces: the tiny decisions made by innumerable people whose efforts interact, resonate, magnify, flow, and cascade, changing the world in a messy, zoomed-in, and infinitely plural way, in which lots and lots of people try to change the world and none of them get exactly the world they wanted, but all of them contribute to changing the world in bigger, newer, weirder, stranger ways than they ever imagined.