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The Economic History of the Medieval Middle East: Strengths, Weaknesses, and the Challenges Ahead
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 July 2012
Extract
One may say that our field has had a respectable crop of scholars engaged in research and numerous important publications to its credit. Past investigations of the agricultural sector have included excellent coverage of taxation systems and tax rates, good coverage of cultivation methods and crops, not very thorough coverage of landholding patterns, and almost no studies of productivity rates. For the manufacturing sector we have very good coverage of manufacturing techniques and good coverage of labor organization and division of labor but little on the productivity rates of individual sectors such as textiles, on apprenticeship and wages for either skilled or unskilled labor, or on the relationship of wages to prices. We have important studies on both regional and long-distance trade and commerce, including on routes and trade-related institutions and on tools of trade such as credit and investment partnerships (qirād/commenda), and related studies regarding urbanization, exchange, and markets. The auxiliary fields of numismatics and archeology have yielded important studies on coinage and minting and on settlement patterns that are likely to improve our grasp of the economic history of the medieval Middle East. We also have at our disposal volumes of statistical data, collected from literary and documentary sources, on prices, wages, commodities, weights, measures, and coins. Several online projects scrutinizing data from primary sources, mainly papyri and Geniza documents, yield more figures, though mostly on the economic history of early Islamic societies. Among the lacunae are studies related to topics such as economic institutions, property rights, standards of living and inequality, GDP estimations, sector productivity, market integration, exogenous shocks, and economic growth.
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References
NOTES
1 Because it is beyond the scope of this roundtable discussion to engage in a comprehensive bibliographical coverage of the economic history of the medieval Islamic/Middle East, I limit my comments here to general observations and reflections. Further discussion of the issues and full bibliographical details may be found in my recent paper “Economic Performance and Economic Growth in the Early Islamic World,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 54 (2011): 132–84.
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