Twilight of the Clerical and Landowning Elite, Rise of Tuǧǧār

This chapter seeks to reopen the debate on the social identity and culture of the trading community from the late Umayyads to 950. It discusses how certain traders became tuǧǧār, and the mechanisms by which these came to constitute collectives of individuals, sharing identities and practices. It further explores the confrontation and collaboration between these enriched entrepreneurs and the aristocracy, as well as the translation of the growing political awareness of this community into practical action. The chapter argues that tuǧǧār became great supporters of the ‘Abbāsid caliphs from 800, and they were more actively involved in the administration of the Empire than Goitein proposes.

Islamifying the Economy

Until the late seventh century, there was a definite continuity in the system of regulation and administration of urban economic life; the monitoring of transactions and the control of prices, weights, and measures being carried out by rabbis and Christian priests. By contrast, from the early eighth and ninth centuries, the evolving status of trade and craft in Near Eastern cities and the conscious Islamification of daily life encouraged changes to the established practices. This chapter discusses the mechanisms by which Islamic religious norms came to govern general economic behaviour. It looks at the increasing influence of Islamic worship, religious institutions, and authority in the regulation and administration of trade, retail, and crafts from 700 to 950, in the context of the Islamification of daily life, and its economic significance.

Conclusion to Part II

From 700, the early Islamic economy remained strongly aligned with its late antique heritage, which brought a definite rupture between the Near East and Europe. Robin Fleming shows that Britain’s towns fell into total decay after the departure of the Roman legions.1 The prominence of the urban marketplace in the Near East in the early Middle Ages certainly contrasted with Carolingian Europe in that the European systems of exchange mostly took place in the form of weekly rural markets....

Reshaping Marketplaces

Early Islamic marketplaces have been studied almost exclusively for their art historical and architectural values, by Maxime Rodinson in the preface of El señor del zoco en España, while their functioning and process of development have not yet been fully elucidated. It is also believed that marketplaces in early Islam functioned as their late antique predecessors, with apparently nothing bequeathed from pre-Islamic Arabia, where dedicated spaces for trade were extremely rare. This chapter considers what happened to urban marketplaces in the Near East after the Muslim conquests, to look at the fate of the late antique legacy under the new Arab masters—a people with contrasting indigenous commercial traditions—in the context of new power dynamics from 700 to 950. It explores the ways in which early medieval marketplaces differed from the late antique past, and the role they played in the agrarian society of early Islam.

Artisans to Producers

This chapter considers the physical change of the workspace chronologically, geographically, and by industry. From the case studies of pottery, glass, and textile making, as well as food processing, it discusses the standardization of the Roman practice, as seen at Timgad in North Africa, of zoning and conglomerating crafts in early Islam across the Near East and Central Asia. While acknowledging this continuity with the past, it examines the novelty and significance of manufacturing after 800, when ‘post-Roman’ ceased to be a meaningful description of Near Eastern economy, and questions whether urban crafts experienced differentiated or similar forms of development.

Conclusion to Part I

In certain respects, the development of urban retailing and crafts in the Near East from 700 to 950 was a natural response to the Muslim conquests, which joined up the late Roman and Persian trading zones. Still, it was not a self-generated process. Archaeological and textual sources reveal the prominent role that Muslim imperial authority played in the patronage of urban market and production spaces, possibly from as early as the late seventh century. While literary testimonies unanimously depict ‘Abbāsid sovereigns as more coercive in provincial life and the patronage of urban economy to support imperial propaganda, we can extrapolate from earlier accounts orally transmitted that caliphs and governors pursued an active investment policy as early as the rule of ‘Abd al-Malik in the late seventh and early eighth centuries....

Conclusion

The conclusion summarizes the findings of the volume as a whole. Recent scholarship has been preoccupied with tracing continuities. Rather than putting the emphasis on late Roman and Iranian inheritances, this book has argued that the institutional innovation undertaken by early Muslim caliphs from 700 resulted in the urban economic successes, which recent archaeological endeavours have unveiled. Rather than viewing the early Islamic economy as the almost serendipitous upshot of the political integration of the Near East, this book locates the engine of economic change squarely within the early Islamic political elite, whose commercial practices, subjectivities, and theories brought about a thoroughgoing restructuring of trade and production, with a clear rupture with tradition occurring after 800.

The Historical Context

The seventh to the eighth centuries witnessed the initially rapid Arab-Muslim conquests of the Near East and their subsequent slow expansion in North Africa, Spain, and Central Asia, leading to the rise of a unified Islamic caliphate from 661 to the early tenth century. Chapter 1 seeks to define the material and sociopolitical context of the early Islamic history of the Near East, which determined the development of urban economic life between 700 and 950 CE. While differing conditions of conquests in the Near East and Central Asia, respectively peaceful subjugation and brutal expansion, laid the foundation of region-specific economic practices, the assertion of caliphal authority as well as the development of agriculture and trade sowed the seeds of economic growth.

Introduction

This volume offers fresh perspectives on the origins of the economic success of the early Islamic caliphate, identifying a number of previously unnoticed or underplayed yet crucial developments, such as the changing conditions of labour, attitudes towards professional associations, and the interplay between the state, Islamic religious institutions, and the economy. Caliphs and Merchants: Cities and Economies of Power in the Near East (700–950) combines detailed analysis of a large corpus of literary sources in Arabic with presentation of new physical and epigraphic evidence. The introduction provides an overview of the history of scholarship in the field and lays out the structure and argumentation of the following chapters.

Money Supply and Currency

In the Middle Ages, Arab-Muslims inherited the massive coin stocks struck by Byzantium and Iran to support their war efforts in the sixth and early seventh centuries. Up to the late seventh century, solidi and drachms continued to circulate, Arab-Muslims making use of the available stocks. The situation changed from the reign of ‘Abd al-Malik (685–705) and the second fitna. With the rise of the ‘counter-caliph’ Ibn al-Zubayr, ‘Abd al-Malik felt the need to assert the Umayyad’s imperial authority to keep the unity of the umma. His famous reform of coinage was used to impose the Umayyads’ ideology through the use of new Islamic currencies. This chapter examines how Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik’s monetary reforms in the late seventh century played a fundamental role in triggering exchange and increasing the velocity of money circulation. It also explores how, in the late eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, influxes of precious metal from the release of antique treasuries, the intensified exploitation of existing mines, and the discovery of ore veins and deposits in the Near East, Central Asia, and Africa, helped to sustain a developing culture of consumption.