False Economy - Alan Beattie [71]
Certainly the first several centuries of Islam did not suggest it was inimically opposed to economic development. While European societies were recovering from the collapse of the Roman empire and the trade routes that it had created, a succession of Islamic civilizations proved themselves to be politically, scientifically, economically, militarily, and culturally advanced.
Islam linked the two trading regions of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean and turned Arabic into the world's most important trading language. Swahili, a common tongue along much of the East African coast, combines elements of Arabic with African languages. It evolved to serve the extensive trade between the ports of the Middle East and East Africa.
The Arab empire that expanded to control the Middle East from the seventh century onward was followed by the Moorish civilization of North Africa that ruled much of Spain, hanging on in the south until the fifteenth century. After the Mongols had invaded the Middle East and then converted to Islam in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, three great Islamic empires established themselves: the Ottoman empire, which took Constantinople from the Christian Byzantine empire in 1453, renaming it Istanbul and expanding across much of Central Asia, North Africa, and the Mediterranean Middle East in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the Saffavid dynasty, based in what is now Iran, which controlled the Arabian pensinsula; and the Moghul dynasty in India. At their height, the Islamic empires were far bigger and more powerful than anything in Europe at the time.
Far from instituting a choking, monolithic theocracy, some of the most successful of these—particularly the Moors and the Ottomans— generally allowed Christianity and Judaism to flourish in their midst.
The Ottoman empire, for example, although based on an Islamic legal code, allowed Christians to be bound by their own laws in cases not involving Muslims; and Christians and Jews were specifically excluded from the classes of people who could be enslaved within the empire. The Ottoman empire also had a lively exchange in ideas as well as goods, absorbing new discoveries about geography and navigation from Europe and developing its own expertise in engineering and astronomy.
Islamic economies were successful in increasing wealth by trade, allowing each economy to specialize in what it did best. They developed a sophisticated set of financial and trading institutions, including forward markets: dates were sold at auction before they were ripe, and wholesale batches of onions, garlic, carrots, radishes, and so on were also sold before being harvested. It seems likely that Italian city-states like Venice imported forms of business contract from the Islamic world, and it's worth noting that the words "tariff," "risk," "traffic," and the French douanes ("customs") all have roots in Eastern languages.
So why did the societies of the Islamic civilization stagnate, along with the Chinese, the other serious rival to European economic dominance in the first half of the second millennium? The answer emerges from a more subtle and less fatalist analysis of the role of religion in economic history. What matters, it seems, is less the precise doctrines than the uses to which the religion itself is put, and the willingness of societies to change or reinterpret laws grounded in religious belief
Islamic economies struggled to increase productivity, or output per head of population. There was no great breakthrough in agricultural efficiency—the advance that would centuries later spur the development of Europe. Businesses and partnerships remained small. There were few examples of substantial private sectors operating genuinely independently of the state. Some did exist, including a medieval Egyptian