Caliphs and Merchants

Over the years there has been a steady stream of books that refuted Henri Pirenne’s ‘thesis’ (from 1937), which claimed that the Islamic conquests disrupted commerce in the Mediterranean, and Jean Sauvaget’s view from a study of Aleppo (1941) that Islam shifted the layout in the urban scene from ‘order to disorder’. In addition to older rebuttals from works by Maurice Lombard and David Whitehouse that argued that Islam in fact created new economic stimuli and invigorated trade, Fanny Bessard now adds the voice of archaeology. Bessard’s work is based on her own field research in the town of Jarash, and corroborates the findings of other surveys by A. Walmsley, G. Tate, K. Bartl, T. Wilkinson, which use new landscape archaeology techniques. This book represents a high-quality blend of the tools and directions in the newly transformed field of Islamic archaeology. It looks at homes, markets and craft shops rather than palace and mosque architectural plans and draws conclusions on daily economic life from tools used in shops, furnaces, pottery wheels, and production waste (such as ceramic shards). The analysis is enhanced by the use of epigraphic sources that include shopkeepers’ accounts etched on marble slabs, papyri and signatures of craftsmen on finished objects—the latter in particular suggesting a spirit of ‘pride in workmanship’ (p. 8)

Ancient history · Archaeology · Craft · Economics · Economy · Islam · Political science · Pottery · Power (physics · Pride · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Eurasian Exchange Networks · Islamic Studies and History · History · Law