Islam, the Mediterranean and the Rise of Capitalism
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The Arab trade empireConcepts of profit, capital, and the accumulation of capital are all found in the Arabic sources of the 9th to 14th centuries. For example, Shāfi‘ī (d. 820) defines the function of partnership as the ‘expansion of capital’ (namā’ al-māl).lviii Al-māl was primarily capital not money, and whenever it is translated as ‘money’ it means capital in money-form or money-capital. Again, discussing the discretion allowed to agents under commenda agreements, Sarakhsī (d 1090) writes, ‘the investor’s aim in handing over the capital to him [the agent] is the achievement of profit’.lix In another passage where he defends the usefulness of such contracts, Sarakhsī says the contract is allowed ‘Because people have a need for this contract. For the owner of capital may not find his way to profitable trading activity, and the person who can find his way to such activity may not have the capital. And profit cannot be attained except by means of both of these, capital and trading activity’.lx A later writer Kāsānī (d. 1191) distinguishes the ‘creation of capital’ from its further expansion, arguing ‘The need for the creation of capital takes precedence over the need for its augmentation’lxi and defining partnerships as a ‘method for augmenting or creating capital’ (ṭarīq namā’al-māl aw taḥṣīlihi).lxii That this vocabulary was part of the wider cultural world of Islam and not confined to the legal schools is shown by other writings. Thus the tenth-century geographer al-Iṣṭakhrī describes the traders of Fars in southern Persia as having a ‘passion for the accumulation of capital’ (maḥabbat jam‘a al-māl).lxiii In the Kitāb al-ishāra ilā maḥāsin al-tijāra, ‘Handbook on the beauties of commerce’, a manual on trade probably written in the 11th century, the author refers repeatedly to the capitalist as ṣāḥib al-māl (liy. ‘owner of capital’).lxiv It is clear from this manual that merchants involved in international trade normally relied on commenda agreements and that the muqāraḍ or factor usually received a share of the profit (ribḥ̣).lxv Finally, in Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1405), there is even a clear resonance of the labour theory of value (or a labour theory of value). In the Muqaddimah, vol. 2, he states clearly that ‘labor is the cause of profit’ (sabab al-kasb). ‘[H]uman labor is necessary for every profit and capital accumulation’, while gold and silver are the only socially acceptable measures of value ‘for all capital accumulations’.lxvi He also defines profit (ribḥ) as the ‘extent by which capital increases’ (or is increased), and commerce as the ‘striving for profit by means of the expansion of capital’ (muḥāwala ilā al-kasb bi-tanmiyat al-māl).lxvii The Arabs inherited the intensely urban and – by the seventh century – very largely monetised territories of late antiquity, Roman and Sasanian, and integrated them into a powerful and strikingly cosmopolitan civilisation whose economic resources and stability were unrivalled, except for those of China.lxviii Whatever the initial impetus behind the conquests, there is little doubt that further expansion was largely motivated by financial and commercial considerations. Al-Balādhuri reports that the conquest of Sind in 711 brought the Arabs a net profit of 60 million dirhams by the reckoning the Umayyad governor al-Ḥajjāj is supposed to have made.lxix Sind was also commercially strategic, a major entrepôt in the Far Eastern trade, which the Sasanians had traditionally dominated. The early eighth-century expansion to the east was like a pincer movement, driving northwards to the wealthy oases beyond Khurāsān and south to control of the Indian Ocean.lxx That the Arabs were seeking to dominate existing networks of trade, as the Portuguese would do centuries later, is proved by al-Ṭabarī’s fascinating reference to ‘ships from China’ frequenting the harbour of al-Ubulla in 633, on the eve of the conquest of southern Iraq.lxxi Trade with the Far East was conceivably the most lucrative sector of accumulation in the 8th to 10th centuries, generating the kind of wealth that was famously associated with Gulf ports like Baṣra and Sīrāf. In the west, the corresponding movement was Islam’s commercial expansion across the Sahara, to the sources of gold in the western Sudan. This happened in the 8th century, when the Arabs broke the Berber monopoly of the trans-Saharan routes and sparked a long period of unbroken prosperity for the towns of Morocco. Ya‘qūbī’s geography, completed in 891, describes Fez as a ‘splendid city and immensely prosperous’.lxxii Sidjilmasa, according to Ibn Ḥauqal, who went there in 951, enjoyed ‘uninterrupted trade with the Sudan’ which brought in ‘huge profits’ (arbāḥ mutawāffiratun).lxxiii At Audoghast he saw a letter of credit (ṣakk), a private transaction, to the tune of 42,000 dinars, something he had never seen in the east. It is hardly surprising that the major dynasties that ruled this sector of North Africa in the 11th to 13th centuries sprang from the Islamised Berber populations of southern Morocco, and that Tlemsen, Fez, and Aghmāt were described (by the Spanish geographer al-Idrīsī) as the wealthiest cities of the Maghreb.lxxiv Indeed, ‘North Africa with its supply of gold …became the driving force of the entire Mediterranean’ in the 14th and 15th centuries,lxxv showing us how unconvincing it is to look at the growth of capitalism in Europe without the significant ways in which this powerful commercial background shaped its evolution. The Muslims created a vigorous monetary economy based on expanding levels of circulation of a stable high-value coinage (the dinar) and the renewed integration of monetary areas that had been distinct and indifferent to each other.lxxvi This was an enormous achievement, both for the kind of economy it allowed for (the sheer extent of the monetary sector) and for its role in enabling Europe to ‘return’ to gold.lxxvii However we characterise that economy, it was certainly not just some loose ensemble of feudal regimes. Trade was fundamental to its structure. The growth of cities and expanding urban markets, the diffusion of new cropslxxviii and explosive growth of cash cropping (rice, flax, hemp, sugarcane, raw silk, indigo, cotton)lxxix are all general indications of the remarkable commercial vitality of the 8th to 11th centuries. We know little about the ‘market systems’ that sustained this huge expansion on the groundlxxx but the tenth-century geographers refer repeatedly to substantial concentrations of capital in the port towns and numerous inland centres that acted as entrepôts or wholesale markets at the intersection of converging trade routes. Towns like Siraf, Nishapur and Narmāsīrlxxxi in Iran, Baikand near Bukhara,lxxxii Daybul in Sind, Mahdia (al-Mahdiyya) in the Sahel, and Cordoba, Almeria and Ceuta in the western Mediterranean were all consistently described in these terms by the geographers. For example, Ibn Ḥauqal’s description of Nishapur refers to the huge market complexes called 'fonduks' (Ar. funduq, Italian fondaco) which were ‘occupied by wealthy merchants specialising in a single branch of commerce, with huge quantities of commodities and large capitals’ ( ).lxxxiii The cloth merchants (bazzāzīn) were especially active here, as Nishapur was a manufacturing centre exporting silk and cotton fabrics as far away as Europe. Sīrāf with its densely packed multi-storied teak houses was a purely commercial site, the ‘point of access to China, after ‘Omān’, in al-Muqaddasi’s description. ‘I have not seen in the realm of Islam more remarkable buildings or more handsome; they are built of teakwood and baked brick. They are towering houses, and a single house is bought for more than 100,000 dirhams’.lxxxiv According to al-Iṣṭ̣̣akhrī, the merchants of Siraf spent lavishly on their homes, over 30,000 dinars in some cases. ‘In my time, one of them acquired assets worth 4,000,000 dinars, yet his clothes were scarcely distinguishable from those of a labourer (ajīr)’.lxxxv Daybul, too, on the barren coast of Sind just west of the Indus was consistently described as a ‘place of merchants’.lxxxvi Al-Muqaddasi, who visited Sind some time before 985, writes, ‘Daybul is on the sea…The water beats against the walls of the town. It has an entirely merchant population, speaking both Sindī and Arabic. It is the port of the area, giving rise to a considerable income’.lxxxvii In the Mediterranean, the late tenth-century Persian geographer of the Hudūd al-‘Ālam described Cairo as the ‘wealthiest city in the world, extremely prosperous’.lxxxviii The records of the Cairo Geniza show that in that century and the following much of Cairo’s commercial life was controlled by merchant houses, like that of Ibn ‘Awkal, working through a network of agents spread across the Mediterranean. Ibn ‘Awkal’s firm exported large quantities of flax to Mahdia in the Sahel.lxxxix This was both a flourishing international port and a textile centre, and in the 12th century al-Idrīsī refers to its ‘wealthy and generous-minded merchants’.xc Even further west, Almeria with its ‘bustling shipyards, vessels, and silklooms’xci was described by al-Idrīsī as unmatched, in Spain at least, for the ‘wealth, industriousness and commercial inclinations of its people’, and said to include 970 hostels for merchants from all parts of the world.xcii Finally, scales of business: these were huge. Ships which entered the Gulf ports laden with goods from China could contain cargoes worth 500,000 dinars!xciii Ibn Ḥauqal notes that Kābul was a major wholesale market for indigo, and tells us, ‘On y met en vente de l’indigo, et, sur ce chapitre le chiffre d’affaires annuel se monte à plus de deux millions de dinars, selon le témoignage des négociants, pour le produit seul de la capitale et de la campagne environnante, en négligeant les dépôts des marchands’.xciv Again, in the second half of the eleventh century Alexandria was exporting well over 5000-6000 tons of raw flax to markets in the Mediterranean.xcv Thus Islam made a powerful contribution to the growth of capitalism in the Mediterranean, in part because it preserved and expanded the monetary economy of late antiquity and innovated business techniques that became the staple of Mediterranean commerce (in particular, partnerships and commenda agreements), and also because the seaports of the Muslim world became a rich source of the plundered money-capital which largely financed the growth of maritime capitalism in Europe. Indeed, Mandel stated this with unabashed bluntness when he wrote: ‘The accumulation of money capital by the Italian merchants who dominated European economic life from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries originated directly from the Crusades, an enormous plundering enterprise if ever there was one’.xcvi Directory: sites -> default -> files -> docs docs -> Chicago Sports Teams a report by D. Rose November 12, 2015 docs -> Resilience Way, Lower Estate, St. Michael Tel: (246) 434-4880 Fax: (246) 271-3660 docs -> Resilience Way, Lower Estate, St. Michael Tel: (246) 434-4880 Fax: (246) 271-3660 Email docs -> Mwezi Tumia eneo hili kwa maneno yanayohusiana na mwezi docs -> Industry Initiatives on Mobile Devices Report docs -> Accreditation August, 2013 Report History docs -> Version including comments docs -> January 2012 Version 1 08 Fall docs -> External Testing) (September 12, 2013) Download 124.33 Kb. Share with your friends:
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