Content area
Full Text
IN 1974, Andrew Watson published an influential article titled "The Arab Agricultural Revolution" in which he argued that Muslim agriculturalists transformed Mediterranean farming beginning shortly after the seventh-century conquests of most of the Middle East and North Africa. Watson elaborated his claims in another article, "A Medieval Green Revolution" (1981), and in a monograph, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700 -1100.1 In these works, Watson proposed a medieval "Green Revolution" that entailed the spread of intensive methods of farming and irrigation technology and a rise in crop yields because of these farming techniques. Accompanied by a demographic upswing, intensive farming methods elevated labor requirements and yielded higher crop surpluses. In turn the abundance of food supported the larger and more numerous cities of the Muslim world.2
In support of his thesis, Watson charted the advance of seventeen food crops and one fiber crop that became important over a large area of the Mediterranean world during the first four centuries of Islamic rule (roughly the seventh through eleventh centuries c.e.). Among these flora we find familiar items whose impact on our diets today is self-evident: Asiatic rice, sugar cane, banana and plantain, lemon, lime, hard (durum) wheat, and sorghum. Others are of less importance but familiar and significant: watermelon, eggplant, spinach, artichoke, colocasia, sour orange, shaddock, mango, and coconut palm. Eventually, during the European colonization of the New World, a number of the crops of the Green Revolution became major components of the Columbian Exchange and thence passed into global agriculture and industry. Chief among the crops are ubiquitous and fundamental New World planter crops: sugar cane, banana, and rice.3
Following the mid seventh-century collapse of Byzantine authority in the eastern Mediterranean and the demise of Sasanian Persia, the Muslim caliphate unified under a single authority for the first time lands from Afghanistan to Spain, an unprecedented and unduplicated success. The colossal embrace of the Islamic polity meant that east and west were connected as never before. This unity facilitated communication and trade and created an atmosphere that encouraged the spread of knowledge and goods. Further, the Arabs' own familiarity with farming in arid regions meant that they were both experienced in developing marginal lands and interested...