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Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran: A Moment in World History. By richard w. bulliet. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. 184 pp. $35.00 (cloth); $24.50 (paper).
A brilliant social historian has taken on a highly interesting issue from medieval times and produced a fascinating study with complex theoretical frameworks, carefully appraised datasets, and majestic sweeps of insights relevant to both the past and the present. Add to that mix Richard Bulliet's elegant prose and the result is a feast for the minds and senses of readers. Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran serves as a model of how history can be approached and how historiography should be crafted.
Bulliet's study focuses on the rise of cotton production and export during the ninth and tenth centuries, a period when Islam was consolidating its following in urban centers and beginning to expand its presence in rural areas at the expense mainly of Iran's indigenous and hitherto demographically, politically, and economically dominant Zoroastrians.1 He traces the links between specialized agrarian production, wealth, urbanization, and confessional change-and how and why those events shaped not only the trajectory of medieval Muslim society but impacted the rest of the world as well. Bulliet then goes on to examine consequences of the decline in cotton production, the spread of camel-breeding as an alternative industry, and the concomitant political ascendance of Turkish nomads on the Iranian plateau. As Bulliet aptly comments (p. x), the events were a nexus of "individual human agency" and "complexities and cross-cutting pressures."
Cotton was utilized in Iran probably from the Achaemenid period (550-330 b.c.e.), when its seeds are attested archeologically, and was woven into carpets and cloth during Sasanian times (224-651). It also may have been woven into fabric used for the white undershirt or shabig (later called the sudre)-and certainly would have been cooler than wool fabric-and the holy cord or kustig worn by Zoroastrians. Authors of the Nerangestan, or Ritual Code of the magi, discussed materials for the holy cord, traditionally made of wool, extensively (chapters 67.1-69.8), including ruling that "cotton (Middle Persian: pambag) is also permissible . . . if it is entirely of complete strands" (67.6, 67.9). Likewise, they declared the holy undershirt could be made from cloth "of...