© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi �0.��63/�5685�09-��34�349

Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 57 (�0�4) �6�-�89

brill.com/jesh

Factor Markets in Early Islamic Iraq, c. 600-1100 AD

Bas van BavelUtrecht University

b.j.p.vanbavel@uu.nl

Michele CampopianoUniversity of York

michele.campopiano@york.ac.uk

Jessica DijkmanUtrecht University

j.dijkman@uu.nl

Abstract

This paper reconstructs the organization and development of factor markets in early medieval Iraq. It shows that from the late Sasanian period on, and accelerating in the early Islamic period, there was a relatively unrestricted functioning of markets for goods, labour, and capital. This stimulated market exchange, associated with growing monetization of the economy, especially in the towns, but also in the countryside, even though coercion remained more pronounced there. We hypothesize that these developments brought economic dynamism but simultaneously increased inequality and furthered the rise of new, powerful elite groups, causing the decline of the same markets.

Keywords

Factor markets – exchange of land, labour, and capital – early Islamic Iraq – early Middle Ages – Abbasid period

* For their comments on an earlier draft of this paper, we would like to thank Maaike van Berkel (UVA, Amsterdam) and Michael Morony (UCLA), and the anonymous referees whose serious comments have stimulated us to revise this paper.

263factor markets in early islamic iraq, c. 600-1100 ad

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

1 Introduction

This paper investigates the development of factor markets in one of the major, pre-industrial examples of market economies in western Eurasia—Iraq in the early Middle Ages. We aim to offer a coherent, long-term overview of these markets, which has been missing up to now, while we will refrain from trying to extract new information from the primary sources. To be sure, these sources are available and could be mined for additional information. Even though doc-umentary evidence for early medieval Iraq, as provided by the clay tablets of preceding periods, is almost entirely lacking and fiscal sources and accounts are near absent, many legal treatises, handbooks, geographical descriptions, chronicles, and narratives from this era have been preserved. These sources hold only scattered information on prices, wages, interest rates, and trade vol-umes, which makes it difficult to reconstruct accurately fluctuations of wages or land prices, to assess the integration of markets, or to estimate the share of land, labour, and capital transacted through the market. They do, however, contain a wealth of qualitative information on the organization and function-ing of factor markets.

We hope that the coming years will see a systematic examination of these sources, but before embarking on such a course of research, it is important that we establish a firm foothold by combining the findings of previous scholarship into a coherent overview and formulating an hypothesis on the role of factor markets in early medieval Iraq.1 In keeping with the purpose of this special issue of JESHO we bring together information from several secondary studies—most of which discuss factor markets only marginally, approach them from a specific angle, or focus on one aspect of a single factor market only—in order to integrate them into an overview. At the end of our contribu-tion we venture a hypothesis on the interaction between the development of factor markets and social and political relations in early medieval Iraq, which, we hope, may serve as a point of departure for more systematic research based on primary source material.

There are compelling reasons to study factor markets in early medieval Iraq, as this region possessed a highly dynamic economy, in which the allocation and exchange of land, labour, and capital was, to a great extent, organized through the market. In the eighth and ninth centuries, Iraq was probably the economically most advanced area of western Eurasia. This is testified, for instance, by the high urbanization rate in Iraq, which reflects the power of the

1 For factor markets more generally and their role in economic and social development, see the introduction to this volume.

264 van Bavel et al.

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

society to generate agrarian surpluses. Although the population of the coun-tryside can be only roughly estimated, it is clear that urbanization was sub-stantial. Recent research suggests that, around the year 800, up to a quarter of the population may have lived in towns.2 This period was also a high point of culture, in architecture and scientific scholarship, with Baghdad perhaps able to claim the title of intellectual capital of the world, which again points to the ample availability of surpluses. This florescence was partly a result of the flows of tribute to the caliph—tribute that also came from other parts of the Abbasid empire—but Iraq also experienced endogenous development. The latter can be inferred from various indicators of economic development, such as the advanced technology employed in agriculture, industries, and hydraulic engi-neering, the high level of occupational specialization, and the importance of non-agricultural activities (Watson 1983: 101-111, 123-128; al-Hassan and Hill 1986: 82-84; Shatzmiller 1994: 169-72). The early Middle Ages were also a period of increasing market exchange. Markets for goods had always been important here but became more important, concomitantly with the high levels of urban-ization and specialization, in both agriculture and industries and trade. In line with the focus of this volume, however, we will leave commodity markets aside and limit ourselves to the markets for land, labour, and capital, which were equally thriving in this period, as will be argued in this article.

In part, developments in early medieval Iraq built on those that had begun in the late Sasanian period. As argued by Rezakhani and Morony in their con-tribution to this issue of JESHO, archaeological research in particular indicates that Iraq at that time was prosperous, with large-scale irrigation works and the extension of agricultural land almost as far as physically possible. Written sources clearly demonstrate the presence of markets for land, labour, and capi-tal, and a growing supply of money in the sixth century, with many Sasanian coins remaining in use up to the ninth century, long after the Islamic conquest. The relevant developments thus show many continuities, so our discussion of the early medieval period begins in the late Sasanian period.

2 Land Tenure and Land Sales

Fiscality and the Role of the StateIn early medieval Iraq the state always had a major stake in landed property, in the sense that it could claim much of the revenues of the land through

2 Estimates by Eltjo Buringh of Utrecht University, based on Buringh’s dataset of urban devel-opment in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East between 800 and 1800.

265factor markets in early islamic iraq, c. 600-1100 ad

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

substantial taxes. The late Sasanian period had laid the foundation of the sys-tem of land-tax extraction that was used after the Arab conquest. The admin-istrative reforms accomplished under Khusraw I (531-579), which specifically pertained to the Sawād of Iraq, the fertile area of the river plains, changed the land tax from a portion of the crop to a fixed amount per unit of area. This tax rate varied according to the crops being grown: for example, tax rates for wheat fields differed from rates for vineyards (Rubin 1995: 227-297; Frye 1984: 324-325). The role of the state in tax collection also became more important: state officers were made responsible for land administration and, at the district level, for the collection of taxes and their remittance to the royal treasury (Campopiano 2011: 244-245). Another consequence of Khusraw’s policies was that landholding was increasingly seen as a simple grant from the sovereign, perhaps implying that the state was now able to reclaim the land grant upon the death of the grantee (Gariboldi 2007: 37-38; Vahrāman 1997: 188-189). This evolution changed the balance of power within the empire and influenced pat-terns of landholding and land administration in Sasanian society, as can be seen most conspicuously in the rise of the dihqān described by Rezakhani and Morony, or dahāqīn, as they are called in later Arabic sources: the petty noble landowners, who also acted as tax collectors, constituted the rural elite and became the backbone of the Persian military and fiscal organization (Campopiano 2011: 247; Daryaee 2009: 147-148; Rezhakani and Morony, in this issue of JESHO).

Land-tax assessment in Iraq after the conquest seems to have followed the outline of Sasanian surplus collection, even though there were changes in ter-minology, and a distinction was now made between Muslim-owned land and that owned by non-Muslims. The main land tax was called kharāj: the tax, imposed on the land of conquered populations who had not accepted Islam before the conquest and had not signed a special agreement (ṣulḥ), was levied on most of the conquered areas. Tax assessment on kharāj land mainly fol-lowed a system called ʿ alā l-misāḥa: from a fixed portion of land a fixed amount of money and/or crops was collected. Tax remissions may have been allowed in cases of poor harvest (Daryaee 2009: 148; Campopiano 2011; Morony 1984: 100). Another, less onerous tax assessment was the tithe (ʿushr), which was assessed on the land of believers (Muslims). Farmers residing on state lands were appar-ently bound to pay taxes proportionate to their yields, as in the Sasanian period (Campopiano 2012 and forthcoming (a); Morony 1984: 100). The Arabs confis-cated the Sasanian crown lands but left the dahāqīn mostly in the possession of the village estates that formed the basic taxation units; their knowledge of existing taxation practices was valuable to the conquerors (Campopiano 2011: 251). In theory, the differentiation of tax regimes could have led to a reduced

266 van Bavel et al.

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

transferability of land: it was not in the interest of the state to allow the transi-tion of land from a heavy to a lighter tax regime. We are indeed informed of attempts to enforce the rule that kharāj land should not be sold to Muslims, both under ʿ Umar Ibn al-Khaṭṭāb (634-644) and under the last of the Umayyads (Morony 1981: 139-40, 155; Lambton 1969: 22-3; Haque 1977: 216-8). That such policies were deemed necessary suggests, however, that land transfers from non-Muslims to Muslims were common. Similar concerns for loss of tax reve-nue seem to explain the argument made by Muslim jurists who claimed that the status of kharāj land should be independent of the religious belief of the owner. Abū Yūsuf, for instance, wrote that no one had the right to turn kharāj land into ʿushr land (Abū Yūsuf 1969: 3). This argument concerned, in part, the conversion of existing landlords to Islam, but it also referred to the sales of land by unbelievers to an emerging Muslim elite—market transactions that, as will be discussed in more detail below, contributed to a concentration of landed property in the hands of that Muslim elite from at least the early eighth century onwards (Campopiano 2011: 253-254).

Land SalesThe strong presence of central authority in the process of surplus extraction in no way meant that landed estates could not be sold or exchanged (Morony 1988: 135-47; Schmucker 1972). On the contrary, apart from the share of the state, property rights to land were clear. As Rezakhani and Morony demon-strate in this issue of JESHO, land in Iraq in the Sasanian period was regularly bought, sold, leased, and mortgaged and the sale of land usually recorded in writing. After the Muslim conquest, registered contracts of land sales were also common, although perhaps not compulsory, and land sales became even eas-ier than before. The Muslims had a clear concept of private property (milk), which had been well established in Arabia (Løkkegaard 1978: 32). Also, ideas that developed in the legal schools, such as the important Ḥanafī school, helped transform land into a commodity, while the payment of a land tax was considered clear proof of private property, which, in its turn, allowed for easy transaction (Johansen 1988: 11-2; cf. Morony 1981: 139; Banaji 2009: 79-82). Landowners held their holdings in private ownership, at least in the case of arable land. Only grazing grounds and springs were held in common, to be used by the Bedouins and other tribes or clans for grazing and watering their cattle. Some villages or towns also had commons (ḥimās), consisting of mead-ows and bogs or fens situated near the village, which supplied grazing, water, and firewood and were probably used more or less collectively (Løkkegaard 1978: 20-24, 36-37). In addition, some state land existed, the crown domains, most of which had already belonged to the crown in Sasanian times. The rest

267factor markets in early islamic iraq, c. 600-1100 ad

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

of the arable land in Iraq—by far the most—was held privately and was bought and sold between private parties.

Besides the land held and exchanged by peasants and petty noblemen, land was also acquired by the new Arab Muslim elites, in part through sale. The sell-ers were, at least in some cases, dahāqīn, whose property rights to the land seem to have been strengthened by the new legal regime. For example, Yaḥyā Ibn Ādam reports that a dihqān approached ʿAbd Allāh Ibn Masʿūd, a Companion of the Prophet, asking him to buy his land. The Arab accepted, provided that the old landlord would continue to pay kharāj on it (Yaḥyā Ibn Ādam 1967: 49). Wealthy Arabs were increasingly converting the booty they had acquired from the conquests and their monetary pensions into landown-ership. Smaller holdings and individual plots of a hectare or so were also bought and sold. Law books from the eighth century discuss extensively the widespread purchasing of land by Christians and, especially, by Muslims (Yaḥyā Ibn Ādam: 27, 28, 30, 33, 47-50).

These land acquisitions, as well as land grants to caliphal relatives, friends, and supporters, gradually resulted in the rise of an elite of big landholding families from the Sawād, who also acted as tax farmers, government officials, bankers, and merchant-entrepreneurs. It was the combination of these func-tions and activities that allowed this elite increasingly to dominate both com-modity and factor markets. The cultivation of market-oriented crops, such as cotton and sugar cane, on the estates of these landowners could easily be com-plemented by industrial processing or by wholesale trade in these commodi-ties, sometimes combined with tax farming or high-ranking positions in the state administration. A good example is ʿAlī b. Aḥmad al-Rāsibī (d. 913/914), who allegedly owned eighty textile workshops in southeastern Iraq and adja-cent Khuzistan; in this same region he was also a tax farmer and a provincial governor (ben Abdallah 1986: 74; Serjeant 1943: 73). Owners of large estates and industrial entrepreneurs such as al-Rāsibī benefited from the presence of a labour market giving them access to a flexible labour force (discussed below). They also profited from the presence—at least for wholesale trade—of free and dynamic commodity markets. In the early tenth century, tax farmers, estate owners, and high officials were, for instance, able to monopolize the grain trade, storing wheat collected in kind and selling it at high prices on the urban market (ben Abdallah 1986: 141-144).

Likewise, these elites could use the land market in accumulating land. Some of the sales in this market were small-scale, as exemplified by the story, from Basra in the first half of the ninth century, about a modest pedlar who sold pepper and vegetables but was able to save some money and thus buy a piece of arable land of one hundred jarīb (sixteen hectares) (al-Jāḥiẓ 1951: 44). The

268 van Bavel et al.

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

emphasis is on the thrift of this pedlar, but there is nothing unusual about his land purchase, showing how general this practice was. Besides these small-scale transactions, larger landholdings also changed hands and seem to have been accumulated by the new Muslim elites. Property lists are not available, but anecdotal evidence gives some idea of the properties—consisting of rural estates, real estate in the towns, and hard cash—built up by these elites. The supreme judge Aḥmad Ibn Abī Duʾād in the mid-ninth century, for instance, possessed more than one million dinars in property, mainly landed estates (Sabari 1981: 35, 37, with other examples). Sometimes, large rural properties entered the market, as in 862. The new caliph first “bought” the properties of two rival pretenders, worth more than ten million dinars, in a process that was more of a disguised confiscation, and, in the following months, had these prop-erties sold in the market (Forstner 1968: 23-24).

In this process, the presence of smallholders was declining. In the Umayyad period there were still peasant freeholders, but land became increasingly con-centrated in the hands of Muslim elites. From the second half of the tenth century, large landownership increased even further, and even more large estates were built up. Conversely, the last remaining small-scale property and smallholding peasantry now disappeared, a development enabled by the free-dom to buy and sell land (Johansen 1988: 81). Buying land was considered the safest investment. Ibn al-Jaṣṣāṣ, a jeweller from Baghdad, in about 960 pos-sessed land in the Baghdad commercial quarter of al-Karkh worth 50,000 dinars, land near one of the Baghdad gates worth 30,000, property in Basra worth 100,000, and several rural estates, totalling 900,000 dinars, as well as 100,000 dinars in cash and 300,000 dinars in slaves, jewels, and other valuables, and this was only what was left after most of his property had been confiscated by the caliph (Margoliouth 1921-22: 16-18). Properties such as these do not seem to have been unusual at the time. The merchant Abū Ḥasan al-Ṭālibī, who was born in Kufa and later moved to Baghdad, possessed, in the second half of the tenth century, some 40,000 hectares of land, which produced twenty million dirhams in crops per year. He invested the profits in buying new land in south-ern Iraq and having it worked by labourers, by which he further increased his profits (Sabari 1981: 38). This case was not exceptional: there were other mer-chants and officials in this period who had a yearly revenue of one million dinars from their estates alone (Ashtor 1976: 140-141, 155-157).

Parts of these large estates were devoted to cash crops, such as rice, cotton, and sugar. These seem to have been worked mainly by wage labourers and slaves, but the rising dominance of large landownership probably also increased the importance of short-term tenancy.

269factor markets in early islamic iraq, c. 600-1100 ad

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

TenancyTenancy systems in early medieval Iraq often involved more than just the allo-cation of land-use rights: they frequently served also as instruments for the allocation of labour and capital. There was variation in which element carried the most weight. This variety of tenancy systems can best be envisaged as a continuum, ranging from systems akin to lease contracts to those that were more like labour contracts. Various forms of tenancy had also existed in the Sasanian period. At that time, the main—and for the tenant most desirable—form of tenancy was permanent share-cropping for one-quarter to one-third of the crop (Morony 1981: 162-165; for the Sasanian period, see Rezakhani and Morony in this issue of JESHO). The sharecropper held permanent rights to the land and could sublet it if he wished. Compared to the permanent sharecrop-per, the contractual tenant (hoker, akkār) was in a less favourable position: he paid a fixed annual sum in cash or crops but had no permanent rights to the land (Campopiano 2011).

After the Arabic conquests, these forms of tenancy were fitted into the emerging framework of Islamic law. A distinction was made, in legal terms, between the rent of land for a fixed sum in cash or kind (a contract of lease or hire of usufruct, or ijāra) and sharecropping. Islamic jurists were opposed, in principle, to sharecropping, because this system could be interpreted as a type of ribā al-faḍl, or undeserved income from unequal exchange of land, leading to the exploitation of the weaker groups in society. In the course of the eighth century, however, more jurists in Iraq attempted to legitimize its use (Campopiano 2011). There are sharecropping contracts described by Abū Yūsuf (d. 798), as, for instance, in a system in which the land tax is muqāsama, a tax assessed on the basis of a share of the crops (Abū Yūsuf 1969: 115-116; Yanagihashi 2004: 253-275). It is striking that the initial resistance of Islamic jurists to share-cropping, and the attention to its exploitative nature, had already weakened during the eighth century, probably precisely because of the dominance of sharecropping in Iraq and the impossibility of banning it.

In contrast to the permanent sharecropping dominant during the Sasanian era, it seems that, in early medieval Iraq, sharecroppers holding grain land, muzāraʿa, held their land mostly for only one or two years. The types of crop were decided by the landowner, and the tenants were allowed to retain only a third or a quarter of the output, which made them resemble dependent labour-ers rather than self-employed farmers. Sharecroppers holding plots with fruit trees or olive trees were usually better off and had longer contracts, which is not surprising, given the long-term investments needed (Yanagihashi 2004: 253-254; Løkkegaard, 1978: 174-175).

270 van Bavel et al.

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

Tenants holding plots of land for a fixed rent (an ijāra contract) were not necessarily in a better position. From references in narrative sources we know that leasing and sub-leasing of small plots of land existed (al-Jāḥiẓ 1951: 173), but larger holdings were also leased out. It seems that, here too, short-term contracts were common. Perhaps most of these contracts were for only one or two years or for indefinite, unspecified terms at the will of the landlord, but direct information on this for Iraq is scarce, in contrast to early medieval Egypt, for instance (Banaji 2009; 2001: 199, 237-238). If these short lease terms were indeed predominant, they would have created insecurity for the tenant and reduced his incentives to invest in the land. A positive element, however, is that Islamic jurists stressed the importance of contractual consent and that the actual rent may never exceed the contractually determined rent, which, if respected, enhanced this aspect of the tenant’s position. The same applies to the development by Islamic jurists of the notion of “fair rent”, placed at the average market level for plots of similar soil quality and size. According to these jurists, valid lease contracts needed to state the size, quality, and location of the leaseholding, the use to which the holding should be put, the duration of the contract, and the amount of rent. Rent needed to be paid only if the owner and the tenant had made a valid contract and the tenant received the “property of use” without interference by the owner, a legal position that reduced the insecurity for the tenants (Johansen 1988: 32-39, although perhaps somewhat too optimistic). This would also have enabled the tenant to sub-lease the land.

The part of the cultivated area distributed in short-term tenancy—share-cropping or ijāra—and its development over time are difficult to reconstruct. The sources available for the Sasanian and the early Islamic period (chronicles and juridical and geographical treatises) do not allow us to give precise figures on the diffusion of short-term tenancy, but, analyzing the works of jurists such as Abū Yūsuf that increasingly supported sharecropping and other forms of short-term tenancy since the eighth century onward, it seems reasonable to see the eighth century as a period of diffusion of this kind of contract and of sharecropping in particular (Campopiano 2011: 261-263). This development took place in a context in which smallholders were already in decline, as we have seen above, with the final acceleration in this process taking place in the second half of the tenth century. The growing dominance of large landowner-ship may have increased the importance of short-term tenancy, but this cannot be ascertained, because of the lack of sources, which are even more silent on the exact organization of leasing. We hardly know, for instance, the length of the lease contract in years. Likewise, it is unclear whether the tenant had full

271factor markets in early islamic iraq, c. 600-1100 ad

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

use-rights during the lease term (Johansen 1988: 38-39) or what the size of ten-ancies was.

3 The Labour Market

Rural LabourIn the countryside, labour relations were affected by the power of the land-owning elites (Banaji 2009: 78-85). Many rural inhabitants remained bound to the land or in some state of (semi-)dependency (Morony 1981: 165). The fact, observed by Baber Johansen, that legal theorists discussed whether the peas-ants of the Sawād could be seen as slaves seems to be an attempt to find a legal rationalization for the conditions of Iraqi peasantry (Morony 1981: 165). According to Abū ʿUbayd, ʿUmar I forbade the purchase of a serf belonging to dhimmīs (raqīq ahl al-dhimma) because these people were ahl kharāj, people of the land tax, that is, people subjected to the exaction of land tax (Ibn Khurradādhbih 1989: 157). The people of the Sawād were also called slaves (ariqqāʾ) in a tradition reported by al-Ṭabarī in the Kitāb ikhtilāf al-fuqahāʾ from Sharīk b. Sharīk b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Nakhaʿī during the caliphate of al-Manṣūr (754-775) (al-Ṭabarī 1933: 225; Robinson 1971: 33). The political constraint on the peasantry is shown also by the fact that, under al-Hajjāj, force was used to bring them back to the land (Forand 1971: 28; Coşgel, Miceli, and Ahmed 2009).

Besides these forms of peasant dependency, outright slavery also existed. Slaves were used to remove the salty soil in order to make the land of southern Iraq cultivable (al-Ṭabarī 1879-1901: 1747-1750; Popovic 1976: 64-66). Conflicts between slaves and masters often exploded in violent rebellions and, in south-ern Iraq, Zanj rebellions occurred as early as 689-90 and 694 (Popovic 1976: 62-63).

However, although forms of dependence or bondage continued to exist at least into the eighth century (Campopiano 2011; forthcoming (b)), the freedom of labour probably increased in the early Islamic period, even in the country-side. The traditional picture of self-sufficient, autarkic villages with property held in common and small surpluses being extracted from an undifferentiated mass of servile villagers in the form of levies, taxes, or corvée labour, found in descriptions of the so-called Asiatic mode of production, is incorrect (Krader 1975: 286-296; cf. Banaji 2001). The rural economy was highly market-oriented, communal agriculture unimportant, social differentiation pronounced, and corvée labour scarce. Most labour was performed in forms of tenancy or as free or semi-free independent labour, while wage labour was also employed. Iraqi

272 van Bavel et al.

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

society could build on the institutions developed in a millennia-long tradition of wage labour in the area of the Euphrates and Tigris.3 Especially during peak agricultural times, such as harvest, but also during labour-intensive tasks such as digging canals and transporting goods, labourers were hired, mostly by the month but also by the day or the year and paid in silver or barley.

After the Muslim conquest, three options were envisaged for using the con-fiscated lands of opponents who had been killed or had fled. Land grants and sales were two such options; the third was to spend money on hiring people to cultivate the land (Yaḥyā Ibn Ādam 1967: 27). Apparently, the hiring of wage labourers was common. In the seventh century, wages for labourers and sea-sonal workers in the countryside were, in part, paid in kind, but this was done increasingly in cash (Beg 1973: 19-20), testifying to the monetization of the economy and the freedom of some people to hire themselves out. Alternatively, sharecropping arrangements were used, in which the cultivation of the land was rewarded with a share of the crops, as discussed above. The validity of this type of labour contract was debated among late-eighth- and ninth-century jurists. Most found that it would be fairer if the landowner in these cases hired a labourer for a fixed wage, because, in the contract under discussion, a crop failure would mean that the labour of the cultivator would remain completely unrewarded. Still, as mentioned earlier, this construction seems to have been much used in the period, although other cultivators, ploughmen, and, espe-cially, seasonal workers such as sowers and harvesters were paid money wages.

Free wage labour was also widely employed in irrigation works. In the Umayyad period, besides free labourers, forced labour and peasants owing labour rents were still used on big irrigation projects, but during the Abbasid period this was no longer common. Among the many wage labourers employed were skilled ones building and repairing irrigation machines, operators of these machines, and engineers, but, of course, also large numbers of diggers, reed-binders, and other unskilled labourers, who were hired mostly by con-tractors (Beg 1973: 23-27; Cahen 1949-50: 117-143). The contractor, the ʿarīf, received a fee per labourer, a practice also found with other workers hired in large numbers. These groups were geographically mobile and could travel lon-ger distances in search of work, but most of the tenants and peasants remained more or less bound to the land. In the Umayyad and early Abbasid periods, rural people who left their land and migrated to the cities were sometimes sent back to their villages, especially in the case of countrymen who had to perform corvée labour (Forand 1971; Løkkegaard 1978: 176-178). So, although most

3 Cf. the introduction to this issue of JESHO: 160-161.

273factor markets in early islamic iraq, c. 600-1100 ad

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

peasants could work independently or hire themselves out for wages, most of them were also, to some extent, bound to the land or subjected to restrictions.

Especially from the ninth century on, coercion of rural labour increased again. A conspicuous aspect of this trend is the diffusion of slave labour during the Islamic period, in particular in southern Iraq, near Basra, linked to the development of cash-crop plantations (mainly of sugar cane) in this region (es-Samarraie 1972: 94). The investors were members of the royal family or its clients and protégés. Among the slaves we find the introduction of Zanj (African slaves), since the end of the seventh century (see also above) and growing in numbers in the subsequent period (Campopiano forthcoming (b); Duri 1979: 90-2; Popovic 1976: 60-2; Talhami 1977: 453, 458-460 refines the emphasis on the assumed East African origin of most slaves). The Basra elites combined their property rights to large tracts of land, their wealth, the avail-ability of credit opportunities—as Basra formed a major centre of banking and finance—and the availability of slaves, as Basra was also a main port of trans-fer in the slave trade (Popovic 1976: 13-25). Like peasants, slaves were used by large landowners and entrepreneurs in order to reclaim the land and prepare it for the cultivation of cash crops such as cotton and, especially, sugar cane, a crop able to grow on the salty soils reclaimed from these brackish and sali-nated marshlands (Ouerfelli 2008: 22-24; Waines 1977: 301-302). The slaves, numbering some 15,000 in this area and forming perhaps a quarter of the labour force there, performed this hard work in large gangs, overseen by the agents of the big entrepreneurs, and were lodged in big work camps owned by these entrepreneurs. Many of the latter belonged to the Hashimite, Barmakid, and Abbasid families, the most powerful families in the Muslim world. These slaves, often suffering from malaria in the brackish marshlands, were not allowed to marry and did not have children (Beg 1975: 114-115); they were no more than capital goods procured by the wealthy Basra elite. After the terrible Zanj slave revolt in southern Iraq at the end of the ninth century and the elites’ growing fear of large numbers of slaves, it seems that sharecropping spread as a substitute for slave labour (Ouerfelli 2008: 23-24). Just like slavery, these sharecropping arrangements, which often coincided with a semi-dependent position of the tenant, helped to keep the cost of rural labour low, even during periods of plague and population decline, but it may be that this also came at the expense of the investments in labour-saving techniques.

Urban LabourUrban labour in early medieval Iraq was highly specialized and diversified (Shatzmiller 1994: 172, records 659 occupations from six sources from Iraq, from the eighth to the twelfth century). A growing demand for products and

274 van Bavel et al.

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

services, reinforced by the high levels of urbanization and Iraq’s position as the administrative and commercial centre of the Abbasid empire, stimulated spe-cialization. Abū Saʿīd (or Saʿd) Naṣr b. Yaʿqūb al-Dīnawarī’s Encyclopaedia of Dreams paints a vivid picture of the wide range of activities in manufacturing, trade, and services that Baghdad must have harboured in the tenth century. The streets of the city teemed with craftsmen and labourers of every sort, pedlars and traders selling all kinds of wares, porters, household personnel, and many others (Fahd 1965). In order to understand the functioning of the labour market that wove this diverse array of workers into a coherent fabric, three formative principles deserve attention: state control, self-organization of workers, and—by far the most important—individual relationships between “employees” and their “employers” in the widest sense of the word (including relations between craftsmen working on commission and their customers). All three were influenced by changing economic circumstances and by the developing legal framework of Islamic law, but they were also affected by the balance of power in society.

As in the late Sasanian empire, the state frequently made use of coerced labour: the army and the household of the caliph, in particular, contained slaves (Beg 1975: 111, 113-114). Nor did the practice of population transfers, so prominent in the late Sasanian empire,4 completely disappear. In the middle of the ninth century, for instance, Caliph al-Muʿtaṣim, returning from a mili-tary campaign in Egypt, took a group of Egyptian captives with him to Baghdad, some of whom were later put to work as weavers to make embroidered linens in the Egyptian fashion (Michael the Syrian 1905: 84). Still, such population transfers appear to have been less frequent than in the late Sasanian era, and there is no sign of an ambition to keep large parts of the working population in the towns under state surveillance. In fact, government regulation of private labour markets was very limited. From at least the late eighth century onward, the muḥtasib, a state functionary responsible for the supervision of trade and industry, saw to it that rules on product quality and weighing and measuring were obeyed and that trade at the suqs proceeded in an orderly fashion, but he appears to have been but little involved with aspects such as wages, training, and labour conditions (Sabari 1981: 30-31).

Collective forms of self-organization, when present, were informal. Contrary to the assertions of earlier historians, Louis Massignon foremost among them, there is no evidence for the existence in Islamic cities of formal guilds of craftsmen and traders, in the sense of corporate, self-organizing bodies with considerable of autonomy, until the Ottoman era (Cahen 1970: 51-63). Iraq was

4 For population transfers in Sasanian Iraq, see Rezahkani and Morony in this issue of JESHO.

275factor markets in early islamic iraq, c. 600-1100 ad

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

no exception to this rule. The grouping of occupations in quarters surrounding a specialized suq, as has been demonstrated in detail for Basra in the eighth and ninth centuries (Naji and Ali 1981: 298-309), doubtless did create informal bonds. There are indications that, from the late tenth century onwards, these bonds strengthened and that some degree of informal self-organization of workers in the same profession came into being. The silk workers of the Attabiya quarter in Baghdad, for instance, rose in protest against the imposi-tion of new taxes in 985, and, at the end of the eleventh century, professional groups in Baghdad occasionally manifested themselves as a collective on fes-tive occasions, displaying the tools or products of their occupation as a symbol of their identity (Sabari 1981: 31). It has been argued that such informal associa-tions of craftsmen may have played a part in, for instance, the training of youngsters and admission to the profession, a subject about which we know very little (Hamdani 2002: 167). This remains an unproven hypothesis.

Common, on the other hand, was another type of self-organization, on a strictly individual basis: the collaboration of individual artisans in labour part-nerships, in which they pooled resources and skills. Partnerships in general were a core element of Islamic law as it emerged in the first centuries after the conquest. Because jurists living and working in the cities of Iraq played an important role in the formation of early Islamic law, we can be fairly sure that the cases they discussed in legal treatises do indeed reflect economic condi-tions in Baghdad, Kufa, or Basra. Labour partnerships could be formed between artisans with the same profession, but, at least according to the jurists of the Ḥanafī law school, also between artisans with different but complementary skills, such as a weaver and a dyer, and, significantly, between an artisan and a stall owner. Juridical treatises state explicitly that these arrangements answered economic needs (Udovitch 1967; 1970: 65-77). Some of these needs no doubt referred to scale: some ventures required a greater amount of capital or a greater variety of skills than a single person could muster, but partnerships also lent legal legitimacy to subcontracting and thus to entrepreneurship on a larger scale. This takes us to relations between “employees” and their “employ-ers.” Some of these relations were coercive: well-to-do members of the elite commonly owned slaves. These slaves worked in towns as domestic servants, were employed in manufacturing in the workshops of their master, or acted as his agents in trade.5 The demand for slaves was satisfied by slave dealers, whose supply lines reached into Africa, India, Central Asia, and the Slavic lands. Urban slave markets facilitated the trade: Baghdad, Basra, and Samarra each had one or more, each being a huge complex, with rooms, shops, and alleys

5 For slave labour in the countryside, see above: 271, 273.

276 van Bavel et al.

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

(Savage 1997: 67-89; Beg 1975: 107-108). Slaves could also be rented out. The attention paid in legal treatises to the complications regarding liability for damages in situations like this suggests that this was common practice (Yanagihashi 2004: 61, 67-69).

Although the share of unfree labour in the total labour force cannot be cal-culated accurately, it is clear that most of the urban labour force consisted of free men—and women. Many of them were wage labourers. Others, especially among the artisanate, worked on their own account, selling their products or services to consumers or merchants (ben Abdallah 1986: 77). In the early Abbasid era, wages were usually paid in cash, although a component in kind (e.g., a ration of bread) was sometimes included (Ashtor 1969: 64). This testifies to the extensive monetization of society.

In Islamic law, the most common legal interpretation of labour in return for payment was to envisage it as a contract of lease or hire of usufruct (ijāra). Ijāra can be divided into the rent of objects such as land (where we have already seen it in operation), houses, animals—and slaves, who also belonged to this category—and the hiring of human labour. In the latter case, a person cedes his labour to another man, either for a specified period or for carrying out a certain task, in return for a fee. Jurists distinguished between “employees working for the public” (self-employed craftsmen who were paid for the prod-ucts commissioned by their customers) and “employees working for a particu-lar person”, who were paid a monthly or daily wage: both types of agreement were referred to as ijāra (Hallaq 2012: 256-258; Wichard 1995: 242; Yanagihashi 2004: 73-74).

Contracts of this kind were probably not often put in writing, and, as far as we know, none has been preserved for Abbasid Iraq. But sometimes literary sources provide information on the way in which employers and employees arrived at an agreement. One such example is the account of the later vizier of Caliph al-Muʿtaṣim, who started his career as a kitchen steward in the service of a wealthy inhabitant of Baghdad, apparently on an ijāra contract. In this position he was able to negotiate about his salary:

In my early days during the reign of Rashid, I was kitchen steward to Harthama b. Aʿyam, a miserly man, who had a eunuch who inspected his kitchen. He gave me fifteen dirhems a month as pay, and a ration of bread. . . . On one occasion he gave a great banquet, and I saved a thou-sand dirhems on the prices which he would have had to pay, and showed him an account to that effect. He was pleased and it made a favourable impression. One day he said to me: You have earned an increase and how much would you like it to be?—I said: At least another ten dirhems.—

277factor markets in early islamic iraq, c. 600-1100 ad

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

That, he said, is a lot of money; let us say four dirhams (Margoliouth 1921-22: 506-507).

Ijāra agreements thus suited a situation in which labour conditions, the dura-tion of the contract, and the level of wages were determined by individual bar-gaining based on market conditions.

Another way to embed labour relations in a legal framework was through an investment contract (salam). Under a salam contract an investor provided cash (or goods) to a producer, who committed in return to handing over a product at a later date. Salam is also referred to as a sales contract, but it differs from other sales contracts in that the delivery is deferred (Hallaq 2012: 250-251). As this could, like the sharecropping discussed earlier, be seen as a violation of the Qurʾanic prohibition of undeserved income from unequal exchange, jurists were much concerned with an early and accurate assessment of the value of the product to be made. That is why originally salam was mostly restricted to agricultural products such as fruits or grain—products of a fairly uniform qual-ity that could easily be weighed or measured. However, Baber Johansen has shown that from at least the ninth century onwards salam contracts also began to fulfil an important role in the production of and trade in manufactures such as textiles. Merchants used these contracts to assemble stocks of products made according to strict specifications; they thus suited the rise of merchant-entrepreneurship in this era (Johansen 2006: 863-869).

In Iraq, the commercial nexus of the Abbasid empire, merchant-entrepre-neurship in textiles probably emerged at an early stage. Cohen’s analysis of the biographies of scholars in religion and law has found several eighth-century examples of theologians and jurisprudents who had a background as drapers in Baghdad, Kufa, or Basra (Cohen 1970: 26-28). Under a salam contract, small textile producers formally remained self-employed artisans, but in practice they were economically dependent on the large entrepreneurs who commis-sioned their work. Despite the fact that the legal discourse on salam contracts emphasizes equality of exchange, there is reason to believe that their use served mainly the interests of merchant-entrepreneurs and did not prevent the exploitation of small producers. This is, for instance, suggested by the Baghdad riots of 985 mentioned earlier. These riots were initiated by the peo-ple of the Attabiya quarter, a centre of silk production, where the Attabi silks, one of Baghdad’s primary export products, were made. The fact that the silk workers rose in protest against new taxes imposed on the manufacture of silks suggests that they had to bear the brunt of the burden: the powerful silk mer-chants probably tried to shift the financial consequences of the new tax to the small producers (Amedroz and Margoliouth 1921: 119-120, 361-362).

278 van Bavel et al.

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

Urban labour markets in early medieval Iraq were, in short, characterized by free and flexible relations between individual employers and employees. This stimulated specialization and efficiency in production and trade, but it also allowed for economic dependence when the power balance shifted. Checks in the form of regulation by the authorities or self-regulation and counter-bal-ances by way of self-organisation of the producers were too weak to counteract this effect.

4 Money, Credit and Financial Markets

The economy of early medieval Iraq was characterized by a high degree of monetization. Coins were widely available. Starting already in the late Sasanian period,6 the money supply in early medieval Iraq increased greatly. Gold and pure silver coins were used in long-distance trade and fiscal transfers, but more striking is the increase of the number of smaller silver coins in the eighth and ninth centuries, with Basra and Kufa being among the main mints (Heidemann 2010: 649-650, 657-661). These dirhams were the coins used in actual market exchange and for bigger wage payments in the labour market. Dirhams with a low silver content, and the numerous small copper and billon coins minted by regional authorities, were used for smaller payments and daily transactions. The dinars from the Umayyad and early Abbasid period are very consistent in fineness and weight, without substantial declines, with the exception of sev-eral specimens from the period of the civil war between al-Amīn and al-Maʾmūn (810-813) (Ehrenkreutz 1959: 128-161, 135-143; Broome 1985: 29-32; Bates 1996). From the reign of al-Maʾmūn onwards, there was again no relevant decline in the standard of fineness of the dinars struck in Baghdad and Samarra, at least until the rise of the Buwayhids (Ehrenkreutz 1959: 144-145). In fact, the stan-dard of fineness was increased during the reign of al-Maʾmūn (el-Hibri 1993: 72). An analysis of silver coins shows that their weight tended to vary more, with different types of silver coins having different weights (often depending on the province where they were struck), and it is likely that silver coins were circulated by weight. The dirhams struck between the seventh and ninth centuries generally were of high-quality silver (Bates 1978, 1979, 1986; Broome 1985: 28-29).

Financial services also grew during the same period. Already in the early Islamic period, Iraq had numerous money changers, pawnbrokers, and mer-chant-financiers, and the latter employed sophisticated instruments, including

6 See Rezakhani and Morony in this issue of JESHO: 243-244.

279factor markets in early islamic iraq, c. 600-1100 ad

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

bills of exchange and letters of credit (Udovitch 1975; Goitein 1967: 242, 244). If anything, this shows that the notion that capital markets were obstructed by Qurʾanic prohibitions on interest is incorrect: from the very beginning, creative traders, entrepreneurs, and financiers found ways to obtain credit and to make credit transactions and other financial services profitable (Wichard 1995: 22-24). In the countryside, the use of credit instruments was often linked to fiscality and may have produced forms of dependency. At the local (village) level, the link between credit and fiscality was evident in the practice of qabāla, in which a rich man or village notable advanced the tax payment to the tax officer for the local community, in order to be reimbursed later by the commu-nity, with compensation. This practice could result in abuses, and already in the late eighth century it was condemned by Muslim jurist Abū Yūsuf, in part because he feared that, under this system, the state would receive less than in case of direct collection (Løkkegaard 1978: 95-96).

At the same time, especially in the ninth century, financial markets in the towns developed in a much more favourable way, linked to urban markets and long-distance commodity trade. Letters of credit (suftaja) proliferated, to be cashed at a bank, allowing for the safe transfer of amounts of up to thousands of dinars over long distances (Fischel 1937: 17-21; Ray 1997: 71-72). These letters of credit were also employed in fiscal administration, by officials and tax farm-ers from remote provinces to send money to the capital, showing the interac-tion between fiscality and trade and between state elites and merchant elites. The instrument was also used to deposit unpaid letters of credit with bankers, as a security for loans. Another financial instrument that had existed earlier but came into regular use in the tenth century was the ṣakk, a bill of exchange, used for amounts up to thousands of dinars or even more (Mez 1922: 447-8; Labib 1969: 79-96). Bankers levied a charge when paying out, for instance, a commission of one dirham per dinar (= 5-10%, depending on the exchange rate) (Margoliouth 1921-22: 215-216).

The ninth and tenth centuries were thus a period of booming financial markets and new financial instruments. In this period, all kinds of banking activities flourished, with money changers and merchant-bankers ( jahbadh) changing coins, verifying the value of coins, collecting payments, and offering banking facilities, including to the government and its officials. These exchanger-bankers are first mentioned in the second half of the eighth cen-tury, but they proliferated in the tenth century (Fischel 1933; Sabari 1981: 29-30). Among these bankers were Muslim Arabs, Christians, and many Jews. Some of the Jewish jahbadh became state bankers and built close connections to the caliph and the viziers. Links between the exchanger-bankers and the state were formalized in about 910, with the establishment of a central bank under

280 van Bavel et al.

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

the direction of two prominent bankers. This bank was made responsible for the monthly payment of cash advances to the state, secured on future tax rev-enues. The early tenth century also witnessed the emergence of the diwān al-jahabidha, a kind of central banking agency with branches in all major towns, under a governor appointed by the state, mentioned for the first time in 928 (Chaci 2005: 10-11; ben Abdallah 1986: 87).

Although links between the financial sector and the state were tight, and became more so over time, the exchanger-bankers also played the role of pri-vate bankers to the wealthy, including high officials and merchants, who deposited their money with them. In order to shield this money from taxation or confiscation, these sums were often omitted from the bankers’ books, even if they involved tens of thousands of dinars. In the beginning of the tenth cen-tury, financiers (ṣarrāf ) offered all kinds of banking facilities to a wide public (Udovitch 1981; Fischel 1992). Sums lent could be huge, such as the loan of 200,000 dinars extended by the Barīdīs, a family of tax-farmers and generals, to the vizier al-Kalwadhānī in 931, through the financial intermediary Ibn Qarāba (Ray 1997: 68). As Caliph Ibn Muʿtazz noted in about 900, financiers could make the largest profits by extending loans to former members of the elite who had been ruined, with interest rates as high as 1000%. Mostly, how-ever, the interest rates were modest, that is, from four to ten percent per year, rates that would indicate a well-functioning, secure capital market (Ashtor 1978: 198-199).7

Both bankers and financiers combined their banking activities with trade and with the advancing of money to the state, secured by future tax revenues, which they sometimes collected themselves. Banks as autonomous institu-tions did not develop, but banking activities were widespread and operated within a market. In large towns, such as Basra, or in al-Karkh, the commercial district of Baghdad, these bankers and money changers assembled around their own markets, bankers’ bazaars, or streets, such as Awn Street in al-Karkh (Le Strange 1900; Ray 1997: 72-73). In Basra c. 1000, an observer noted that virtu-ally every merchant had his own bank account and paid only in cheques on his bank in the banking bazaar there.

At that time, people from Basra had earned a reputation for their financial activities, and they were sometimes ridiculed or despised for this, as shown in the ninth-century satirical book by al-Jāḥiẓ containing numerous anecdotes about the niggardly bankers from Basra (al-Jāḥiẓ 1951: 49-51, 59). Some of these Basra bankers acquired great wealth, such as Zubayda ibn Ḥumayd, famous for

7 The observations are few, however, and almost always concern loans by the vizier or other high-ranking officials; interest rates were substantially higher for short-term loans.

281factor markets in early islamic iraq, c. 600-1100 ad

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

his avarice, who owned some 100,000 dinars, and Aḥmad ibn Khalaf al-Yazīdī, whose father left him and his brother a sum of 2.6 million dirhams and 140,000 dinars. These families were also linked to the religious elite, again disproving the ideas of a supposed Muslim distrust of financial dealings. Of the religious scholars of the Arabian heartland, including many from Iraq, a substantial part was involved in business, sometimes combined with tax-farming, including some investors and moneylenders. The share of moneylenders and financial dealers among them grew in this period, from three percent of the scholars before the ninth century to 5-8% in the ninth to eleventh centuries (Cohen 1970: 32-33, 43-44).

In part, credit had been a solution to the problem of the declining availabil-ity of cash. The period of high monetization and ample availability of coins ended in the tenth and eleventh centuries (Heidemann 2010: 649-650, 657-661; Ilisch 1990; Ehrenkreutz 1959), such that the number of coins struck declined dramatically, in Iraq even more than in other parts of the empire. The produc-tion of copper coins even ceased completely in Iraq in the last third of the ninth century. From then on, fragments of silver and gold coins were used for small daily transactions, but these coins also became rarer (Heidemann 2011: 55; 2010: 657-661). Stefan Heidemann asserts that monetization in the eleventh century had shrunk to a level not seen since the Hellenistic period, a millen-nium before, which must have severely hindered the functioning of factor markets. The period discussed in this chapter, including the late Sasanian period, thus stands out for its high monetization and dynamic markets.

5 Tentative Reconstruction of the Rise and Decline of Markets

The main goal of this contribution has been to outline the functioning of the markets for land, labour, and capital in early medieval Iraq and to examine their development between the seventh and the eleventh century CE. We will not touch on the topic of economic growth and the decline of medieval Iraq here. Rather, in this concluding section we intend to position factor markets in a wider context by tentatively highlighting the way in which these markets interacted with changing social and political relations. It will be clear that, even for this more limited ambition, it is too early to draw firm conclusions, but on the basis of the admittedly sketchy picture it is possible to formulate an hypothesis that can be tested by future, more systematic research.

Factor markets in the seventh and eighth centuries, which probably built on developments that had begun in the late Sasanian period, clearly display growth in freedom and dynamism. This applies especially to the freedom of

282 van Bavel et al.

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

labour, in town and in countryside, and to the impressive rise of monetization and financial services. Also, tenancy systems became more open and flexible. Changes in the land market are less conspicuous, but we do see that both land and lease markets were fairly open and voluminous in this period. Perhaps most striking are the many links between factor markets—between credit arrangements and labour contracts, for instance, and between labour and landholding systems. The rise of these markets coincided with growing urban-ization rates and an agricultural revolution in the seventh and eighth centu-ries: these were mutually reinforcing developments. The late eighth and ninth centuries, however, saw the rise of large landholders from the Sawād who extended their domains and captured large parts of the surpluses, and later also saw merchant-bankers and tax farmers emerge from their ranks. The top positions in the bureaucracy were filled by the same families (van Berkel 2003: 71-79, 87-102). These families also dominated the grain trade, acquired trade monopolies, and built market-oriented estates. The now dominant groups made huge profits, partly through the markets. When they entered the mar-kets, they had not only vast amounts of land and capital but also the political influence to adapt the rules of market exchange. At the same time, the position of non-elite groups deteriorated, as witnessed by the impoverishment of the peasantry.

In this process, there are clear differences between urban and rural devel-opments. Market exchange in the towns, as well as the exchange of labour and capital, seems to have been less restricted and more dynamic. In contrast, the exchange of land, labour, and capital in the countryside remained much more restricted and characterized by coercion, subjected to the interests of the tax-receiving state and the elites, mainly operating from the towns. The latter did not conflict with or block market exchange. On the contrary, the commer-cialization of the rural economy and the functioning of these factor markets, that were skewed toward their interests, aided this process. The organization of land tenure and leasing, for instance, while raising surpluses, promoting urbanization, and introducing new crops generating market profits seems also to have been well suited to squeezing the countryside and rural labour.

There are clear signs that a significant reduction of agricultural output took place at the same time. The land-tax revenues declined from more than 120 million dirhams in 787-788 to scarcely thirty million dirhams in 918-919.8 Although these revenues were not solely dependent on output but also on tax-collection rates, a decline of this magnitude suggests a substantial

8 See more extensively Van Bavel in this issue of JESHO: 168.

283factor markets in early islamic iraq, c. 600-1100 ad

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

reduction of agricultural output. The same kind of data, combined with archaeological findings, suggest also that the high point in agricultural output was not reached in the Islamic period at all but rather under the Sasanians. The Diyala region, east of later Baghdad, had at that time reached the maxi-mum level of cultivation; all available agricultural land had been put to use, enabled by huge, state-organized irrigation schemes (Adams 1965: 69-83). The exact relationship between the functioning of factor markets and agricultural decline in the ninth century CE requires further research: other factors, such as climate change, may also have played a part. However, it is very possible that the increasingly skewed character of factor markets exacerbated and acceler-ated the process, by facilitating the exploitation of the rural population.

It is thus not surprising that social unrest manifested itself in the country-side first, although later, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the effects were felt also in the cities. Eventually the whole country suffered: the urban popula-tion declined rapidly, villages were deserted, irrigation works deteriorated, and the area under cultivation shrank (Ashtor 1976: 168-169). These developments in turn affected markets, because they led to a partial substitution of non-mar-ket exchange and coercion for market exchange. This is reflected by the decline of coin output and a substantial decrease in the level of monetization in the eleventh century, as noted above. Current information on the populations of towns is also in keeping with this hypothesis. The absolute size of towns peaked in about 900, arguably as a result of the increasing success in the extraction of surpluses from the countryside, partly through market mechanisms. Baghdad, in particular, commanded a large share of surpluses (Bosker, Buringh, and van Zanden 2013; Eltjo Buringh kindly provided estimates, 5 May 2011). In the tenth century, the erosion of the productive base of the countryside reached a level that made impossible the feeding of such big cities, resulting in sharp decline in urban population. At the same time, per capita GDP—and, to an even greater extent, real wages—sank from the high levels they had reached in the eighth century to substantially lower levels in the tenth and eleventh centuries (Pamuk and Shatzmiller 2014).

In short, we hypothesize that, from the late Sasanian period on, and acceler-ating in the early Islamic period, there was a relatively unrestricted functioning of markets for goods, labour, and capital that stimulated market exchange, especially in the towns, associated with the growing monetization of the econ-omy. This brought economic dynamism, but, at the same time, these develop-ments increased inequality and furthered the rise of new, powerful elite groups. These groups availed themselves of the market in order to maximize their revenues and used the non-economic, coercive opportunities offered by and

284 van Bavel et al.

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

within the market, to the detriment especially of the countryside and, later, also that of the towns.

This tentative reconstruction of the manner in which factor markets turned against themselves is, for now, an hypothesis that needs to be tested against the available evidence. Future research will undoubtedly refine and possibly mod-ify the picture, leading to a better understanding of the way in which factor markets interacted with a changing social and political context between the seventh and the eleventh century.

Bibliography

Abdallah, H. ben. 1986. De l’iqtaʿ étatique à l’iqtaʿ militaire. Transition économique et changements sociaux à Baghdad, 247-447 de l’Hégire/861-1055 ap. J. Uppsala: Almqvist och Wiksell.

Abū Yūsuf. 1969. Kitāb al-kharāj, trans. A. Ben Shemesh, Taxation in Islam, vol. 3. Leiden: Brill.

Adams, R. Mc. 1965. Land behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement on the Diyala Plains. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Amedroz, H.F., and Margoliouth, D.S. 1921. The Eclipse of the ʿAbbasid Caliphate, vol. 6. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Ashtor, Eliyahu. 1969. Histoire des prix et des salaires dans l’Orient médiéval. Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N.

———. 1976. A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages. London: Collins.

———. 1978 [1977]. Le taux d’intérêt dans l’Orient medieval. In The Medieval Near East: Social and Economic History, ed. E. Ashtor. London: Variorum Reprints: 197-213.

Banaji, Jairus. 2001. Agrarian Change in Late Antiquity: Gold, Labour, and Aristocratic Dominance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2009. Aristocracies, Peasantries and the Framing of the Early Middle Ages. Journal of Agrarian Change 9: 59-91.

Bates, Michael L. 1978-1979. Islamic Numismatics. Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 12/2: 1-16; 12/3: 2-18; 13/1: 3-21; 13/2: 1-9.

———. 1986. History, Geography, and Numismatics in the First Century of Islamic Coinage. Revue Suisse de numismatique 65: 231-262.

———. 1996. The ʿAbbasid Coinage System, 833-946. Unpub. paper presented at the annual meeting of The Middle East Studies Association.

Beg, M.A.J. 1973. Agricultural and Irrigation Labourers in Social and Economic Life of Iraq during the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates. Islamic Culture 47/1: 15-30.

285factor markets in early islamic iraq, c. 600-1100 ad

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

———. 1975. The “Serfs” of Islamic Society under the ʿAbbāsid Regime. Islamic Culture 49: 107-118.

Berkel, Maaike van. 2003. Accountants and Men of Letters: Status and Position of Civil Servants in Early Tenth-Century Baghdad. PhD diss. University of Amsterdam.

Bosker, Maarten, Eltjo Buringh, and Jan Luiten van Zanden. 2013. From Baghdad to London: Unraveling Urban Development in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, 800-1800. Review of Economics and Statistics 95/4: 1418-1437.

Broome, Michael. 1985. A Handbook of Islamic Coins. London: Seaby.Cahen, Claude. 1949-50. Le service de l’irrigation en Iraq au début du XIe siècle. Bulletin

d’Etudes Orientales 13: 117-143.———. 1970. Y a-t-il eu des corporations professionnelles dans le monde musulman

classique? In The Islamic City, ed. A.H. Hourani and S.M. Stern. Oxford: Bruno Cassirer: 51-63.

Campopiano, Michele. 2011. Land tax ʿalā l-misāha and muqāsama: Legal Theory and Balance of Social Forces in Early Medieval Iraq (6th-8th Centuries C.E.). Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 54: 239-269.

———. 2012. State, Land Tax and Agriculture in Iraq from the Arab Conquest to the Crisis of the Abbasid Caliphate (Seventh-Tenth Centuries). Studia Islamica, new ser. 3: 35-80.

———. Forthcoming (a). Fiscalité et structures économiques et sociales en Iraq de la conquête arabe à la crise du califat abbaside (VII-X siècles). In Espaces et réseaux en Méditerranée VIe et XVIe siècle III, Repenser l’espace économique méditerranéen (Ve-XVe siècle), ed. Damien Coulon et al. Saint-Denis: Éditions Bouchene.

———. Forthcoming (b). Land Tenure, Land Tax and Social Conflictuality in Iraq from the Late Sasanian to the Early Islamic Period (Fifth to Ninth Centuries). In Authority and Control in the Countryside, Continuity and Change in the Mediterranean 6th-10th century. Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 25, eds. A. Delattre, M. Legendre and P.M. Sijpesteijn. Princeton: The Darwin Press.

Chaci, Abdelkader. 2005. Origin and Development of Commercial and Islamic Banking Operations. Journal of King Abdulaziz University: Islamic Economics 18: 3-25.

Cohen, Hayyim J. 1970. The Economic Background and the Secular Occupations of Muslim Jurisprudents and Traditionists in the Classical Period of Islam (until the Middle of the Eleventh Century). Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 13: 16-61.

Coşgel, Metin, Thomas Miceli and Rasha Ahmed. 2009. Law, State Power, and Taxation in Islamic History. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 71: 704-717.

Daryaee, Touraj. 2009. Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire. London: I.B. Tauris.

Ehrenkreutz, Andrew S. 1959. Studies in the Monetary History of the Near East in the Middle Ages. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 2: 128-161.

286 van Bavel et al.

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

Fahd, Toufy. 1965. Les corps de métiers au IV/Xe siècle à Bagdad, d’après le chapitre XII d’al-Qādirī fī-t-taʿbīr de Dīnawarī. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 8: 186-212.

Farraxvmart Vahrāman. 1997. The Book of a Thousand Judgements: A Sasanian Law-Book, trans. A. Perikhanian and N. Garsoïan. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda.

Fischel, Walter J. 1933. The Origin of Banking in Mediaeval Islam: A Contribution to the Economic History of the Jews of Baghdad in the Tenth Century. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 65: 339-352.

———. 1937. Jews in the Economic and Political Life of Mediaeval Islam. London: Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

———. 1992. Jewish-American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia. Garland Reference Library of the Social Sciences 429. Ed. Walter J. Fischel and Sanford Pinsker. New York: Garland.

Forand, Paul G. 1971. The Status of the Land and Inhabitants of the Sawād during the First Two Centuries of Islām. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 14: 25-37.

Forstner, Martin. 1968. Das Kalifat des Abbasiden al-Mustaʿin (248/862-252/866). PhD diss. University of Mainz.

Frye, R.N. 1984. The History of Ancient Iran. Munich: Beck.Gariboldi, A. 2007. Il regno di Xusraw dall’anima immortale. Riforme economiche e

rivolte sociali nell’Iran Sasanide del VI secolo. Milan: Mimesis.Goitein, Solomon. 1967. A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab

World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, vol. 1, Economic Foundations. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hallaq, Wael B. 2012. Sharī‘a: Theory, Practice, Transformations. 3d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hamdani, Abbas. 2002. The Rasaʾil Ikhwan al-Safaʾ and the Controversy about the Origin of Craft Guilds in Early Medieval Islam. In Money, Land and Trade. An Economic History of the Muslim Mediterranean, ed. N. Hanna. London: I.B. Tauris: 157-173.

Haque, Ziaul. 1977. Landlord and Peasant in Early Islam: A Study of the Legal Doctrine of “Muzāraʿa” or Sharecropping. Islamabad: Islamic Research Institute: 216-218.

al-Hassan, Ahmed, and Donald Hill. 1986. Islamic Technology: An Illlustrated History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heidemann, Stefan. 2010. Numismatics. In The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 1, The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries, ed. Chase Robinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 648-663.

———. 2011. The Agricultural Hinterland of Baghdad, al-Raqqa and Samarraʾ: Settlement Patterns in the Diyar Mudar. In Le Proche-Orient de Justinien aux

287factor markets in early islamic iraq, c. 600-1100 ad

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

Abbasides. Peuplement et dynamiques spatiales, ed. Antoine Borrut et al. Bibliothèque de l’antiquitè tardive 19. Turnhout: Brepols: 43-58.

el-Hibri, Tayeb. 1993. Coinage Reform under the ʿAbbāsid Caliph al-Maʾmūn. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 36: 58-83.

Ibn Khurradādhbih. 1889. Kitāb al-masālik wa-l-mamālik. ed. M.J. de Goeje. Leiden: Brill.

Ilisch, L. 1990. Whole and Fragmented Dirhams in Near Eastern Hoards. In Sigtuna papers, ed. Kenneth Johnson and Brita Malmer. Stockholm: Spink: 121-131.

al-Jāḥiẓ. 1951. Le livre des avares, trans. Ch. Pellat. Paris: Maisonneuve.Johansen, Baber. 1988. The Islamic Law on Land Tax and Rent. The Peasants’ Loss of

Property Rights as Interpreted in the Hanafite Legal Literature of the Mamluk and Ottoman Periods. London: Croom Helm.

———. 2006. Le contrat salam: Droit et formation du capital dans l’Empire abbaside (XIe-XIIe siècle). Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 61: 863-899.

Krader, Lawrence. 1975. The Asiatic Mode of Production: Sources, Development, and Critique in the Writings of Karl Marx. Assen: Van Gorcum.

Labib, Subhi Y. 1969. Capitalism in Medieval Islam. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 29: 79-96.

Lambton, Ann K.S. 1969. Landlord and Peasant in Persia: A Study of Land Tenure and Land Revenue Administration. London: Oxford University Press.

Le Strange, Guy. 1900. Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate: From Contemporary Arabic and Persian Sources. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Løkkegaard, Frede. 1978. Islamic Taxation in the Classic Period with Special Reference to Circumstances in Iraq. 2d ed. Philadelphia: Porcupine Press.

Margoliouth, David S. 1921-1922. The Table-Talk of a Mesopotamian Judge. Oriental Translation Fund, New Series 28. London: Royal Asiatic Society.

Mez, Adam. 1992. Die Renaissance des Islāms. Heidelberg: Winter.Michael the Syrian. 1905. Chronique de Michel le Syrien, patriarche Jacobite d’Antioche

(1166-1199), vol. 3, trans. J.-B. Chabot. Paris: Leroux.Morony, Michael G. 1981. Landholding in Seventh-Century Iraq: Late Sasanian and

Early Islamic Patterns. In The Islamic Middle East, 700-1900. Studies in Economic and Social History, ed. Abraham L. Udovitch. Princeton: Darwin Press: 135-175.

———. 1984. Iraq after the Muslim Conquest. Princeton: Princeton University Press.———. 1988. Grundeigentum im frühislamischen Irak. In Jahrbuch für Wirtschafts-

geschichte, Sonderband 1987, Das Grundeigentum in Mesopotamien, ed. B. Brentjes. Berlin: Akademie Verlag: 135-47.

Naji, A.J., and Y.N. Ali. 1981. The Suqs of Basrah: Commercial Organization and Activity in a Medieval Islamic city. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 24: 298-309.

288 van Bavel et al.

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

Ouerfelli, Mohamed. 2008. Le sucre: Production, commercialisation et usages dans la Méditerranée médiévale. Leiden: Brill.

Pamuk, Şevket, and Maya Shatzmiller. 2014. Plagues, Wages, and Economic Change in the Islamic Middle East, 700-1500. Journal of Economic History 74/1: 196-229.

Popovic, Alexandre. 1976. La révolte des esclaves in Iraq au IIIe/IXe siècle. Paris: Geuthner.Ray, Nicolas Dylan. 1997. The Medieval Islamic System of Credit and Banking: Legal

and Historical Considerations. Arab Law Quarterly 12: 43-90.Robinson, Chase F. 2005. Neck-Sealing in Early Islam. Journal of the Economic and

Social History of the Orient 48/3: 401-441.Rubin, Z. 1995. The Reforms of Khusro Anūshirwān. In The Byzantine and Early Islamic

Near East, vol. 3, States, Resources and Armies, ed. A. Cameron. Princeton: Darwin Press: 227-297.

Sabari, Simha. 1981. Mouvements populaires à Bagdad à l’époque ʿAbbaside, IXe-XIe siè-cles. Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient.

es-Samarraie, Husam. 1972. Agriculture in Iraq during the 3rd Century AH. Beirut: Librairie du Liban.

Savage, Elizabeth. 1997. A Gateway to Hell, a Gateway to Paradise: The North African Response to the Arab Conquest. Princeton: Darwin Press.

Schmucker, Werner. 1972. Untersuchungen zu einigen wichtigen bodenrechtlichen Konsequenzen der islamischen Eroberungsbewegung. Bonn: Selbstverlag der Orien-talischen Seminars der Universität.

Serjeant, R.B. 1943. Material for a History of Islamic Textiles up to the Mongol Conquest. Ars Islamica 10: 71-104.

Shatzmiller, Maya. 1994. Labour in the Medieval Islamic World. Leiden: Brill.al-Ṭabarī. 1933. Das Konstantinopler Fragment des Kitāb ihtilāf al-fuqahāʾ des Abu Gaʿfar

Muḥammad ibn Garīr at-Tabarī, ed. Joseph Schacht. Leiden: Brill.———. 1879-1901. Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-muluk. Annales quos scripsit Abu Djafar

Mohammed Ibn Djarīr At-Tabarī, ed. M.J. de Goeje, 15 vols. Leiden: Brill.Talhami, Ghada Hashem. 1977. The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered. International Journal

of African Historical Studies 10: 443-461.Udovitch, Abraham L. 1967. Labour Partnerships in Early Islamic Law. Journal of the

Economic and Social History of the Orient 10: 64-80.———. 1970. Partnership and Profit in Medieval Islam. Princeton: Princeton University

Press.———. 1975. Reflections on the Institutions of Credits and Banking in the Medieval

Islamic Near East. Studia Islamica 41: 5-21.———. 1981. Bankers without Banks: Commerce, Banking, and Society in the Islamic

World of the Middle Ages. In The Dawn of Modern Banking, ed. Robert S. Lopez. New Haven: Yale University Press: 255-273.

289factor markets in early islamic iraq, c. 600-1100 ad

jesho 57 (2014) 262-289

Waines, David. 1977. The Third Century of Internal Crisis of the Abbasids. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 20: 282-306.

Watson, Andrew M. 1983. Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700-1100. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Wichard, Johannes C. 1995. Zwischen Markt und Moschee. Wirtschaftliche Bedürfnisse und religiöse Anforderungen im frühen islamischen Vertragsrecht. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh.

Yaḥyā Ibn Ādam. 1967. Kitāb al-kharāj, trans. A. Ben Shemesh, Taxation in Islam, vol. 1. Leiden: Brill.

Yanagihashi, Hiroyuki. 2004. A History of the Early Islamic Law of Property: Reconstructing the Legal Development, 7th-9th centuries. Leiden: Brill.