Arab Agricultural Revolution

The Arab Agricultural Revolution (also referred to variously as Medieval Green Revolution, Muslim Agricultural Revolution, Islamic Agricultural Revolution or Islamic Green Revolution) is a term coined by the historian Andrew Watson in a 1974 paper postulating a fundamental transformation in agriculture from the 8th century to the 13th century in the Muslim lands.

Reviewers (Ashtor 1976, Decker 2009) rejected the proposal, stating that there was no such "revolution", as contrary to Watson's central claim, widespread cultivation and consumption of staples such as durum wheat, Asiatic rice, and sorghum as well as cotton were already commonplace under the Roman Empire and Sassanid Empire, centuries before the Islamic period.

Hypothesis

Watson's proposal was an extension of another hypothesis of an agricultural revolution in Islamic Spain proposed much earlier in 1876 by the Spanish historian Antonia Garcia Maceira.

Watson argued that the economy established by Arab and other Muslim traders across the Old World enabled the diffusion of many crops and farming techniques among different parts of the Islamic world, as well as the adaptation of crops and techniques from and to regions beyond the Islamic world. Crops from Africa such as sorghum, crops from China such as citrus fruits, and numerous crops from India such as mangos, rice, cotton and sugar cane, were distributed throughout Islamic lands, which, according to Watson, previously had not grown these crops. Watson listed eighteen such crops being diffused during the Islamic period. Watson argues that these introductions, along with an increased mechanization of agriculture, led to major changes in economy, population distribution, vegetation cover, agricultural production and income, population levels, urban growth, the distribution of the labour force, linked industries, cooking, diet and clothing in the Islamic world.

Reception

Watson's paper met with scepticism at the time of publication. Eliyahu Ashtor has argued that, contrary to Watson's thesis, agricultural production declined in areas brought under Muslim rule in the Middle Ages, including areas in Iraq (Mesopotamia) and Egypt, on the basis of records of taxes collected on cultivated area.

It was again reviewed by Michael Decker (2009), who also challenges the hypothesis. Drawing on literary and archaeological evidence, Decker shows that, contrary to Watson's central thesis, widespread cultivation and consumption of staples such as durum wheat, Asiatic rice, and sorghum as well as cotton were already commonplace under the Roman Empire and Sassanid Empire, centuries before the Islamic period. At the same time he argues that their actual role in Islamic agriculture has been exaggerated. Decker concludes that the agricultural practices of Muslim cultivators did not fundamentally differ from those of pre-Islamic times, but rather evolved from the hydraulic know-how and 'basket' of agricultural plants inherited from their Roman and Persian predecessors.

Decker also points to the advanced state of ancient irrigation practices which "rebuts sizeable parts of the Watson thesis." This shows that basically all important agricultural devices, including the all-important watermills (see List of ancient watermills), but also waterwheels, shadufs, norias, sakias, water screws, and various kinds of water pumps were widely known and applied by Greek and Roman farmers long before the Muslim conquests.

Bibliography

• .
• .
• .

External links

• .