This study describes and explains the revolutionary changes which transformed the agricultural life of the Islamicized world in the four centuries following the early Arab conquests. Professor Watson discusses eighteen crops - from sorghum and rye to the watermelon - which spread through the Near East and North Africa during this period. Their origins, diffusion and uses are reviewed. The book investigates the mechanics of diffusion, the routes by which plants spread, and the processes by which they were acclimatized in their new environment. The social and economic history of agriculture in the medieval Islamic world is assessed in a review of wide importance. Professor Watson sets out to refute the view that the early Islamic period was one of agricultural decline in the Near East. He shows that, in contrast to the late Roman and Sasanian periods, it was a time of agricultural and demographic expansion. Agricultural innovation in the early Islamic world will be of interest to economic, social and agricultural historians and to those concerned with Islam and its effect on Africa and Asia.

Modern society owes a tremendous amount to the Muslim world for the many groundbreaking scientific and technological advances that were pioneered during the Golden Age of Muslim civilization between the 7th and 17th centuries. Every time you drink coffee, eat a three-course meal, get a whiff of your favorite perfume, take shelter in an earthquake-resistant structure, get a broken bone set or solve an algebra problem, it is in part due to the discoveries of Muslim civilization.

A boom in the production and export of cotton turned Iran into the richest region of the Islamic caliphate in the ninth and tenth centuries. Yet in the eleventh century, Iran's primacy ended as its agricultural economy entered a steep decline. Richard W. Bulliet advances several provocative explanations, for example that the boom in cotton production paralleled the spread of Islam and that Iran's agricultural decline stemmed from a significant cooling of the climate that lasted more than a century. Substantiating his argument with innovative quantitative research and scientific discoveries, Bulliet first establishes the relationship between Iran's cotton industry and Islam and then outlines the evidence for what he terms the "Big Chill." He then focuses on a lucrative but temperature-sensitive industry of cross-breeding one-humped and two-humped camels, concluding with an unusual concatenation of events that had a profound and long-lasting impact not just on the history of Iran but on the development of the world.

Analyzes Muslim countries' contemporary problems, particularly violence, authoritarianism, and underdevelopment, comparing their historical levels of development with Western Europe.

Examines the socio-cultural history of the regions where Islam took hold between the 7th and 16th century. This two-volume work contains 700 alphabetically arranged entries, and provides a portrait of Islamic civilization. It is of use in understanding the roots of Islamic society as well to explore the culture of medieval civilization.

Agricultural history has enjoyed a rebirth in recent years, in part because the agricultural enterprise promotes economic and cultural connections in an era that has become ever more globally focused, but also because of agriculture's potential to lead to conflicts over precious resources. The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History reflects this rebirth and examines the wide-reaching implications of agricultural issues, featuring essays that touch on the green revolution, the development of the Atlantic slave plantation, the agricultural impact of the American Civil War, the rise of scientific and corporate agriculture, and modern exploitation of agricultural labor.

Explores the cultural framework within which changes in agricultural technology and economic organization occur and the ways in which changes in the social fabric influence attitudes toward rural work and the peasantry.

In this volume, André Wink analyzes the beginning of the process of momentous and long-term change that came with the Islamization of the regions that the Arabs called al-Hind—India and large parts of its Indianized hinterland. In the seventh to eleventh centuries, the expansion of Islam had a largely commercial impact on al-Hind. In the peripheral states of the Indian subcontinent, fluid resources, intensive raiding and trading activity, as well as social and political fluidity and openness produced a dynamic impetus that was absent in the densely settled agricultural heartland. Shifts of power occurred, in combination with massive transfers of wealth across multiple centers along the periphery of al-Hind. These multiple centers mediated between the world of mobile wealth on the Islamic-Sino-Tibetan frontier (which extended into Southeast Asia) and the world of sedentary agriculture, epitomized by brahmanical temple Hinduism in and around Kanauj in the heartland. The growth and development of a world economy in and around the Indian Ocean—with India at its center and the Middle East and China as its two dynamic poles—was effected by continued economic, social, and cultural integration into ever wider and more complex patterns under the aegis of Islam. Please note that Early medieval India and the expansion of Islam 7th-11th centuries was previously published by Brill in hardback (ISBN 90 04 09249 8, still available).