Effects of trade on society
- Trade stimulated innovation and invention.
The Medieval Middle East can best be described as an area with
large cities that functioned fairly independently and were thoroughly interconnected.
Inhabitants of these large cities demanded goods, food,
daily supplies from the city's hinterland,
but always from much farther away.
Sources talk about markets where you could find silk and porcelain from China,
spices from India and gold from Africa.
For the Medieval common man,
these goods while unattainable,
but among the rich there was plenty of demand for them.
Muslim coins have been found as far away as Japan and Scandinavia.
Vikings came in search of dirhams
New research reveals an intricate trade relationship that existed between Norsemen and the Islamic world.
First of all, there needed to be an infrastructure of routes and connections.
Secondly, technical support in the form of ships and instruments was needed,
and important advances were made, for example,
the navigation instruments as a result of the Muslim trade revolution.
Another very important ingredient for trade was wealth.
After all, for trade to exist,
you need clients to buy your products.
You also need investors who used their capital to build ships,
supply caravans et cetera.
We can picture the network of routes as the veins of the world at that time.
The Middle East formed it's heart connecting Africa, Europe and Asia.
Traveling these routes could lead to enormous wealth but was also hazardous.
Landscape and weather conditions themselves already provided a risk.
With so many precious goods being transported,
bandits and pirates formed a constant threat.
In order to minimize the risk,
traders would therefore usually travel in groups creating the famous caravans
These caravans could indeed be very large and consists of hundreds of camels. Along the trade routes,
not only goods but also ideas traveled.
Religious and political movements were often spread by merchants.
From very early on,
communities of Muslim merchants settled in India,
China and Sub-Saharan Africa.
These communities played a crucial role in the spreading of Islam.
In fact, proximity to historical trade routes increases
the chance that a country or area has a majority Muslim population.
We should realize that it was not just Islam spreading through trade,
but that those same routes and mechanisms also introduced ideas back into Islam.
We really should consider this as an interactive process.
Communities embraced Islam while their ideas and customs impacted the shaping of Islam.
Of course, not only religious ideas traveled along the trade routes, philosophy,
medical and medicinal knowledge,
insights in astronomy and mathematics and technical inventions,
all moved along these roads.
(
In the video about porcelain,
you can get some idea of how networks evolved and knowledge was exchanged.)
It is no coincidence that the world order shifted when trade routes did.
When Europeans started building ships that were
sturdy enough to sail around the Cape of Africa,
it undermined the monopoly that
the Middle Eastern traders had had for more than a millennium.
With the discovery of the New World,
added into the wealth of the Europeans,
the center of gravity moved away from the Middle East
with Western Europe becoming the new world power.
Legal Inventions
So far, we have seen that in the Islamic Medieval world,
there were many different interpretations of the words of the Prophet Muhammad.
It was probably the exception that all the Islamic law schools would agree on a topic.
One of these rare occasions was
the ban on interest.
Western Europe at this time new assimilate religiously inspired ban,
yet, the financial system that developed in these two societies differed significantly.
Though it's generally assumed that the ban unusually
inhibited the development of trade in Europe for a period of time,
there is little evidence that this was the case in the Islamic world.
Some scholars have proposed that this is so because people either
just ignored the ban or circumvented it with illegal rules,
such as the double sale.
In a double sale, an item was sold with the agreement that
the seller would buy the item back at a higher price.
For example, you buy a table from me for $100 and we make
a contract that you will sell that same table to me in one month from now for $110.
This would not be usually making money with money but profit,
making money by selling goods and thus permissible.
One of these was buying and selling on credit.
Apart from circumventing the ban on interest,
buying and selling on credit had
the additional advantage that a trader did not have to carry cash when traveling;
after all, cash could be easily stolen by bandits or pirates.
Another reason why its used to cough as it did was that trade was so omnipresent and
wealth was increasing so rapidly that there simply
were not enough coins to keep up with the cash flow.
This practice evolved into a Suftaja,
a bill of exchange or a letter of credit which was
taken out by banker or traders with a good reputation.
The Suftajas were as good as cash money and much less of a hazard.
They could be exchanged anywhere in the empire for cash or products.
Another legal model that contributed to the success of traders from the Middle East was
the partnership called in Arabic "Mudarabah" and in
Latin as it became commonly used in Europe as "Commenda."
In a mudarabah, an investor provided cash
and the trader executed a commercial enterprise.
The investor and executor shared in the profit and loss at a previously determined rates.
The mudarabah functioned as a flywheel in commerce.
It made it possible for people who did not have capital to become traders and people with
capital could benefit from trading activity
without going on hazardous journeys themselves.
Legal inventions, like the mudarabah and the suftaja,
soon became a substantial part of trading.
But the surprising thing is,
though it was widespread and happened on a large scale,
it was never formalized into something resembling
a bank in the sense of an official economic institution.
Several centuries later, when Italian city-states,
like Genoa and Venice,
entered to the commercial sphere,
Europe was introduced to these legal inventions that
greatly facilitated trade and the flow of money.
Once adopted, these instruments soon evolved into
more structural financial institutions, essentially banks.
It remains guessing why despite the clear head start,
the money dealings in the Medieval Islamic world
never consolidated into a more solid structure.
One explanation could be that the initial strength of the system, namely,
the trust and personal networks,
eventually inhibited growth and expansion.
Slave trade
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A 13th-century book illustration produced in Baghdad by al-Wasiti showing a slave-market in the town of Zabid in Yemen |
Slavery was an inherent part of pre-modern society and also very
present in the Medieval Middle East yet slavery did not have one face throughout history.
In fact, even within one society,
the living circumstances could differ a lot from one slave to the next.
In Islamic society, for example,
the human status of a slave was never questioned.
If slaves converted to Islam,
they were considered to have
the same religious responsibilities and rights as other believers.
The slave status did not necessarily last lifetime
and manumission was quite normal and even encouraged by Islam.
If a Muslim committed a sin like breaking the fast during Ramadan,
he could compensate by freeing a slave.
Slaves could also own property, traits, and inherit.
The Medieval Middle East owed much of its wealth and power to slavery.
Slave trade can in fact be seen as one of
the motors behind the growth and success that was achieved,
but slavery in the Middle East was not uniform.
Slavery was already widespread before the rise of Islam.
Not surprisingly therefore we find several references to
slavery in the Quran and in the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad.
When Islam started to split,
war captives formed an almost endless resource of slaves.
This did not stop,
the sources indicate that raids into enemy territory with
the specific purpose of obtaining human booty continue to take place.
However, when the empire established itself,
the occasional border wars and the capture of
war prisoners were not enough to meet the demand for slaves.
Thus slaves needed to be brought in from elsewhere and
that is how traits in humans became an important part of the commercial setting.
Slaves came from many different backgrounds,
but three sources stand out,
inner Africa, inner Asia,
and Caucasus in Europe.
The people living there called sloughs gave us the word slave.
Every town had its own slave market,
the Samarkand Market being amongst
the most famous slave markets at the time but they were also found in Europe,
on the North African coast, and In Arabia.
There was a general belief that race determined the qualities of a slave.
So Berber women were considered especially well suited for housework,
sexual relations, and childbearing.
African women were robust and well-qualified as
wet nurses and men from this continent made for strong infantry soldiers.
Indian women were difficult to manage.
Turks were excellent archers and horseman.
The prices of slaves varied greatly depending on looks.
Especially for women, strength,
age etc with white skin counting as a virtue over black skin.
Female slaves would almost always have
domestic tasks which could include sexual relations with their master.
According to Islamic law,
sexual intercourse with one's slave girls is permitted.
Though the Quran explicitly mentions that
concubines may not be put to work as prostitutes,
this would still happen.
Male slaves had a range of duties,
there are examples of them being put to work in large-scale agricultural enterprises,
low class stereotypical slaves.
But this was not common.
Other functions might include administrative jobs,
trade, running businesses, or teaching.
In these kind of school jobs,
slaves could gain some status within society
which was also true for slaves holding important military positions.
Some male slaves were put to work in the Harem,
the residence of a master's female slave companions.
But since the Master did not trust regular males in the quarters of his women,
these slaves would be castrated and are called eunuch.
These eunuchs apparently sparked the imagination of Westerners of later ages leading
to an overrepresentation of eunuchs and Harems in European art portraying your end.
Yet it is fair to say that the demand for eunuchs was at some point substantial,
Medieval writings tell us that there were
different categories of eunuchs and the fault lines were racial.
Blacks were usually submitted to complete amputation while white slaves could be
castrated in such a way that they retained the ability to have intercourse.
There are in fact records of eunuchs that were married or had concubines themselves.
Slave traders were widely despised.
But the lack of rank and status could be made up for by the wealth they could acquire.
With an ever-increasing demand,
slave trade became an oiled machine.
European slaves initially reached the Middle East through the Balkan route over land.
In fact, heaps of gold dinars have been found on
the Balkans which are witness to these transactions.
When the Mongol invasion and the Crusades made trade along this route impossible,
Genoese and Venetian traders jumped into the vacuum and
the market shifted to the European and North African shores of the Western Mediterranean.
Slavery was present in Europe until the nineteenth century and on a larger scale than previously assumed by scholars. In southern Europe, the heyday of slavery was the seventeenth century, when tens of thousands of Muslims were held for ransom or labor in Italy, Malta, France, and Spain.Orientalism
Edward Said, the scholar who introduced the term orientalism would say it does matter
because of two reasons.
First, i
n his book, he provides us with an endless list of movies, artworks,
and scholarship that all reaffirm our stereotypes of the Arab other.
The second reason is that these orientalist stereotypes created by
scholars and artists in the west were used to extend Western political,
economic, and military dominance over the Middle East.
So, it's not just harmless stereotyping, but rather,
political demonizing to justify Western dominance over the East.
Orientalism is different from regular stereotyping because of the scale and the impact.
Western scholarship on the East has for centuries been
creating the orient rather than observing it.
With scholars repeating each other and building
own exceptional examples and concepts that were flawed,
they create an essentialist picture of
a static society that hardly changed since the Middle Ages.
