Eurocentrism and Contributions of Medieval Muslims to the History of Economics

Abstract

80 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXV, No.1, Fall 2011 Eurocentrism and Contributions of Medieval Muslims to the History of Economics Hamid Hosseini* Beginning with William Ashley and John K. Ingram economists started to write the history of their discipline.1 Since 1888 and until recently, historians of economic thought presented economics as an exclusively European/Western discipline. In doing so, historians of economics ignored the contributions to economic thought by non-European civilizations, in particular those by medieval Muslim scholars which were substantial and influenced Christian scholasticism. Those historians of economic thought generally assumed that economics began by ancient Greeks, died with the demise of classical Greek civilization, and was revived by Christian Scholastic Thomas Aquinas during the 13th century. This exclusively European view of economics was best expressed by Joseph Schumpeter in his seminal encyclopedic work History of Economic Analysis in which he discussed the so called Gap thesis.2 According to that thesis, during a gap of over five hundred years that stretched from the demise of classical Greek civilization to the writings of Thomas Aquinas, no contributions were made *Hamid Hosseini is Professor of International Business and Economics at McGowan School of Business, King’s College where has taught since the mid-1980s. Prior to joining King’s College, he also taught at the University of Oregon, Wayne State, and Jundi Shapur University in Iran. He has also been a resident scholar at the University of Pennsylvania in the Spring of 2010, at Harvard University in 1994, 1995, and 2001, and at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business in 1984. Born in Iran, he studied at the University of Akron, Michigan State University, University of California at Berkely, and the University of Oregon, where he finished his Ph.D., Hosseini has published extensively in both economic and international business. 1 Ashley, William, S., 1888, An Introduction to English Economic History, Voles, New York, G.P.P. Putnam, and John Ingram, 1888, History of Political Economy, London. 2 Schumpeter, Joseph, 1954, History of Economic Analysis, New York, Oxford University Press. 81 to the history of economic analysis anywhere in the world. Schumpeter wrote: “So far as our subject is concerned, we may leap over 500 years to the epoch of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) whose Summa Theologica is in the history of thought what the South-Western spire of the Cathedral of Charles is in the history of architecture”.3 To emphasize the importance of Aquinas in the “revival” of economic analysis, Schumpeter discusses the start of a revolution by this Christian scholar that had two causes: the rediscovery of the writings of Aristotle in the West, and what he called the towering achievements of Aquinas.4 Deemphasizing the Aristotelian influence, and indirectly the influence of medieval Muslim scholars, since Aquinas was introduced to the writings of Aristotle via Muslim philosophers who had preserved and debated Greek thought for centuries, Schumpeter wrote: “the reader will observe that I do not assign to the recovery of Aristotle’s writings the role of chief cause of the 13th century developments.”5 Of course, contributions to the history of economics have not been exclusively European, and there is no truth to the five hundred or so years of discontinuity of economic thought which was suggested by the Schumpeterian Gap thesis. Pre Greek Near Eastern civilizations, which had influenced the Greeks, had a thorough understanding of the economic process. And, as various writers have demonstrated, ancient (pre-gap centuries) scholars like Guan Zhorg of China and Kantilya of India made substantial contributions to the understanding of the economy. However, the works of Yassine Essid, S.M. Ghazanfar, Azim Islahi, Abbas Mirakhor and Hamid Hosseini during the last two decades, by demonstrating the contributions of medieval Muslim scholars to economics during the Schumpeterian blank centuries, and their direct impact on the contributions of Aquinas and Christian scholastics, explicitly challenged the Schumpeterian Gap thesis, and thus the supposed revolution by Thomas Aquinas.6 One has to remember that during these so called gap centuries, when Europeans were in their “Dark Ages”, the Islamic civilization: “represented about the most fertile environment of intellectual activity in...