Islam, Merchants, and Capitalism: Fifty-Five Years in the Socioeconomic History of the Medieval Islamic World

Abstract

Abstract: “Islam, Merchants, and Capitalism” draws attention to the missing link between early and central medieval Islamic socioeconomic history (ca. 650–1250) and the history of capitalism. This intertext essay starts from reassessing the work of French Marxist Islamicist Maxime Rodinson, who first made a programmatic attempt to forge such a link in his seminal 1966 Islam and Capitalism . It then proceeds to lay bare the reasons why Rodinson’s call went largely unheard in the following decades, identifying the persistence of a pervasive decline paradigm within medieval Islamic socioeconomic history as the key obstacle preventing advances in the field and foreclosing avenues for theoretical discussion. Regrettably this paradigm, while outdated and no longer tenable, still remains authoritative and is frequently invoked by modern theorists of “underdevelopment.” The essay then discusses some examples of recent groundbreaking scholarship that deploy new archaeological and documentary sources to decidedly move away from decline, showing the way forward out of this historiographical impasse. Finally, the essay returns to the question of capitalism, and of the forms in which this ambiguous term can, or cannot, be applied to early and central medieval Islamic societies, calling for a recentering of the Islamic Middle Ages in a longue-durée global history of capitalism.