The Donkey And The Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950-1180

This article is from World Archaeology issue 127

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REVIEW BY ROBERT PORTASS

It is not every day that one encounters a book that aims to overturn a paradigm and establish in its place the foundations of a new one; rarer still is it to find that the author succeeds in that task. But that is exactly what Chris Wickham achieves in his mammoth new book on the origins and workings of the dynamics of economic change that characterised western Eurasian economic expansion from about AD 950 to about 1200 – a phenomenon known to specialists, at least since Robert Lopez’s seminal monograph of 1971, as the ‘commercial revolution’.

What, then, according to Wickham, have we been getting wrong? Perhaps we ought to start with the very underpinnings of ‘commercial revolution’ as conventionally understood, which are given short shrift in a wide-ranging, historiographically acute, and wryly amusing introduction. Wickham puts his cards on the table in the very first paragraph, telling us that the book’s origins are to be found in the author’s ‘intense dissatisfaction’ with ‘traditional narratives of the “commercial revolution” of the central Middle Ages in Europe and the Mediterranean’. What this means, it turns out, is that readers who come to this book hoping to marvel at the scale and scope of long-distance sea-borne trade in luxury goods are in for a shock. As the argument unfolds in a series of remarkably detailed chapters, each focused on a particular region (Egypt; North Africa and Sicily; Byzantium; Islamic Spain and Portugal; north-central Italy) numerous shibboleths are persuasively dismantled. Foremost among these is another historiographical mainstay that has rarely been challenged in its broad outlines: namely, that the commercial revolution was largely the result of the coordinating efforts, pioneering spirit, and ability to service the demand for sumptuous goods from far-flung locales of the merchant fleets of the major Italian city-states.

If it is origins we are interested in – and, incidentally, this does not seem to me one of Wickham’s primary concerns – then we need to look elsewhere. For it was Egypt, brought to life here in vivid detail by Wickham’s masterly engagement with its tens of thousands of Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic texts and its rich archaeology, that was the true economic powerhouse of the medieval Mediterranean throughout this period: so rich and so economically complex was it, in fact, that it could not play the leading role in coordinating the wider inter-regional economic activity that its wealth warranted until other regions caught up with it in their internal economic development.

Although it would never match Egypt’s fiscal complexity, nor even the scale of its artisanal production, Sicily did indeed catch up throughout the 11th century, and its agricultural prosperity and use of Egyptian (and, later, Italian) shipping serve to underline the significance of resource endowments, geography, and location in piecing these case-studies together. Clearly, some inter-regional connections were important, and Wickham concedes as much when discussing the bulk commerce in flax and linen that linked Egypt, Sicily, and North Africa. But such connections did not matter to the same extent everywhere we look: Byzantium, for instance, developed prosperous artisanal productions in most of its core regions, but its commercial activity was largely restricted to the Aegean. North-central Italy did not produce much at all that other regions of the central and eastern Mediterranean wanted or needed until the 12th century. So plentiful were metals, ceramics, cloth, and grain in al-Andalus (Islamic Spain and Portugal) that a booming internal economy could develop without very dense connections with the eastern Mediterranean at all.

A new perspective

All of these insights matter; and when placed in comparative perspective, something of the scale of Wickham’s achievement becomes apparent. Indeed, so much that we once thought crucial to Eurasian economic take-off now looks different – trivial, even – in the light of Wickham’s persuasive marshalling of masses of archaeological data and skilful sifting of thousands of written documents. Put simply, the donkey, which facilitated the short-distance movement of goods within regions, was more important than the boat, and to recognise as much is not to fixate on a technicality but to reorient our understanding of how economic complexity emerged and commercial activity took place in the medieval Mediterranean.

Where we once thought luxuries such as silk and pepper central to inter-regional trade, we now know to focus instead on flax and timber; where we once thought that the seafaring genius of Pisans, Venetians, and the Genoese unlocked economic expansion, we now know that – crucial as the Italian city-states were to developments from about 1150 – they were peripheral to Mediterranean exchange before then; and where we once thought that economic complexity depended on connection across land and sea, we now know that some regions, such as al-Andalus and Byzantium, developed internal economic complexity of an order that rendered dense connections with the eastern Mediterranean unnecessary. This last point merits further reflection, for it gets to the heart of Wickham’s model: in short, if we do not take the trouble to reassemble as far as possible the local building blocks of society and economy in any given corner of the Mediterranean, we cannot hope to piece together how separate regions interacted, nor understand what catalysed such interactions in the first place.

Inevitably in a book of this size (795 pages), one could quibble with certain details or pose questions not confronted directly: for example, Wickham notes that al-Andalus was richer and more commercially active after the Umayyad state collapsed in the 1030s, but why was this so if irrigation systems and the productive advantages they bring were present in the 10th century? What, if anything, can we say about those who watered and fed the donkeys on which most trade depended, and are we to imagine that middlemen or artisanal producers invested in their own herds? And so on. But to complain overmuch seems ungenerous when one considers the scale of Wickham’s achievement.

Refreshingly, considering how iconoclastic this book is in certain regards, there is no hint of point-scoring on show here, either. It is simply the case that, for Wickham, images of Italian wharves ‘groaning with silks and spices taken off the argosies from the east’ are misleading not just because they are wrong, at least before 1200, but because they distract from the very processes that made such exchange possible: production and demand. This reframing of the problem of economic take-off in the medieval Mediterranean underpins what is perhaps the book’s most important argument, brought out with especial force and clarity in the two closing chapters: internal agrarian developments prefigured and configured economic complexity in all regions, and are thus the starting points for any attempt at synthesis across regions. This is a point that archaeologists and economic historians, myself included, would do well to remember.

The Donkey And The Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950-1180
Chris Wickham
Oxford University Press, £40
ISBN 978-0198856481