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.
