Labour in the Medieval Islamic World.

The economic history of the Islamic world has developed slowly and erratically. Even with scholars like Claude Cahen, Eliyahu Ashtor, and Andrew Watson, who devote special attention to economic questions, a tendency to draw sweeping conclusions from quite limited data undermines the value of their work. Many other orientalists have drawn similar conclusions with little or no data, relying instead on unsupported assumptions or their sense of the "essence" of Islam.

Prof. Maya Shatzmiller sets a new standard for Islamic economic history. Though she fairly and comprehensively summarizes the state of the field in her first chapter on "The Historiographical Context," she does not shy away from rejecting both specific and general conclusions put forward by her predecessors. Sweeping aside long held received opinions, she concludes: "Stagnation, aversion to manual labour and the limited participation of women in economic activities and in the labour force can no longer be upheld." (p. 399) What lends generalizations like this greater weight than declarations by earlier historians are the clarity, scrupulousness, and logic of her methodology.

Following the established technique of economic history, Shatzmiller presents an extensive base of quantifiable data, comments on its limitations, deduces certain conclusions, and then hazards more general comments. Her database consists of a master list of 1853 occupational terms compiled from 2957 individual citations in 26 sources devoted primarily to the Arab east, North Africa, and Muslim Spain. Her sources include both primary compilations, notably a number of hisba manuals relating to the regulation of urban markets by the official known as the muhtasib, and secondary assemblages of terms gleaned, for the most part, from biographical dictionaries. Pointing to work done in European history on division of labor as revealed in technical terminology, Shatzmiller uses her list to demonstrate occupational similarities and differences among regions and, very broadly, between the 8th-11th century and the 12th-15th century. The frequency of cases allows her to speak of the proportional distribution of occupations, as well.

Since her sources are not homogeneous, and occupational attributes reflected in personal names may be inherited and thus unrelated to the life of the person bearing the name, Shatzmiller is commendably cautious in not putting too much weight on her quantified findings. Sector by sector and occupation by occupation she compares her numbers with discussions and analyses drawn from an exhaustive array of mostly secondary sources. In this way she modifies her findings to correct for underrepresentation of occupations that were remote from the urban milieu of the hisba manuals and biographical dictionaries, e.g., mining, and overrepresentation of more familiar urban activities, e.g., religious scholarship.

She devotes separate chapters to the ethnic division of labor and to the labor of women. In the former, she translates and comments on a fascinating text of uncertain date specifying which trades in Spain were practiced by Arabs, Berbers, Jews, etc. In the latter, she makes the usual observations about the paucity of data, including in her master list, but then constructs a solid argument from a variety of sources establishing that women were widely employed as the dominant element in spinning, and that they usually worked in the home. She also offers interesting speculations on why women seem to have had so few opportunities for employment.

A final chapter treats the theoretical dimension of labor as conveyed by Islamic legal, religious, and literary sources. She demonstrates a long-lasting polarity between texts extolling asceticism and frowning on manual labor, and others condemning indolence or otherworldliness and praising work. Though her discussion in this chapter is brief, it provides a valuable antidote to earlier portrayals of medieval Islam as hostile to manual labor.

Though this will certainly henceforward be the place for anyone to start investigating the occupational aspect of medieval Islamic history, it does suffer certain drawbacks. Most critically, it ignores entirely the non- Arab world. Since Iran played a central role in Islamic history from the end of the Umayyad dynasty in 750 to the decline of the Seljuq dynasty ca. 1150, the absence of more than token source citation from Iran constitutes a serious gap, particularly given the book's title. In particular, the proportional rise in the service sector Shatzmiller perceives between her earlier and her later periods should have been tested against Iran, where it can be argued that Islamic religious and educational elaboration came somewhat earlier than in Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain.

Other reservations relate to derivation of the proportional allocation of labor in different times and places from the number of cases in her master list. Shatzmiller takes as a premise that "the number of cases, occurrences of occupational terms, is a historically reliable measure for the relative size of the labour force employed in any given sector and type of activity, and, as such, is a reliable measure of the distribution of the labour force in the economy." (p. 170) A fuller discussion of this premise would have been desirable since it is not self-evident, particularly given the heterogeneous character of her sources.

Shatzmiller concludes her study with some suggestive remarks concerning the comparison of medieval Islam and medieval Europe. She casts doubt on some of the theories that have been advanced for the late medieval economic divergence between these two regions. Without advancing a particular theory of her own, she calls for intensified research into the Islamic side of the equation. This plea is well justified by the strides she has taken in this book, both in compiling and analyzing her master list, and in putting together an excellent bibliography that will show the prospective researcher where to start. If one is to read only one book on medieval Islamic economic history, however, this book, despite its focus on labor, unquestionably supersedes previous attempts at a general presentation.

Richard W. Bulliet Columbia University