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This article shows that the management of water resources in Late Sasanian and Early Islamic Iraq (sixth to tenth centuries ad) implied the participation of local communities and the mutual cooperation of landholders. The organisation of water management in the Late Sasanian Period (sixth to seventh centuries) depended on a highly complex system of interaction between local communities, aristocratic rulers and the imperial bureaucracy. This interaction allowed the government to gather information from different regions of the empire and to understand the needs of the different stakeholders. As such, the system provided a favourable institutional framework for the expansion of irrigated agriculture. The system changed when landholding conditions were transformed in the Early Islamic period, during the ninth century. These institutional transformations allowed the influence of a group of tax-farmers and merchant-bankers to increase. Irrigation policies were therefore bent to the interests of these new elites, which often lay in short-term gains rather than in long-term success. The article suggests that, in the long run, these socio-economic and institutional changes contributed substantially to the breakdown of the agricultural system in Ancient Iraq.

This paper reconstructs the organization and development of factor markets in early medieval Iraq. It shows that from the late Sasanian period on, and accelerating in the early Islamic period, there v^as a relatively unrestricted functioning of markets for goods, labour, and capital. This stimulated market exchange, associated with growing monetization of the economy, especially in the towns, hut also in the countryside, even though coercion remained more pronounced there. We hypothesize that these developments hrought economic dynamism hut simultaneously increased inequality and furthered the rise of new, powerful elite groups, causing the decline of the same markets. KeywordsFactor markets -exchange of land, lahour, and capital -early Islamic Iraq -early Middle Ages -Ahhasid period For their comments on an earlier draft of this paper, we would like to thank Maaike van Berkel (UVA, Amsterdam) and Michael Morony (UCLA), and the anonymous referees whose serious comments have stimulated us to revise this paper.