Plagues, Wages, and Economic Change in the Islamic Middle East, 700–1500

Pamuk, Şevket; Shatzmiller, Maya

doi:10.1017/s0022050714000072

Cited by 68 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 54 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Allen, Murphy, and Schneider, ‘Colonial origins’; Allen, Bassino, Ma, Moll‐Murata, and van Zanden, ‘China’; Arroyo Abad, Davies, van Zanden, ‘Spanish America’; Bassino and Ma, ‘Japanese unskilled wages’; Broadberry and Gupta, ‘Early modern great divergence’; Frankema and van Waijenburg, ‘Structural impediments’; Özmucur and Pamuk, ‘Ottoman Empire’; Pamuk and Shatzmiller, ‘Islamic Middle East’; du Plessis and du Plessis, ‘Happy’; Rönnbäck, ‘Gold Coast’; de Zwart, Globalization ; de Zwart and van Zanden, ‘Java’.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Real wages once more: a response to Judy Stephenson

Allen¹

2018

The Economic History Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines Judy Stephenson's claim that institutional wage series such as those of Greenwich Hospital overstate the earnings of building workers by 20 to 30 per cent, and it is argued here that the conclusion is unpersuasive. Whatever adjustments to existing wage series are necessary in view of her new evidence would have no significant implications for real wages in England compared to the rest of the world. Consequently, Stephenson's findings do not call into question the high wage explanation for the industrial revolution. E conomists and historians have collected long time series of wages and prices forEngland, and these have been used to measure changes in the living standard of workers. The original approach was simply to compare an index of wages to an index of prices (roughly weighted to reflect spending) to see if the resulting real wage ratio went up or down. 1 More recent approaches have tried to extract more information from the data by estimating annual earnings and comparing them to the annual cost of subsistence. This method shows how far the standard of living was above or below subsistence, 2 and it also facilitates international comparisons of living standards, which can be measured as the number of subsistence baskets earned by workers in different countries. 3 Serious questions arise in this research: how should the subsistence basket be defined? How are daily wages or servants' premiums converted to annual earnings? 4 Judy Stephenson has added another issue to this list. 5 She claims that the wage series for English building workers at least from the seventeenth century onwards overstate the earnings of the workers in view of changes in the organization of the building industry. Most of our information about builders' wages comes from the records of large institutions. In the middle ages, they hired workers, bought materials, and project-managed themselves, so what they paid the workers was what the workers earned. After 1600, however, it was common for institutions to let contracts to builders who sometimes did the work themselves, sometimes hired tradesmen or labourers to do the job, and sometimes subcontracted work.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Real wages once more: a response to Judy Stephenson

Allen¹

2018

The Economic History Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Although material is scarcer for the early medieval period, it does allow us to make estimates also for this period. The recent estimates by Pamuk and Shatzmifler for southern Iraq show per capita GDP at roughly the same level as for the earlier period, ranging from $890-990 around 760 CE, to $770-860 around 1060, and $640-720 around 1220 (Pamuk and Shatzmiller, 2014). These tentative estimates demonstrate that per capita GDP in the early medieval period of dynamic factor markets is not impressive, compared to earlier periods and other areas, and that these levels declined rather than increased during this period.…”

mentioning

confidence: 62%

New Perspectives on Factor Markets and Ancient Middle Eastern Economies: A Survey

Bavel

2014

J Econ Soc Hist Orient

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The conventional view of markets for land, labour, and capital as a modern. Western phenomenon is questionable. Factor markets did indeed exist in Iraq, and even thrived, in various parts of its pre-modern history, including the period around 2000 BCE, the "long" sixth century (c. 620-480 BCE), and the eighth and ninth centuries CE. By employing the long-term approach used in this issue of JESHO and by placing the organization of these markets in their wider social-political context, we can understand better how these markets developed, how they functioned, and why they rose and declined again. Keywords-• markets -long-term development -Iraq -exchange of land, labour, and capitalantiquity -Middle Ages Even though markets have become a major topic in recent historiography, there are few studies investigating the shifts in the importance of markets and their functioning over the very long run. The present volume offers such a longterm study, by focusing on the case of ancient and medieval Iraq. Markets, defined here as a system of exchanging and allocating resources by means of the price mechanism-with prices determined primarily by the forces of supply and demand-existed in Iraq from early in its history. At various points in that history, as will be shown further below, they even formed a main system of exchange and allocation in Iraq. This applies not only to the markets for goods KONINKLIJKE BRILL NY, LEIDEN, 2014 | DO] 10.1163/15685209-12341345 146 VAN BAVELand products but also to those for land, labour, and capital-that is, to the factor markets, on which we will concentrate in this volume.The long presence of markets makes Iraq an apt case for an investigation of the formation, functioning, and effects of these markets over the long run. In this volume, we will undertake such an investigation for the period from c. 700 BCE to c. 1100 CE, that is, roughly from the neo-Babylonian to the Abbasid period. Iraq in this period was home to one of the most advanced civilizations in the world (as it had been earlier), as witnessed by the high levels of urbanization, learning, architecture, and political and economic complexity.' The source material for this period is not abundant, at least compared with later periods in history, and it is unevenly spread over the various centuries, but it is richer than that available for most other parts of the globe, and it allows us to take at least a tentative first step.This step consists, first, of a reconstruction of the functioning of markets in Iraq during this period of almost two millennia. Next, and much more tentatively, this volume seeks to place the market developments in a wider context. It focuses especially on the socio-political context, because this is where the main determinants of the organization and functioning of markets may be found.2 How did societal transformations and political regime shifts interact with the development of markets? Did political events, such as the fall of the Sasanian empire and the Islamic conquest, for instance, cause a rupture in th...

show abstract

“…In the tenth century, the erosion of the productive base of the countryside reached a level that made impossible the feeding of such big cities, resulting in sharp decline in urban population. At the same time, per capita GDP-and, to an even greater extent, real wages-sank from the high levels they had reached in the eighth century to substantially lower levels in the tenth and eleventh centuries (Pamuk and Shatzmiller 2014).…”

Section: Tentative Reconstruction Of the Rise And Decline Of Marketsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Factor Markets in Early Islamic Iraq, c. 600-1100 AD

Bavel

Campopiano

Dijkman

2014

J Econ Soc Hist Orient

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Plagues, Wages, and Economic Change in the Islamic Middle East, 700–1500

Cited by 68 publications

References 54 publications

Real wages once more: a response to Judy Stephenson

Real wages once more: a response to Judy Stephenson

New Perspectives on Factor Markets and Ancient Middle Eastern Economies: A Survey

Factor Markets in Early Islamic Iraq, c. 600-1100 AD

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About