Synopses & Reviews
A boom in the production and export of cotton made Iran the richest region of the Islamic caliphate in the ninth and tenth centuries. Yet in the eleventh century, Iran's impressive agricultural economy entered a steep decline, bringing the country's primacy to an end.
Richard W. Bulliet advances several provocative theses to explain these hitherto unrecognized historical events. According to Bulliet, the boom in cotton production directly paralleled the spread of Islam, and Iran's agricultural decline stemmed from a significant cooling of the climate that lasted for over a century. The latter phenomenon also prompted Turkish nomadic tribes to enter Iran for the first time, establishing a political dominance that would last for centuries.
Substantiating his argument with innovative quantitative research and recent scientific discoveries, Bulliet first establishes the relationship between Iran's cotton industry and Islam and then outlines the evidence for what he terms the Big Chill. Turning to the story of the Turks, he focuses on the lucrative but temperature-sensitive industry of cross-breeding one-humped and two-humped camels. He concludes that this unusual concatenation of events had a profound and long-lasting impact not just on the history of Iran but on the development of world affairs in general.
Synopsis
A boom in the production and export of cotton made Iran the richest region of the Islamic caliphate in the ninth and tenth centuries. In the eleventh century, however, Iran's rich agricultural economy collapsed, along with its trade in textiles.
Combining recent ecological data with a breakthrough analysis of primary sources, Richard W. Bulliet advances a provocative thesis to explain this puzzling historical moment. According to Bulliet, two significant events changed Iran in the eleventh century: its climate cooled significantly, which curbed the production of cotton, allowing Turkish nomads to establish a political dominance in the susceptible region that would last for centuries. Substantiating his argument with exhaustive archival and scientific research, Bulliet first establishes the factors that helped cultivate Iran's cotton industry, and then identifies the climatic trends, which he terms the Big Chill, that rendered the environment hostile to the crop. He concludes with the arrival of the Turks, a camel-driven migration that would change not only the makeup of the villages and cities of Iran but also the divisions of power and religion in the Islamic Middle East and the world for years to come.