The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950–1180. By ChrisWickham. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2023. xl + 795 pp. £40/$55. ISBN 978 0 19 885648 1.

In his major new study, Chris Wickham contests the idea that the primary engine of economic change in the central Middle Ages was a ‘commercial revolution’, led by the Italian port cities of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, and fuelled by the trade in eastern spices, silks, and other luxuries. Rather, Wickham argues, between c.950 and c.1180, a Mediterranean-wide economy developed from the ground up, as distinct regional economies became increasingly complex. This process was centred as much (or more) on North Africa as it was on Europe, and it was driven above all by local demand for – and specialized production of – bulk goods, not luxuries (Chapter 1). Down to the Black Death of the fourteenth century, Egypt's economy was the most sophisticated anywhere in the Mediterranean. In the region of Būṣīr, between the Fayyum oasis and the Nile, local peasants may even have been so narrowly focused on commercial flax production that they had to buy their food in the market. Cash-cropping like this was rare in the Middle Ages, even in Egypt; but specialized production – especially in grain, flax, and linen, but also sugar, wine, paper, fine ceramic table wares, and other commodities – was wholly typical of the region. So was a market economy in which even peasants could participate (Chapter 2). Between the tenth and twelfth centuries, this same kind of ground-level complexity becomes visible elsewhere in the Mediterranean too, though always to a lesser degree than in Egypt. Wickham focuses on four other regional case studies: Tunisia and Sicily (Chapter 3), the Byzantine Aegean (Chapter 4), Islamic Spain and Portugal (Chapter 5), and north-central Italy (Chapter 6). As in Egypt, production in all of these regions became specialized to a significant degree; Wickham pays particular attention to linen, cotton, wool, and silk (a ‘semi-luxury’), as well as ceramic fine wares and amphora-borne products like wine. A hierarchy of cities and towns supported polyfocal exchange in all four regions too. Other than northern Italy, they were also all governed by centralizing, tax-raising ‘states’, with robust elite demand, for most of Wickham's period. The rents, taxes, and other fees extracted from rural cultivators varied from region to region, but in most of them, prosperous peasants had access to fine ware ceramics, and presumably to other goods as well. By c.950, these regional economies began to link up, as complex exchange relationships developed between Sicily, Tunisia, and Egypt. For a time, Jewish merchants based in the latter could even ship flax over 1,500 km west to Sicily, where it was woven into linen cloth and then re-imported back into Egypt. The Byzantine economy remained more self-contained, but here too seaborne trade connected the Aegean to imperial and former imperial territories in the Ionian and Adriatic Seas, including Venice. Far to the west, the economy of Islamic Iberia similarly remained highly integrated internally, but only thinly connected to other parts of the medieval world. When Italian merchants joined this system, in the mid-twelfth century, what they did above all was to unify the various pre-existing routes into a more or less coherent network that spanned the Mediterranean. Wickham concludes by summarizing these findings (Chapter 7), briefly also considering how transalpine Europe fits into the picture, and sketching out the Marxist theory that underlies his analysis (Chapter 8). For scholars interested in the emergence of a medieval Mediterranean economy, Wickham's macro-scale analysis of the process makes for a magnificent slow burn of a book. While future discoveries and ongoing research will doubtless continue to refine his interpretations, I suspect that economic historians will be working within the broad parameters that he outlines here for quite some time. Wickham's study is well grounded in a wide reading of the existing scholarship, and he is generous in his acknowledgement of where and how the insights of others have informed his own. One of his great strengths is his methodology, which focuses on regional case studies constructed less from the literary sources than from the practical documentation and archaeological data. Wickham tries as far as possible to use each of these kinds of evidence independently of the other, building up separate pictures of a region's economy from the written texts and from published archaeological field work, before synthesizing the two into a composite image. For many of his chosen regions, this work is itself an original and welcome contribution. That it results in a rich array of arresting and sometimes provocative insights is an additional bonus. Some of these are themselves methodological: Wickham is convincing, for example, that genizah documents (written in Arabic, but in Hebrew script), Arabic-script documents, and archaeology all let us see different aspects of an integrated Egyptian economy. His approach also allows him to intervene forcefully in a number of existing historiographical arguments. He rejects the idea that the Middle Ages saw the ‘failure’ of Islamic economies in general, and argues that Sicily in particular was, like Egypt, ‘one of the success stories of the Mediterranean’ (p. 268). He challenges the idea that peasant freeholders lost their lands to powerful Byzantine landlords over the tenth and eleventh centuries. Indeed, his emphasis on, and documentation of, the role of peasant demand in stimulating exchange across southern Europe and North Africa is another important contribution of this study. Perhaps most of all, though, Wickham compellingly argues that, for the expanding economies of the central medieval period, Mediterranean trade was not a zero-sum game, and that, at least down to c.1180, Italian merchants mostly added to its volume, rather than wresting it away from the control of others. The donkey and the boat of the title are metonyms for, respectively, overland and overseas trade. The book is not overly focused on actual donkeys or boats, or, for that matter, on the infrastructure or mechanics of intraregional trade. What Wickham does emphasize is that such trade was commercial, though it operated within a larger ‘feudal’ framework, which focused on taking surpluses away from labourers, rather than a capitalist one, which focused on paying them wages. Wickham is correspondingly – and rightly – sceptical of the idea of a central medieval ‘gift economy’ (p. 481, specifically of north-central Italy). But such scepticism should not blind us to the fact that in the Middle Ages economic transactions were also enmeshed within a larger complex of social relationships. Even when exchange was primarily commercial, it cannot always adequately be understood simply in terms of the classical economic categories of demand and supply. Occasionally, the book's analysis might have been enriched by keeping this fact closer to the surface. In Chapter 5, for example, we learn that the Umayyad capital of Córdoba has ‘the biggest set of ceramics kilns ever found in medieval western Eurasia’ (p. 398). With over 175 known firing ovens, production there was an order of magnitude greater than anywhere else in Europe. Moreover, down to c.1030, Córdoba probably enjoyed a monopoly over Andalusi production of a kind of fine white-glazed pottery, characteristically painted in green and black, and often with the Arabic word al-mulk (‘power’) integrated into the design. By the early eleventh century, pottery of this sort was already finding its way even to rural sites, a fact that Wickham – no doubt rightly – takes as a sign of peasant purchasing power. But one wonders if other factors might have been at play in its diffusion into the countryside too, like the symbolic projection of Umayyad power far deeper into Andalusi society than was typical elsewhere. This is a concept that Wickham floats (p. 399), but does not really explore in depth. That said, exploring questions like these would take space, and this is already a long book. The average length of the substantive Chapters 2–6 is about 120 pages each, meaning that the primary audience of the monograph is likely to be scholars rather than students. To be sure, the world needs scholarly tomes like this one. But a major factor in the success of the ‘commercial revolution’ model was Roberto Lopez's lively – and pithy – book of that name, which synthesized the concept for a wide readership. Similar synthesis for a lay audience would have intensified still further the impact of Wickham's study, and to good effect; for his important, stimulating, challenging counter-model deserves to be equally widely known.