Charlemagne, Muhammad, and the Arab Roots of Capitalism

by Heck, Gene W.

• ISBN13: 9783110192292
• ISBN10: 3110192292
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-11-01
• Publisher: De Gruyter

Summary

Gene W. Heck explores the role of Islam in precipitating Europea (TM)s twelfth century commercial renaissance. Determining that Europea (TM)s medieval feudal interregnum was largely caused by indigenous governmental business regulation and not by shifts in international trade patterns, he demonstrates how Islamic economic precepts provided the ideological rationales that empoweredmedieval Europe to escape its three-centuries-long experiment in a oeDark Age economicsa a " in the process, providing the West with its archetypic tools of capitalism.

Table of Contents

Medieval Christian Europe in stasis	p. 13
The Muslims' medieval "trade explosion"	p. 41
Islamic "free market" doctrine pragmatically applied	p. 81
The fruition of "commercial capitalism" in Fatimid Egypt	p. 115
Imperatives of trade and the transformation of Europe	p. 161
Medieval Europe's transformation : "the triumph of ideas"	p. 211
Epilogue : Islam and medieval Europe's economic recrudescence	p. 259
Early medieval Muslim perceptions of the European West	p. 265
The dispersion of Islamic global trade	p. 273
Trade routes leading to the Hijaz at the dawn of Islam	p. 289
The Islamic doctrine of "private gain" in the free market	p. 297
The early evolutions of the "Mudarabah" and "Mukhatarah" contracts	p. 301
Principal trade routes of the Radhanite Jews	p. 305
A compendium of major early Islamic naval engagements	p. 307
Imperatives of trade and the transformation of Europe	p. 315
Reflections on the derivation and use of the "Mancus"	p. 319
The echoes of "Islamic exegesis" in early Christian Protestant reformist thought	p. 321
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