through these networks where they were assimilated in a process of ‘oriental
globalization’.
The early Abbasid caliphs (661–1258), who ruled much of the Middle East
and North Africa from their capital at Baghdad, played a pioneering role in
sponsoring secular learning in the Middle East. They created libraries and
observatories in Baghdad which produced translations of Greek and Indian
works on philosophy, mathematics and medicine. As scholarly activity in
Baghdad declined during the twelfth century and disappeared with the Mongol
invasion, intellectual leadership had passed to Muslim Spain (Maddison,
2007). The ‘external’ view argues the European agricultural revolution
(discussed above) was preceded and influenced by one in the Islamic world
between 700 and 1100. This revolution was stimulated by a systematic effort
by the Abbasid caliphate to collect and diffuse knowledge about botany, agri-
culture and pharmacology. Ease of trade and travel allowed new crops such as
sugar cane, cotton, rice, hard wheat, sorghum, taro, indigo, oranges and
eggplants to diffuse westwards. More settled political conditions and access to
credit allowed for investment in improved irrigation, water storage in cisterns,
and water-lifting technology,which in turn permitted a more intensive use of
land (Maddison, 2007).
The financial innovations (in banking, insurance and accounting) associated
with the commercial revolution after 1000 CE in Europe have often been cred-
ited to Italy. In reality, argues Hobson (2004), they were all derived from the pre-
Islamic or Islamic Middle East. Likewise, he argues, the voyages of the
Portuguese in the fifteenth century merely followed earlier Afro-Asian explo-
ra tion. The African Cape, for example, had been rounded in the mid-fifteenth
century by the Arab navigator Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Majid, who eventually
reached the Mediterranean via the straits of Gibraltar. Key features of
Portuguese shipping such as sternpost rudders, triple-mast system (with square
and lanteen sails) had long been characteristic of Chinese shipping and could
have been learned by European visitors to China or by observation of Chinese
ships in Africa and the Middle East. Hobson also argues that the origins of print-
ing lay not with Gutenberg in 1453, but with sixth-century China and four-
teenth-century Korea. The learning of Europe was nothing particularly special.
As early as 978 CE a single Chinese library contained 80,000 volumes (which
was exceeded only by some Islamic libraries). By 1100 China became the global
centre of pioneering innovations encompassing military technology (metal-
barrelled guns, cannons), agricultural technology (seed-drill, horse-drawn hoe,
horse-powered threshing machines, crop rotation, the Rotherham plough), and
industrial technology (iron, steel, cotton, steam engine, blast furnace). In all
cases, Hobson argues, the technology was originally developed in the East
(mainly China) and diffused west. Hobson’s claims are certainly bold: ‘After
1000, the major technologies, ideas and institutions that stimulated the various
Western commercial, production,financial, military and navigational revolu-
tions as well as the Renaissance and the scientific revolution, were first devel-
oped in the East but later assimilated by the Europeans’ (Hobson, 2004:22).
The Great Divergence since 1750 161