The Land of the Xeriffe

From Age of Invention: The Forgotten Golden Age by Anton Howes. Not a history of economics but the economics of history. Who developed, how they developed, when they developed and why they developed.

World history is marked by efflorescences when some place or region suddenly bloomed - Athens 550 BC, Rome, Netherlands, London, Boston, Philadelphia - places where the human mind changed, where productivity changed, where our understanding changed.

In most cases, the efflorescence is for a decade or two or a century, rarely longer. But why do they occur? What are the key contributing components? Are there common arcs?

I find this sort of thing fascinating.

Howes makes a point that there under-researched instances of efflorescence, pockets of history which are largely unknown.

I agree but I also think that in many instances we have a fine distinction to make. There are plenty of instances where a location can suddenly flourish, not because of endogenous factors (productivity, innovation, etc.) but because of 1) changed circumstances (example, the local climate suddenly improves), or 2) the increased prosperity is due to conquest. All are interesting but only the former are useful.

From the article:

In the middle of the sixteenth century, England was not the place that one would have expected to have an acceleration of innovation. As I’ve said before, it would have seemed a technological backwater, with little trade, few industries, and a host of social and political problems. It was, overwhelmingly, an economy based on the primary production of raw materials.

Yet within a just century, it was already well on its way to sustained economic growth. By the 1650s, it had achieved a critical mass of inventors and scientists, with London a major and internationally-recognised hub of innovation. I’m still exploring why, but one thing I’ve been investigating as I try to figure it out is to look at how England changed through the eyes of foreigners.

To that end, I’ve spent the past couple of days reading the work of an Italian geographer, Giovanni Botero. His 1590s treatise, on The Strength of all the Powers of Europe and Asia (translated into English in 1601 as The Traveller’s Breviat) tries to provide a comprehensive account of the relative strengths of all the world’s great powers. It can be a bit dry — at times it’s a bit like reading a table of statistics, but in paragraph form, as he goes through every country’s population, geography, and industries, as well as their manpower, the sizes and qualities of their armies and navies, their political systems, taxes, and geopolitical situations. Yet in all that information, we get a snapshot of what characteristics stood out internationally, at a point that was midway through England’s crucial century of change.

[snip]

In a sense, this was unsurprising. The Low Countries had long been the most urbanised region in Europe, and the seventeenth-century “Golden Age” of its northern half, the Dutch Republic, is famous even today. It’s already on the known list of “efflorescences”: temporary bubblings up of innovation and economic growth, which ultimately resulted in stagnation or decline, but which we need to explain if we’re to understand why Britain’s didn’t also fizzle out. Yet there was another region that Botero singled out in terms of its technological and economic achievements, which I had never heard mentioned before: the land of “The Xeriffe”.

The term is usually rendered as sharif, denoting a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad via his grandson, Hasan ibn Ali. In 1600, the title was claimed by the rulers of the Saadi Empire, centred around Fez, in present-day Morocco. Botero claimed that its cities were of marble and alabaster, decorated with great lamps of brass. In Fez in particular were “200 schools of learning, 200 inns, and 400 water mills, every one driven with four or five wheels”, from which the ruler derived a substantial rent. The city also featured “600 conduits, from whence almost every house is served with water.” Indeed, he noted that “the inhabitants are very thrifty, given to traffic [commerce], and especially to the making of clothes of wool, silk, and cotton.”

So here was a remarkable city. One that was wealthy, populous, somewhat industrialised, and given to trade. It was a centre of learning for the entire region, especially under the long rule of one of its sultans, Ahmad al-Mansur “the Golden” and his immediate successors: the library they amassed forms one of the major surviving collections of Islamic manuscripts on literature and science (which was captured during a war in the seventeenth century, and has been in Spain ever since). The Saadi Empire even had some military might: during its rise it successfully contended with Portugal, and it had a large arsenal of gunpowder weapons, which it put to use in conquering parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. It maintained friendly commercial and diplomatic links with both England and the Dutch Republic, uniting with them in their opposition to Spain.

And yet, the Saadi Empire is never mentioned as an efflorescence. It doesn’t even feature in debates about the causes of the Long Divergence — the centuries-long reversal of economic fortunes between northwestern Europe and the Islamic world.

Interesting essay.