Charlemagne, Muhammad, and the Arab Roots of Capitalism

Presented in six principal analytic chapters with supporting appendices, this book explores the role of Islam in precipitating Europes twelfth century commercial renaissance. Employing the classic analytic techniques of economics, Gene Heck determines that medieval Europes feudal interregnum was largely caused by indigenous governmental business regulation and not by shifts in international trade patterns. He then proceeds by demonstrating how Islamic economic precepts provided the ideological rationales that empowered medieval Europe to escape its three-centuries-long experiment in Dark Age economics in the process, providing the West with its archetypic tools of capitalism. While treatises such as Maxime Rodinsons excellent book, Islam and Capitalism, document the capitalistic nature of the Islamic economic system, in applying modern economic method to medieval orientalist historiography, this work is unique in capturing both the evolution and the impact of the systems role in forging medieval history.