Agriculture · a Light

Historians still argue whether there was a farming revolution

In 1974 the economic historian Andrew Watson proposed that between the eighth and the tenth centuries a group of crops moved west across the Muslim world and changed how land was worked: sugar cane, cotton, rice, hard wheat, citrus, bananas, aubergines, spinach, watermelon, together with irrigation that allowed a summer crop where the fields had rested. He called it an agricultural revolution and the phrase stuck. Michael Decker and others have since argued from archaeology and from Roman farming manuals that several of those crops were already grown in the Roman east, so what happened was spread and intensification rather than novelty. The argument is not settled. Both sides agree the crops and the irrigation moved, that the Arabic farming manuals record real practice, and that much of it ended up in Spain and then in the Americas.

Watson 1974, Decker 2009 · a continuing debate