NONZERO

Introduction

PART I: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND

1. The Ladder of Cultural Evolution
2. The Way We Were
3. Add Technology and Bake for Five Millennia
4. The Invisible Brain
5. War: What Is It Good For?
6. The Inevitability of Agriculture
7. The Age of Chiefdoms
8. The Second Information Revolution
9. Civilization and So On
10. Our Friends the Barbarians
11. Dark Ages
12. The Inscrutable Orient
13. Modern Times
14. And Here We Are
15. New World Order
16. Degrees of Freedom

PART II: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ORGANIC LIFE

17. The Cosmic Context
18. The Rise of Biological Non-zero-sumness
19. Why Life Is So Complex
20. The Last Adaptation

PART III: FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

21. Non-crazy Questions
22. You Call This a God?

Excerpt from Chapter Twelve

THE INSCRUTABLE ORIENT

[SNIP]

[David] Landes spent part of his magnum opus The Wealth and Poverty of Nations trying to figure out why the westernmost of Oriental cultures, the Islamic civilization of the Middle Ages, had not been destined for industrial greatness. His answer, in part: short time horizons. Whereas Europe's pragmatic medieval Christians coolly pursued "continuing, sustainable profit," the rampaging Muslims were propelled by "fighting zeal" and paused "only for an occasional digestion of conquest and booty."

It's true that many western Europeans pursued profit smartly. In the previous chapter, we saw how some basic elements of capitalism coalesced in Europe during the late Middle Ages—notably the justly celebrated contralto di commenda, used to pool capital for trade.

But the idea of the commenda may well have come from the Islamic world. Before the commenda appeared in Italy in the tenth century, the very same tool, under another name, was used by Muslims as they turned Baghdad and Basra into centers of world commerce, trading goods ranging from paper and ink to panther skins and ostriches. As early as the late eighth century, texts of the Hanafite school, one of four Islamic legal traditions, discuss the commenda—and the business partnership, another capital-pooling tool. (At about the same time, checks drafted in Baghdad could be cashed in Morocco, a convenience not offered by European banks until centuries later.) Over the years, Hanafite scholars would again and again defend the legal infrastructure of finance on grounds of "the need of trade" or "the attainment of profit." In this light, Landes's simple dichotomy—that European Christians were moved by sustainable "profit," whereas those zealous Muslims were just "doing God's work"—begins to blur.

Indeed, one of Muhammad's great accomplishments, and one key to Islam's potency, was making the larger world safe for commerce. In the early seventh century, before he started preaching in Mecca, the town's main commercial lubricant was its sacred shrine, the Kabah; violence was forbidden in its vicinity, so otherwise contentious Arab tribes could meet and trade. Muhammad and his successors, metaphorically speaking, expanded that sacred realm across much of the known world. For him—as for other great leaders before and since waging war turned out to be a way of waging peace.

Of course, during the early Islamic expansion, the war part predominated. In that sense Landes's cartoonish sketch of the Muslim mind has a kind of time-bound truth. But as the Middle Ages progressed, and the Islamic empire grew and crystallized, stretching from Spain across North Africa to Pakistan, its formative mind-set faded. With the trust barrier between distant lands now eroded by a common religion, and communication barriers penetrated by the spread of the Arabic language, this huge swath became a low-friction zone for commerce. Taxation replaced booty as the empire's financial base.

The Muslims, as people are wont to do, retained and refined information technologies that further reduced the friction, including some early algorithms of capitalism, ranging from the commenda to basic accounting. (Speaking of algorithms: the word "algorithm" comes from the name of the ninth-century Islamic astronomer and mathematician al-Khwarizmi, who also popularized the term al jabr, or algebra.) Though tracing the path of medieval memes is tricky, some of these algorithms seem to have reached Europe in time to help usher in the High Middle Ages. It is probably no coincidence that the hotbed of medieval Europe's inchoate capitalism was Italy, with its Mediterranean exposure to Islamic culture.

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