The agricultural expansion in Šarq al-andalus

Abstract

In this article we will analyse some features of the process of economic and social transformation that took place in al-Andalus between the 10th and 12th centuries, within the framework of the “economic revolution” of European High Middle Ages, taking the eastern region of the Iberian Peninsula as a case study. The process must have started with a demographic boom and with the increase in agricultural productivity, in this case derived from the technical progress associated with the so-called Islamic “green revolution” of the 8th to 10th centuries. The increase in the growing profits of the countryside and the interest in exploiting them had different effects, such as the coercion of urban elites on peasant communities to take away the most profitable land. It also resulted in the colonisation of less favoured rural areas, especially dry lands that had remained uncultivated until then, by those wealthy groups seeking to expand cash crops, as well as by peasant families dispossessed of better land. The changes in the rural world influenced the growth of the cities due to the immigration of the pressured and displaced rural population, which was incorporated as an urban proletariat in the face of the increased demand for manufactured and consumer goods by the wealthy landowners who inhabited these cities.