Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran: A Moment in World History (review)

This slim volume makes a pair of historical and historiographic arguments about the rise and fall of Islam in Iran between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Author Richard W Bulliet is known among Middle Eastern scholars for producing an innovative brand of cultural history that attends to the affairs of ordinary people like farmers and camel herders as they figure into more easily documented military, political, and intellectual shifts. Bulliet goes farther here to consider the effects of climate change. The historiographic goal is to find a path between two unattractive options. Placing human agency at the center invites us to follow those in power who produced most of the surviving evidence. Paying attention to environmental changes that affected all people, on the other hand, encourages what Bulliet calls a "determinist" account (pp. vii, x).

Bulliet takes a middle course that puts elites, plain folk, animals, and ecology on an equal footing, creating a fuller account: A cotton boom in northern Iran was precipitated by Muslim Arabs who entered this arid plateau and brought with them both the techniques and money required to build qanats—underground irrigation canals—that would support villages dedicated to this cash crop. The production and trade of cotton cloth fostered urbanization that underwrote the development of Islam in the area during this long moment. A cooling trend began in the 11th century. Dropping temperatures gradually undermined the economic stability derived from cotton growing but also brought camel-breeding Oghuz Turks into Iran. Together, Bulliet argues, these changes in commercial agriculture linked Iran to the spread of Islam and world history in a way that has gone unnoticed.

The volume's five chapters are an exercise in the assembly and cautious interpretation of a wide range of data. The first and second chapters establish the premise that a cotton boom happened and document its effects on religious traditions. Biographical dictionaries show the occupational names of prominent Muslim scholars of the period, revealing that they made their living through the manufacture and trade of types of cotton cloth rather than wool, leather, or fur. Tax schedules and place-name analyses of Muslim-controlled cotton villages further support Bulliet's cotton boom thesis and its link to the spread of Islam.

The third and fourth chapters turn to the non-human agents in this story. Tree-ring data from Mongolia indicate a drop in temperature during the 11th century. Examination of the Siberian High—a weather-system circulation over that area and some 1,500 miles to the south—helps establish what Bulliet calls the "Big Chill" that ended cotton growing and the stability it provided.

Did politics or the physiology of camels drive the Oghuz Turks into Iran? When Arabs invaded Turkmenistan in the eighth century, they brought one-humped camels adapted for desert conditions with them. To the north and east, two-humped breeds flourished in colder conditions. Contemporary sources remark that the hybrid is larger and superior to its one- and two-humped parents. Continued breeding between hybrids, however, produced a less-vigorous and less-desirable animal. Thus, nomadic breeders had to chase the warm zone of the one-humped camel west and south into Iran during the Big Chill, meaning that there was a link between climate change, camel biology, and cultural change.

This book is best suited to readers familiar with Middle Eastern history and debates among its scholars. Environmental historians and those interested in bringing animals into our narratives will find Bulliet's argument a worthwhile exemplar. Not all questions are treated fully and skeptics will find more correlation than causality behind Bulliet's story. For example, the Big Chill as established by tree-ring data is said to coincide with the end of Iran's cotton boom as dated by other sources, but Bulliet does not ask about the temporal margins of error for either kind of data. We know it got colder...