Andrew Watson’s contribution to the history of agriculture: The “Islamic Green Revolution” fifty years on 

Daniel Varisco and Daniel Fuks

            The year 1974 saw two major contributions to the study of the Islamic era in the Middle East. The first was Marshall Hodgson's The Venture of Islam, which introduced the term "Islamicate" to distinguish the multi-cultural dimensions of the caliphate from the religion per se. The second was the pioneering work of Andrew Watson in this journal, proposing an "Arab Agricultural Revolution" in the first four centuries of the Islamic era (c. 650-1100). He expanded the proposal in Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World (1983). This was the year I [DV] first met Andrew as we both gave papers at a conference in Kuwait. There were over fifty participants, mainly from Arab countries. Among the other Western scholars was Cambridge Prof. R. B. Serjeant, a distinguished Scottish Arabist who translated part of a medieval Yemeni agricultural treatise. As invited guests of the Kuwaiti Ministry of Culture, we had been taken directly to the hotel without any customs check. Andrew brought with him a bottle of whiskey, not knowing it was forbidden, and asked if I would join him for a drink. I was not a whiskey drinker, but I knew Serjeant was and introduced them to each other for a nightly toddy.

            Andrew’s 1974 article suggested that there were several reasons why the emerging Islamic area was conducive to the diffusion of new crops and medicinal plants, especially from India, to the Middle East, North Africa and Andalusia. Andrew argued that the empire established by the initial Arab conquests "was peculiarly receptive to many kinds of novelty and favored their transmission." In addition there was extensive travel within the vast stretch of land under "Islamic" authority, whose political centers patronized translations of scientific texts. Andrew saw new forms and management of irrigation as key factors in the diffusion of cultivars and techniques. In the background, Islamic law encouraged investment in such systems, lightening the tax burden. Growing demand from expanding populations and improved supply stimulated an "agricultural revolution" unlike anything before. In the acknowledgement to his 1983 book, Andrew mentioned consulting over ninety individuals, but mainly he examined a wide range of Arabic geographical and agricultural sources to identify the major crops that had become important in the Islamicate world. As he noted, his survey was based almost entirely on textual sources, few of which dated before 900 CE. He was well aware of the limitations of such a resource base, even before there was any significant archaeobotanical research in the region.

            Watson's analysis of the textual data on crops is still a standard reference, and it continues to stimulate my own research on agriculture in Rasulid-era (13-15th centuries) Yemen. Although there is much more information available now, Watson provided a valuable survey of the available medieval texts. The fundamental problem that he faced was that there is virtually no reliable agronomical data from the first two centuries of the Islamic era.  Even the widely circulated Iraqi book on Nabataean agriculture was not written until the 10th century, although its information no doubt derives from earlier material. The major Andalusian sources start in the 11th century, Egyptian sources in Arabic start in the 12th century and a century later in Yemen. Although the caliphate theoretically stretched from India to Spain, extant texts alone do not cover this vast area, and mainly provide a hindsight view, what people four centuries after the start of Islam thought had happened to agriculture.

            A major problem with Watson's analysis is the suggestion of a unique "agricultural revolution" stimulated by the Arab conquests and strengthened during the caliphate. A number of the crops he discussed were present before the Islamic era, as he at times recognized. Given that agriculture was the main economic activity for the bulk of the population in the area, the expansion of urban areas and the need to maintain major armies clearly required expansion of agricultural production. The trade networks linking Asia with the Middle East had always been a vector for transmission of crops and the relative safety of the sea routes surely encouraged the spread of crops from India and elsewhere. Whether or not agriculture underwent a "revolution" is a subjective call, but there can be little doubt that there was plenty of "agricultural innovation."

-DV

Andrew Watson’s passing marks 50 years since the publication of his pioneering 1974 article, which offered the first comprehensive argument that the early Islamic caliphates transformed agriculture across the Middle East and Mediterranean, ca. 700–1100 CE. His "Arab Agricultural Revolution," aka “Islamic Green Revolution” (IGR), described a unique Islamicate contribution to long-term agricultural change that involved unprecedented dispersal of sub/tropical crops, along with associated agricultural knowledge, technology, infrastructure, and impetus. In its time, the IGR contributed to debunking the Pirennean idea that Islam’s rise engendered “Dark-Age” Europe via declining Mediterranean agricultural productivity and trade (Pirenne 1957). Today, the IGR is one of a handful of canonical agrarian “revolutions” in history and Watson’s ideas continue to influence scholarship widely.

One element of their staying power is that the IGR offers a framework for relating basic questions of economic and social history to empirical evidence for agricultural introductions and expansion (Squatriti 2014a; Fuks et al. 2020). Two generations of archaeobotanists studying early Islamic plant remains have used the IGR as a model for assessing their evidence for crop introductions (e.g., Samuel 2001; Van der Veen 2011; Ramsay and Holum 2015; Amichay et al. 2019; Fuks et al. 2023). Scholars from various other historical, archaeological and sociological disciplines employing a variety of methods (e.g., philology, landscape archaeology, ceramology, zooarchaeology, palaeoproteomics, stable isotope analysis) continue to explore, refine, qualify and carry forward Watson’s ideas (e.g., Butzer et al. 1985; Davis 2006; Magness 2010; Amar and Lev 2011; Alexander et al. 2019; Avni 2020; Toso et al. 2021; Kirchner et al. 2023).

However, assessing the IGR’s validity is no straightforward task. One issue is the methodological breadth required to test Watson’s thesis, given his thoroughness in considering all aspects of agricultural innovation, not just crops. The 1974 article deliberately relegated the argument’s base — the evidence for each crop’s diffusion — to the forthcoming book (Watson 1983), focusing instead on demographic, geographic, agrarian, and technological aspects, as well as their causes and aftermath. Critics charged Watson with not paying enough attention to pre-Islamic evidence, emphasizing that most crops on his list were either well-known in the Mediterranean region before the rise of Islam, or remained minor crops (e.g., Decker 2009; Johns 1984; Ashtor 1985; cf. Davies 2023). Similar arguments were made regarding the requisite irrigation technologies (Butzer et al. 1985; Kamash 2012). But the IGR was resilient: Watson acknowledged pre-Islamic knowledge of some crops and techniques, but his argument rests on their hard-to-gauge general entrenchment and expansion, rather than on initial introduction (cf. Van der Veen 2010). In a 2018 correspondence, I [DF] asked Andrew how falsifiable his thesis was, but he was unsure; then 88 years old and long retired, he had relinquished such issues to scholars of the next generation.

The IGR can be assessed by synthesizing and comparing the archaeobotanical and textual evidence for crop introductions in the periods before and after Muhammad (Fuks et al. 2020). This is now possible thanks to the growing first millennium CE archaeobotanical data generated in the fifty years since Watson’s original publication. A multi-regional synthesis was the aim of the Moving Plants workshop held in May 2022 in Cambridge, UK, the proceedings of which are being published as a special issue of Vegetation History and Archaeobotany (Bosi et al. 2023; Fiorentino et al. 2024; Marston et al. 2023; Mir-Makhamad et al. 2023; Morales et al. 2023; Muthukumaran 2023; Peña-Chocarro et al. 2023; Varisco 2023). At present, it seems that the early Islamic introductions were significant but, in some regions at least, the IGR was outdone by RAD (Roman Agricultural Diffusion) — presenting a challenge for the “R” in IGR. Perhaps we should consider RAD and the IGR as two components of a single first-millennium CE phenomenon which was indeed unprecedented in the number of crop introductions, although they rarely caught on as major staples/cash crops (Squatriti 2014b; Fuks et al. 2023). Why some crops did eventually go global while most did not, is one of the most interesting puzzles in the study of crop histories (e.g., Fuks et al. 2024). In the foreword to the 2008 reprinting of his book, Watson recognized that many crop histories would be refined, particularly by archaeobotany and archaeogenetics: “Indeed, it seems likely that in the next twenty-five years the whole history of the rise and spread of food grains in West Asia, North Africa and Europe will be completely rewritten.” Crop history researchers have nearly a decade to meet this deadline, and are on track to get there.*

-DF

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*We would like to thank Paolo Squatriti for facilitating this opportunity to honor Andrew Watson's scholarly legacy and for his valuable comments on earlier drafts.