Overview

A new account of the Mediterranean economy in the 10th to 12th centuries, forcing readers to entirely rethink the underlying logic to medieval economic systems. Chris Wickham re-examines documentary and archaeological sources to give a detailed account of both individual economies, and their relationships with each other.Chris Wickham offers a new account of the Mediterranean economy in the tenth to twelfth centuries, based on a completely new look at the sources, documentary and archaeological. Our knowledge of the Mediterranean economy is based on syntheses which are between 50 and 150 years old; they are based on outdated assumptions and restricted data sets, and were written before there was any usable archaeology; and Wickham contends that they have to be properly rethought. This is the first book ever to give a fully detailed comparative account of the regions of the Mediterranean in this period, in their internal economies and in their relationships with each other. It focusses on Egypt, Tunisia, Sicily, the Byzantine empire, Islamic Spain and Portugal, and north-central Italy, and gives the first comprehensive account of the changing economies of each; only Byzantium has a good prior synthesis. It aims to force our rethinking of how economies worked in the medieval Mediterranean. It also offers a rethinking of how we should understand the underlying logic of the medieval economy in general.

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9780198856481

Table of Contents

Reviews

an impressive book that turns the history of the Mediterranean upside down...an extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging reinterpretation of the Mediterranean...a monumental achievement that fully deserves to take its place among classic studies of Mediterranean history. * David Abulafia, Times Literary Supplement * The Donkey and the Boat is an impressive book that turns the history of the Mediterranean upside down...The Donkey and the Boat is an extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging reinterpretation of the Mediterranean at a crucial point in its revival, after the relatively quiet centuries that some of us, though not Chris Wickham, still call the fall of the Roman Empire. Confidently crossing back and forth between the Christian East and West and the Islamic world, his book is a monumental achievement that fully deserves to take its place among classic studies of Mediterranean history. * David Abulafia, Times Literary Supplement *

an impressive book that turns the history of the Mediterranean upside down...an extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging reinterpretation of the Mediterranean...a monumental achievement that fully deserves to take its place among classic studies of Mediterranean history. * David Abulafia, Times Literary Supplement * The Donkey and the Boat is an impressive book that turns the history of the Mediterranean upside down...The Donkey and the Boat is an extraordinarily rich and wide-ranging reinterpretation of the Mediterranean at a crucial point in its revival, after the relatively quiet centuries that some of us, though not Chris Wickham, still call the fall of the Roman Empire. Confidently crossing back and forth between the Christian East and West and the Islamic world, his book is a monumental achievement that fully deserves to take its place among classic studies of Mediterranean history. * David Abulafia, Times Literary Supplement * The Donkey and the Boat is a comprehensive and groundbreaking study. Wickham argues that our understanding of this period has been hampered by outdated assumptions and restricted data sets. It is a major contribution to an understanding of the Mediterranean economy during the Middle Ages and is highly recommended to readers with an interest in this field of study. * Richard Tuttle, University of Edinburgh, World History Encyclopedia *

Author Information

Chris Wickham taught at Birmingham for nearly thirty years before moving to Oxford as Chichele Professor in 2005. He was Head of Department from 2009 to 2012, and Head of the Humanities Division in 2015 and 2016. He returned to Birmingham as pasrt-time Professor of Medieval History from 2016 until his retirement in 2021. He was Director of the British School at Rome in 2020-2021.

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