Arab Agricultural Revolution

The Arab Agricultural Revolution is a conjectured transformation in agriculture from the 8th to the 13th century in the Islamic region of the Old World. The name was coined by the historian Andrew Watson in an influential 1974 paper. He listed eighteen crops that were widely diffused during the Islamic period, including four staple crops, namely durum wheat, Asiatic rice, sorghum, and cotton. He also argued that techniques such as irrigation were spread across the region at that time. The paper was not based on direct archaeological or scientific evidence, and its approach has been called old-fashioned and philological.

Some scholars have disagreed with parts of Watson's proposal, arguing that the four staple crops were already widely disseminated before that period, and that Islamic irrigation built on rather than replacing the Roman irrigation network in Spain. However, the historian Paolo Squatriti, reviewing Watson's paper 40 years on, noted that it had proven useful to many different historical agendas, and had held up surprisingly well in the face of new findings in archaeology and archaeobotany.

The Arab Agricultural Revolution has also variously been called the Medieval Green Revolution, the Muslim Agricultural Revolution, the Islamic Agricultural Revolution and the Islamic Green Revolution.

In 1974, the historian Andrew Watson published a paper, "The Arab Agricultural Revolution and Its Diffusion, 700–1100". The paper proposed an extension of the Spanish historian Antonia Garcia Maceira's 1876 hypothesis of an agricultural revolution in Al-Andalus (Islamic Spain). It also recalled the Belgian economic historian Henri Pirenne's 1939 view of the way that a seventh century Islamic maritime power in the Mediterranean had isolated Europe from trading there.

Watson argued that the economy established by Arab and other Muslim traders across the Old World enabled the diffusion of many crops and farming techniques across the Islamic world, as well as the adaptation of crops and techniques from and to regions outside it. Crops from Africa such as sorghum, from China such as citrus fruits, and from India such as mango, rice, cotton and sugar cane, were distributed throughout Islamic lands, which, in his opinion, had not previously grown these plants; he listed eighteen such crops. He further argued that these introductions, along with an increased mechanization of agriculture and irrigation, led to major changes in economy, population distribution, vegetation cover, agricultural production and income, population, urban growth, distribution of the labour force, linked industries, cooking, diet and clothing in the Islamic world.

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