Muslim Agricultural Revolution

The Arab Agricultural Revolution (also referred to variously as Medieval Green Revolution,Muslim Agricultural Revolution, Islamic Agricultural Revolution and Islamic Green Revolution) is the name given by the historian Andrew Watson in an influential 1974 paper to what he argued was a fundamental transformation in agriculture from the 8th to the 13th century in the Islamic region of the Old World. 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.

Scholars such as the historian Michael Decker 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.

Watson's proposal was 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 beyond the Islamic world. 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, according to Watson, had not previously grown these plants. Watson listed eighteen such crops. Watson 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.

...
Wikipedia