Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

272 DEBT
in exactly the same situation as most of Africa: plugged into the larger
world economy, if at all, largely as an exporter of slaves, raw materials,
and the occasional exotica (amber, elephant tusks . . .), and importer
of manufactured goods (Chinese silks and porcelain, Indian calicoes,
Arab steel). To get a sense of comparative economic development (even
if the examples are somewhat scattered over time), consider the following
table:58
Populations and Tax Revenue, 350 BC-1200 AD
Population Revenue Revenue
per Head
Millions Tons of Silver Grams of Silver
Persia, c. BC 350 I7 697 4I
Egypt, c. BC 2oo 7 384 55
Rome, c. r AD so 825 I7
Rome, c. rso AD so r,oso 2I
Byzantium, c. 850 AD 10 rso 15
Abbasids, c. 8so AD 26 1,260 48
T'ang, c. 8so AD so 2,145 43
France, 1221 AD 8.s 20.3
2.4
England, 1203 AD
2.5
1!.5 4·6
What's more, for most of the Middle Ages, Islam was not only the
core of Western civilization; it was its expansive edge, working its way
into India, expanding in Africa and Europe, sending missionaries and
winning converts across the Indian Ocean.
The prevailing Islamic attitude toward law, government, and economic
matters was the exact opposite of that prevalent in China. Confucians
were suspicious of governance through strict codes of law,
preferring to rely on the inherent sense of justice of the cultivated
scholar-a scholar who was simply assumed to also be a government
official. Medieval Islam, on the other hand, enthusiastically embraced
law, which was seen as a religious institution derived from the Prophet,
but tended to view government, more often than not, as an unfortunate
necessity, an institution that the truly pious would do better to avoid.59
In part this was because of the peculiar nature of Islamic government.
The Arab military leaders who, after Mohammed's death in
632 AD, conquered the Sassanian empire and established the Abbasid
Caliphate, always continued to see themselves as people of the desert,