Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran: A Moment in World History

摘要

This slim volume makes a pair of historical and historiographic arguments about the rise and fall of Islam in Iran between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Author Richard W. Bulliet is known among Middle Eastern scholars for producing an innovative brand of cultural history that attends to the affairs of ordinary people like farmers and camel herders as they figure into more easily documented military, political, and intellectual shifts. Bulliet goes farther here to consider the effects of climate change. The historiographic goal is to find a path between two unattractive options. Placing human agency at the center invites us to follow those in power who produced most of the surviving evidence.