Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran by Richard W. Bulliet

Author:Richard W. Bulliet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/Middle East/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-09-11T16:00:00+00:00

The Big Chill signaled by the Mongolian tree-ring data roughly coincides with a pronounced decline in Iran’s cotton industry. Cotton did not reappear as a fiber of major economic importance until early modern times, when printed fabrics inspired by Indian techniques became popular, and raw cotton from northern Iran began to be exported in large quantities to Russia, primarily in the nineteenth/thirteenth century.42 This does not mean that cotton made no return after the Big Chill. When it did, however, it was grown more in southern than in northern Iran, and its economic role was local rather than transregional.

André Miquel, in the first volume of his monumental La géographie humaine du monde musulman jusqu’au milieu du 11e siècle, which encompasses all parts of the Islamic world, lists the references to cotton growing and cotton export that he found in four major works of Arabic geography completed before the year 1000/390 (i.e., before the Big Chill).43 Half—twenty-one out of forty-one—pertain to the Iran-Afghanistan-Central Asia region, and two-thirds of those refer specifically to cities or provinces north of Isfahan. Miquel’s tabulation can be compared with a later geographical work penned by a government official named Hamd-Allah Mustawfi in 1340/740, when the Big Chill had faded from memory.44 Mustawfi mentions only twelve Iranian cotton-producing areas, and of those twelve, all but three are located either in southern Iran or in the balmy Caspian lowlands. More important, the locales he mentions are mostly villages, not cities, which indicates local consumption rather than a major export trade in cotton textiles. Major cities like Isfahan, Qazvin, Nishapur, Marv, Bukhara, Samarqand, and Rayy that had dominated the cotton industry prior to the year 1000/390 are no longer mentioned as producing areas. Moreover, these cities are not named as cotton centers in Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo’s narrative of an embassy to the court of Timur in the years 1403–1406/805–808.45 His observations on cottons imported to Sultaniyeh, Timur’s capital in northwestern Iran, specify Shiraz, Yazd, and Khurasan as producing areas: two southern cities and one general northeastern province.

The southward shift in cotton growing hints at climate change having lingering effects. However, it is hard to determine whether cold weather in and of itself brought devastation to the cotton planters of the north. Fluctuations in the Siberian High, a winter phenomenon, probably did not diminish the heat of summer or shorten the growing season to less than the five months needed for cotton plants to mature. To be sure, the cotton plant is sensitive to cold, but the greatest sensitivity is at the time of planting. Seeds do not germinate properly if the soil temperature falls below 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Without thermometers, Iran’s cotton farmers may well have occasionally sown their crops too early after a severe winter. An agricultural almanac from Yemen, where Iran’s cotton culture probably originated, matches crop activities to specific times of year, suggesting that farmers relied more on time-honored tradition than on technical calculation in determining the best date for planting.46 However, as experienced men

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