Wickham Chris. The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950-1180

Oxford University Press, 2023. — 848 p.- Offers an exciting new account of the Mediterranean economy in the tenth to twelfth centuries
- Draws on and connects the documentary and archaeological sources for the first time
- Makes a systematic comparison between Latin Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic World
- Aims to change our view of the medieval economy as a wholeChris Wickham offers a new account of the Mediterranean economy in the tenth to twelfth centuries, based on a completely new look at the sources, documentary and archaeological. Our knowledge of the Mediterranean economy is based on syntheses which are between 50 and 150 years old; they are based on outdated assumptions and restricted data sets, and were written before there was any usable archaeology; and Wickham contends that they have to be properly rethought.This is the first book ever to give a fully detailed comparative account of the regions of the Mediterranean in this period, in their internal economies and in their relationships with each other. It focusses on Egypt, Tunisia, Sicily, the Byzantine empire, Islamic Spain and Portugal, and north-central Italy, and gives the first comprehensive account of the changing economies of each; only Byzantium has a good prior synthesis. It aims to force our rethinking of how economies worked in the medieval Mediterranean. It also offers a rethinking of how we should understand the underlying logic of the medieval economy in general.Chris Wickham taught at Birmingham for nearly thirty years before moving to Oxford as Chichele Professor in 2005. He was Head of Department from 2009 to 2012, and Head of the Humanities Division in 2015 and 2016. He returned to Birmingham as part-time Professor of Medieval History from 2016 until his retirement in 2021. He was Director of the British School at Rome in 2020-2021.