ABSTRACT
The imaginative announcement of our conference spells a challenge which the writers of this joint paper have taken up boldly. We are asked to suggest leads for future research in what has been properly defined as an underdeveloped area of economic history: it will not be enough to use as working hypotheses such tentative generalizations as may be construed upon a handful of known Middle Eastern facts, unless we borrow concepts and assumptions from some of the more developed historical areas. Without minimizing the variables of geographic, political and cultural milieus, we are entitled to expect that fundamental trends of climate, population, and economic and social organization were not restricted to one of the major regions of Eurasia, but affected them all. At least, we must be prepared to assume that such international trade as may have existed in the Middle East was linked to trade conditions in other areas, and that basic changes in England, Italy, India and China had some repercussions on Middle Eastern commercial trends. With these guidelines in mind, we may explore the overall economic history of Eurasia at a period of accelerated change—namely, the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries—and endeavour to outline a general pattern. Clearly, such an undertaking within the scope of a few pages can produce no more than an over-simplified contour map; but while such a map will not tell us all we would like to know, it may add a dimension of knowledge which would be obscured by the immediate and overwhelming reality of minute detail.
