CGEH Working Paper Series Immovable capital goods in medieval Muslim lands: why water-mills and building cranes went missing Bas van Bavel, Utrecht University Eltjo Buringh, Utrecht University Jessica Dijkman, Utrecht University June 2015 Working paper no. 69 www.cgeh.nl/working-paper-series/ Immovable capital goods in medieval Muslim lands: why water-mills and building cranes went missing Bas van Bavel, Utrecht University Eltjo Buringh, Utrecht University Jessica Dijkman, Utrecht University Abstract: Immovable capital goods such as water-mills were in widespread use in Muslim lands in the early medieval period, just as in the Latin West. In the later Middle Ages, however, vertical windmills and cranes, then widely employed in Europe, were not introduced there, while the number of water-mills dwindled. This decline was concentrated in specific parts of the Muslim world, which rules out time-invariant and generic causes like religion. We show that it was the growing insecurity of property rights and introduction of a specific system of land tenure (ikta) that prevented application of such labor-saving capital goods. Keywords: capital goods, Middle East, Middle Ages, great divergence JEL Codes: N10, N15, N30, N35, N70. Corresponding author: Bas van Bavel,
[email protected]. Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Antoni Furio (Universitat de Valencia), Oscar Gelderblom (Utrecht University), Timur Kuran (Duke University) and Maya Shatzmiller (Western University) for their suggestions and comments on earlier versions of this paper, Eileen Power for the correction of the English, Iason Jongepier (University of Antwerp) for his work on the maps and Josephine van den Bent (University of Amsterdam) for her work on the database.