Andalus: what went wrong?

As more grist against that Andalusi paradise, today the Turtle linked Islam and human capital in historical Spain. And excerpted it, which is great on account Journal of Economic Growth paywalled the original.

Francesco Cinnirella, Alireza Naghavi and Giovanni Prarolo correlated last January a dataset on Muslim domination between 711-1492 and literacy in 1860 for about 7500 municipalities. The longer the city or large town was Muslim, the less-literate as of 1860.

We could argue the encomienda system, and Spain's general north-upon-south orientation under the later Catholic kings. We might even consider the Inquisition. Both contributed to emigration from Andalucia and Extremadura over to the New World; back home that brain-drain and lack of available husbands assuredly didn't help the southern gene-pool. I understand that el Presidente Alejandro Lerroux argued much of what I've noted. Lieutenant General José Sanjurjo might counterargue how come the southern moriscos had taken to the latifundia system so well.

Cinnirella, Naghavi and Prarolo show that a longer Muslim domination in Spain is negatively related to the share of merchants. Now, this surprises me for two reasons. One comes from Chase Robinson's Islamic Civilization in Thirty Lives, a sort of Suetonian take on the history; and as far as I can tell, a fine one (he has good things to say of Algazel but not of Ibn Taymiyya). His comments on Central Asia are absolutely buttressed by the evidence of Central Asian IQ if we take local science as proxy. Robinson offers the missing link, as local trade, which Muslims encouraged...

... in Central Asia. But not in Spain. Why not in Spain?

If you'll allow me to speculate, which I suppose you can't much prevent me, I suggest that Spain had a limited pool of customers. First up, Andalus barely included the northern littoral, whose local Gallegos and Euskara behaved like Tabaris over in Iran. Western Spain geographically would be left trading with the Azores and, oops, the Lishbunatis actually tried crossing the saltwater and failed. The Umayyad amirate lost Barcelona to Louis the Pious by, what, AD 800? so that's out. (The marchlords-later-dukes introduced all the Carolingian reforms, so Barcelona would become a wealthy tradepost for Catholics.)

Okay: so, Sicily. And North Africa. Well, according to Robinson, North Africa was a basket-case of, basically, marginal city-states and Kabyles. The age of Augustine was long, long past.

I can assuredly lay some blame upon "Islamic institutions" as Andalusis (and Nafris) expressed them. The first century of Islamic occupation in Iberia, in particular, was little more than an Awza'ite plunder-state; they left a bad stench in the nostrils of all western Europeans, which the Umayyad caliphate could scarcely live down (much less the bigoted Almoravids and even-worse Almohads). Of course this goes two ways; the imams didn't approve trade with the infidel in return, which trade might have saved them. But given that the Islamic institutions of Rayy, Samarkand, Herat, and Delhi(!) all seemed to be working just great during this era; I am reluctant to blame Islam as such.

BACKDATE 5/24