Demographic and Economic Factors of Urban Development in Early Medieval Iraq

By Sean Dillon, York University

Advised by Professor Thabit A.J. Abdullah

Edited by Daniel Ma, Marcus McKee, Aaron Jenkins, and River Sell

Abstract

Baghdad was among the largest cities in the world during its ninth century “Golden Age” and Abbasid Iraq maintained urbanization rates that may have reached or exceeded 20%. While the political and geographic factors which facilitated the development of Baghdad into one of the largest cities in the Medieval world are well understood, less documented are the demographic and economic factors that enabled this very high level of urban development. This article introduces new data from eighth and ninth century literary sources and quantitative-statistical demographic projections to demonstrate that rapid urbanization in Early Medieval Iraq occurred in the context of broader regional demographic expansion, emergent rural-to-urban human migration, and substantial shifts in agrarian and non-agrarian sectors of the Abbasid economy.