Charlemagne, Muhammad, and the Arab Roots of Capitalism

Gene W. Heck explores the role of Islam in precipitating Europe's twelfth century commercial renaissance. Determining that Europe’s medieval feudal interregnum was largely caused by indigenous governmental business regulation and not by shifts in international trade patterns, he demonstrates how Islamic economic precepts provided the ideological rationales that empowered medieval Europe to escape its three-centuries-long experiment in "Dark Age economics" - in the process, providing the West with its archetypic tools of capitalism.