Charlemagne, Muhammad, and the Arab Roots of Capitalism

Gene W. Heck explores the role of Islam in precipitating Europea (TM)s twelfth century commercial renaissance. Determining that Europea (TM)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 empoweredmedieval Europe to escape its three-centuries-long experiment in a oeDark Age economicsa a " in the process, providing the West with its archetypic tools of capitalism.