In The Donkey and the Boat, Chris Wickham reconstructs in eight masterfully written chapters the working and the inner dynamics of medieval economy from the tenth to the twelfth century CE. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction, while also providing a blueprint of the whole work; then, in the following five chapters, the author delves into an extensive, empirical examination of six regional case studies from the Mediterranean world: Egypt, North Africa, Sicily, Byzantium, Islamic Spain and Portugal, and northern-central Italy. In Chapter 7, W. refuses to frame the economies of these regions as an integrated exchange network, as the effects of their combined trajectories should rather be followed from the bottom-up in their shaping of the Mediterranean ecosystem. In the final chapter, the author reveals the connecting thread between the six realities previously analyzed: the feudal economic logic, namely the ability to generate economic complexity without setting-off capital domination.

If read in reverse order, W.’s work is perhaps even more compelling: his perspective on the medieval economy immediately shows, and then the text offers a macroscopic view on the Mediterranean economy and its changes through history. According to the author, the economy of the Mediterranean in the last two millenia has been shaped by three great economic cycles. The first was the ancient trade cycle, which started with the unification of the Mediterranean in the second century BCE and reached its peak during the Imperial period (first to fourth centuries CE); then, it declined in the West, while in the East it continued to thrive until 700. The second Mediterranean trade cycle arose around 900 in the southern and central Mediterranean (Egypt, North Africa, and Sicily), it increased slowly but gradually over the next two centuries, and it reached northern and central Italy around the twelfth century. Its end is traditionally identified with the opening of the third economic cycle, at the eve of the modern period, when the re-orientation towards the Atlantic began. Under this new economic system, the commercial relations between Europe and the rest of the world hugely increased, and with them the forms of exploitation they brought about. In W.’s interpretation, this last cycle, which shaped the rise of capitalism, broke away from the economic logic of the earlier periods.

The ancient and the medieval world functioned according to what W. calls feudal logic: in this context, social rules guided the process of economic sophistication locally, through the demands of the state and the elites. From the Neolithic to the nineteenth century, peasants constituted the base of every society that came to be and production fell almost entirely under their domain; however, under certain circumstances, peasants were forced to produce more to match the demand of landlords and the state. The latter in particular had the means to collect and transfer local surpluses to regional and interregional consuming centres. From here, commodities were reallocated or sold. The more sizable this traffic was – no matter if handled via taxation, local lords, merchants or a combination of the three – the more complex the economic system it gave rise to. At its side, local exchange between peasants or between villages existed everywhere and at every time. All in all, when trying to assess the degree of economic sophistication of pre-capitalist societies, the volume of production, circulation, and consumption of bulk commodities is the clearest indicator, while the trade of luxury goods is only relevant to gauge the spending capacity of the elites.

The main difference between the ancient and the medieval economic systems lies in the prime mover and its capacity to produce and exchange bulk commodities. In the ancient period, and the Roman world in particular, state demand via taxation played a primary role in gathering, mobilizing, and redistributing rural goods. Thanks to the imperial infrastructures, peasants in northern Italy could buy olive oil from North Africa. Within the medieval cycle, in contrast, the redistribution of basic alimentary goods in long-distance exchange was never as significant. In the Middle Ages, artisanal products, and especially textiles such as cotton and wool, replaced grain, oil, and wine as the main objects of exchange. The demand was more differentiated than in ancient times: the state and the elites established the exchange infrastructures, but it was peasants’ access to greater surpluses and therefore to the market of handmade crafts that allowed for a significant expansion in production and trade. In other words, in W.’s model, the economic logic of feudalism relied on peasants as key factors in both production and exchange. Although landlords continued to collect rents and dues from the rural population, in the long term the balance between peasant surplus and lordly extraction tended to favour the peasantry. Not only does W. see this tendency as a form of resistance to the penetration of commercial capital, but he also considers it as an indicator of stability of the feudal economic system, which he deems capable of dynamism and of giving rise to the ‘commercial revolution’, even if it was not subordinated to market forces.

This explains why the ‘commercial revolution’ of the Middle Ages was not linear and took several centuries before moving from a feudal to a capitalist logic. It started in Egypt, then it expanded in the Middle East and along the southern shores of the Mediterranean, including North Africa, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula. Italy was a latecomer in this expansion, while Flanders and England undertook their own separate trajectories of economic growth during the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. There is, in fact, a certain consensus in recent scholarship when arguing for the continuation of the feudal economic logic everywhere in Eurasia until after 1700 and thus postponing the massive diffusion of capitalism well into the late nineteenth century. Only after the 1850s, capitalism compelled peasants to become uprooted rural wage labourers. Once deprived of their control over production, former peasants entered a new economic system, in so doing becoming entirely subordinated to market forces.