Morisco migration’s economic impact on host societies faded within generations

Evidence

Although the memory of the settlements of the “Andalous” (the name by which the descendants of the immigrants are still known in North Africa) is alive after nearly four hundred years, the impulse that they were at the outset undoubtedly able to give to the economy does not appear to have been sustained for more than a few generations. It is not surprising that an Islamic society like seventeenth-century rural Tunisia should have rejected the alien implant, but the subject deserves far more attention than it has received from economic historians. Perhaps the discredit into which the Marxist concept of an “oriental means of production” has fallen discourages investigators from looking into this interaction. The Morisco phenomenon has been ignored because it fails to fit smoothly into schemata designed to account for quite different realities. In Tunisia, the European and the Islamic economic systems, for so long in external contact through the machinery of international trade, now became intimately enmeshed in a new way as a consequence of Morisco immigration. Plantations were set up as speculative ventures to provide agricultural produce for Europe’s markets. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1653

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: the Morisco settlements as a case study in why skilled migration’s economic boost fails to persist, and how Marxist theory’s discredit left a whole economic-historical topic understudied.