Caliphs and Merchants: Cities and Economies of Power in the Near East (700–950) offers fresh perspectives on the origins of the economic success of the early Islamic caliphate, identifying a number of previously unnoticed or underplayed yet crucial developments, such as the changing conditions of labour, attitudes towards professional associations, and the interplay between the state, Islamic religious institutions, and the economy. Moving beyond the well-studied transition between the death of Justinian in 565 and the Arab-Muslim conquests in the seventh century, Caliphs and Merchants focuses on the period of assertion of the Islamic world’s identity and authority. While the extraordinary prosperity of Near Eastern cities and economies in 700–950 was not unprecedented when one considers the early imperial Roman world, the aftermath of the Arab-Muslim conquests saw a deep transformation of urban retail and craft, which marked a break from the past. This book explores the mechanisms through which these changes resulted from the increasing involvement of caliphs and their governors in the patronage of urban economies, alongside the empowerment of enriched entrepreneurial tāǧir from the ninth century, as well as how they served the Arab-Muslim elite to secure their power and legitimacy. This book combines a wide corpus of literary sources in Arabic with original physical and epigraphic evidence. The approach is both comparative and global. The Middle East is examined in a Eurasian context, parallels being drawn between the Islamic world and Western Christendom, Byzantium, South East Asia, and China.