Arab Agricultural Revolution

The Arab Agricultural Revolution, also called the Muslim Agricultural Revolution or Islamic Green Revolution, was a transformation in farming across the Old World during the Islamic Golden Age of the 8th to 13th centuries, a term coined by the historian Andrew Watson in 1974. Hundreds of crops were diffused across the Islamic world and beyond, including rice, sugar cane, cotton, citrus fruits, bananas, watermelons and hard wheat, many reaching regions where they had not previously been grown, alongside advances in irrigation and water management such as the qanat underground channel and the saqiyah waterwheel, and improved crop rotation and animal husbandry techniques. The resulting gains in agricultural productivity supported population growth, urbanization and increasing social stratification across the medieval Islamic world.