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Message:: [QUOTE="EWC3, post: 4599922, member: 93416"]I agree - but things got hectic here so I have to be brief. A big problem is to do with a basic imbalance in the evidence. By their nature coins tend to leave strong evidence of where they come from and where they are going. Slaves do not. And historical text are none too useful on either. Leaves us guessing. The book you cite seems to give a lot of useful evidence - but at a quick look the author seems to follow the agenda set by Braudel and applied by Noonan. That Islam suffered a "silver crisis" – that their mines merely ran out of metal or some such. This seems to me to kind of sanitise our understanding of some of the rather nastier things that were going on in history – closing down of the market economy, serfdom and slavery etc In bed last night I remember the name of the old guy I talked to in Oxford – called ‘Lieber A. E.’ in the literature (Albert I think – his letter and paper are lost in my files). The paper he sent me – criticising that “silver crisis” thesis – does not seem to even get a mention on the web. I see however is he much mentioned concerning discussions of sightings of a supernova in 1054 AD. Sigh – I wish I had gotten to talk to him longer In haste Rob T[/QUOTE]