Dear Professor Zenker:

During the last two decades,a few of us,as historians of economists with
roots or interests in the Islamic world,have tried to challenge the so
called Schumpeterian Great Gap argument (i.e.that economics began with
ancient Greeks;died after the demise of that civilization for several
centuries,to be revived by Thomas Aquinas in Western Europe).We have tried
to argue that there was no historical discontinuity in economic
thought,since ancient civilizations-Chinese,Indians,and in particular
Muslims who also inherited Greek,Iranian (i.e., Persian) civilization
continued economic analysis,and even anticipated many economic concepts
which were developed later on in Western Europe.For example,in my
History of Political Economy paper (1998,"Seeking the Roots of Adam
Smith's Division of Labor in Medieval Persia" ),I demonstrated that the
famous example of the pin factory in Smith's WN for the value of
division of labor had been used by 11th century Persian/Muslim thinker
Ghazali (in his Revial of Religious Scheinces),.....Those medieval
thinkers (philosophers,writers of mirrors for princes,or
theologian/jurists),writing during the Golden Age of Islam (when a
rudimentary form of capitalism emerged),understood many modern
economic concepts-like demand/supply/the
market mechanism,which was ignored.In fact,during last year's HES
conference in Toronto, in a paper entitled "Eurocentrism and the
Schumpeterian Great Gap Thesis:How and Why Were the Contributions of
Medieval Muslim Scholars to Economics Ignored",I tried to explain why
have historians of economics ignored those contributions during the last
few centuries.Recently,I have also seen attempts to show the contributions
of other ancient civilizations to the history of economics.

Sincerely,

Hamid Hosseini