In Memoriam: Andrew Watson’s contribution to the history of agriculture: The “Islamic Green Revolution” fifty years on

The year 1974 saw two major contributions to the study of the Islamic era in the Middle East. The first was Marshall Hodgson's The Venture of Islam, which introduced the term "Islamicate" to distinguish the multi-cultural dimensions of the caliphate from the religion per se. The second was the pioneering work of Andrew Watson in this journal, proposing an "Arab Agricultural Revolution" in the first four centuries of the Islamic era (c. 650-1100). He expanded the proposal in Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World (1983). This was the year I [DV] first met Andrew as we both gave papers at a conference in Kuwait. There were over fifty participants, mainly from Arab countries. Among the other Western scholars was Cambridge Prof. R. B. Serjeant, a distinguished Scottish Arabist who translated part of a medieval Yemeni agricultural treatise. As invited guests of the Kuwaiti Ministry of Culture, we had been taken directly to the hotel without any customs check. Andrew brought with him a bottle of whiskey, not knowing it was forbidden, and asked if I would join him for a drink. I was not a whiskey drinker, but I knew Serjeant was and introduced them to each other for a nightly toddy.