The Arabian Nights and the Pre-History of Commercial Capitalism

faisal al-asaad

Caravane sur la Route de la soie (Atlas Catalan, 1375).

In his magisterial study of the tales, The Islamic Context of The Thousand and One Nights (2009), literary theorist Muhsin al-Musawi describes the Thousand and One Nights as a ‘verbal construction of reality’ that is essentially ‘built on shades of meanings, silhouettes, beliefs, readings, resemblances, and realities.’ For all their indeterminacy, however, these stories demonstrate a consistent fascination with one figure in particular: that of the merchant. Sinbad, Aladdin, and Ali Baba are only the most recognizable names in a whole cast of characters who seem to stand as a perfect allegory for the erstwhile capitalist of the Islamic world. The stories are replete with men and women amassing and losing vast fortunes overnight, traversing vast oceans and exploring distant realms both earthly and otherwise, and doing so while facing mortal dangers and moral dilemmas. Accordingly, they have been described as a ‘mirror for merchants,’ much as other epics like Kitab Kalilah wa Dimna acted as a mirror for princes. All the same, al-Musawi is eager to remind us that this is a necessarily opaque mirror, consisting of a mixture of ‘nostalgia and reality, dream and fact’, and cautions against viewing the tales as a ‘documentary or authentic image of Islamic life in its [medieval] urban milieu.’ Rather than a direct reflection of their context, the Nights should instead be treated as a ‘refracted perspective’ on it.

In contrast, in this essay I suggest that it is precisely their opaque quality and functioning as a refracting mirror that make the Nights particularly instructive from a historiographic point of view. Understood as a screen on which the values and moral codes of a vaguely commercial culture are supposed to be transparently reflected, the tales can without doubt be seen as little more than a source of metaphors and poetic flourishes for scholarly inquiry. But treated as the product of a social imaginary actively grappling with a set of radical historical transformations, texts like the Nights act as an indispensable supplement to a novel and burgeoning understanding of commercial or ‘precocious’ capitalism in the medieval Islamic and Indian Ocean world systems. After all, any critical theory of capital must incorporate a phenomenology of its mystifying character, and the tales may be crucial in that regard. This is especially the case once we begin to invert the common and implicit presumption about the Nights’ relationship to the world of merchants. If the latter are positioned as part of a historically specific mode of accumulation, then the tales may be understood as the fantastical form in which this capitalist mode is represented from the outside, rather than being an auto-referential or autodidactic device for capitalists themselves.

Can the Nights be harnessed to a materialist history of the Islamic Mediterranean and Indian Ocean? What can they tell us about the vexed relationship between tributary or princely states and commercial capital? If the tales are emblematic of key historical moments, such as the so-called Islamic Golden Age, can they further our understanding of the radical changes taking place at the time? In particular, can they be seen as a window into how people struggled to understand and make sense of an emergent world system? I raise these questions in conversation with the recent publication of The Annotated Arabian Nights (Seale & Horta, 2021). Perhaps for the first time in the English-speaking world, The Annotated collection enables a more general readership to experience the tales as a truly animated and living text, and it does so through the sheer scope and depth of said annotations. Beginning with a voluminous introduction that meticulously traces significant moments and turning points in the epic’s long and tortuous history, the text unfolds as a vast repository showcasing both the historical and ongoing development of what is clearly an expansive and still evolving storyline. Alongside the scintillating translation of the text itself, each page is teeming with meticulously compiled footnotes and annotations and a delightful array of historical artworks and illustrations inspired by the tales. Page by page, the collection begins to feel less like a book and more like a dizzying but marvellous imaginarium telescoping the many lives, iterations, as well as inspirations of the tales.

For the non-specialist, something quite remarkable happens as a result. The stories suddenly appear in an all new light: not as a text or a set of timeless folktales, but as a product of the imagination of historical actors, who actively struggled to come to terms with radical transformations as concrete and as pressing as ours. Fortunately, alongside the spectacular revival of the Nights, there has been a resurgence in critical historiographies that make us better placed to ask such questions. Key in this regard is the work of Marxist historian Jairus Banaji, which offers a vital contribution to the economic history of late antiquity and the middle ages. Banaji’s work, which spans several decades, has recently attracted renewed critical engagement for his conception of commercial capitalism. For the purpose of the present discussion, I focus on Banaji’s work not because of the way it theorises capitalism as a systemic social totality, but in virtue of its historicization of capital as a historically contingent social relation that presupposes accumulation through the subordination and alienation of labor. Moreover, Banaji’s approach shows how this social relation gives rise to qualitatively distinct and historically determinate modes of accumulation within different material and ‘geopolitical’ conditions. In this way, and through ideas such as commercial or ‘precocious’ capitalism, it brings a wider array of social formations (including the medieval Islamic world) into the historical and critical framework within which capitalism is usually treated. Let us cast a brief glance at how this story departs from more conventional narratives of commerce and capitalism in Islam.

 Delinking Islam and Capitalism

In economic histories of the Islamic world, the Nights makes one of its first notable appearances in a 1969 essay by historian Subhi Labib. Referring to the figure of ‘al-Tājir as-Saffār,’ or the itinerant merchant, Labib notes how ‘adventure, associated with business, became an essential part of life.’ ‘Many tales from the Arabian Nights,’ he adds,

give important and well-known examples and reconstruct for us the picture of the adventurous merchant of the Islamic early Middle Ages. From the late Middle Ages a typical example which has some informative data is the following: The merchant Muhamed b. 'Abd al-Rahman b. Ism-a'il al-JazlrI (died 1302), one of the most respected merchants of his time, traveled between Syria, Mecca, Egypt, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf and undertook three trips to China. At the beginning of his career he possessed 500 dinars as capital. At his death he left behind the sum of 50,000 dinars.

This is no mean feat by any standard, but relative to what we know about commercial life at the time, it was also far from unusual or exceptional. The sums accumulated by individual merchants in the Islamic Mediterranean and Indian Ocean are famously enormous, and they were often produced over the course of a single lifetime, if not a single venture. More extraordinary still is the fact that, as Labib highlighted, many of them were neither landlords nor tax collectors, and derived their wealth entirely from trade.

Anyone even vaguely familiar with the general themes of the Nights can no doubt appreciate their heuristic value here. In the context of exploring a history riddled with extensively documented instances of people making their fortunes and rising in status almost overnight, in which they do so almost inexplicably or even magically, and in which the very act of travel appears as a perfect guarantee of riches, one would be almost remiss not to invoke the tales. Looking a bit more closely at Labib’s account, however, it also becomes clear why the tales appear only in passing, and why the relationship between reality and parable warrants no further attention. Labib’s essay is not so much a narrative as it is a chronicle, detailing in almost schematic fashion various economic actors and instruments (traders, trading companies, credit, insurance, bills of exchange etc.) that most clearly resembled the trappings of early merchant capital found in, say, Portugal or the Italian city-states. It was, in other words, a study in ‘comparative capitalism’, where modern Western capitalism is held as the standard against which other economic formations are measured to determine their historical trajectory. As such, it sufficed to make sense of one reality through the terms provided by another.

As is well-known, Labib’s account was an important intervention in debates around the origins and historiography of capitalist development. Of particular importance was its role as a response to the Weberian camp, which famously attributed economic decline and stagnation in the Muslim world to a lack of rational and secular legal systems. In this regard, Labib was among a group of intellectuals who strove to show how this was precisely not the case. Among them was also and notably Marxist scholar Maxime Rodinson, whose Islam and Capitalism (1966) was a landmark refutation of the Weberian thesis. It essentially argued that in fact there was little evidence suggesting that Islam’s juridical and cultural discourses posed any threat to commercial life or the accumulation of wealth. For these thinkers, then, it was enough to undo the posited link between Islam and the idea of economic stagnation, and the latter was not necessarily questioned in their interventions. In fact, they remained firmly within the teleological framework in which Europe was predestined to experience the novelties associated with capitalist ‘development’. In a way, then, these were studies in comparative capitalism in only a very loose sense, since they presupposed a singular and linear history of capital, whose common features were used as a litmus test against which all other commercial and market practices were measured. Even when certain concepts were used, such as merchant capitalism or commercial capitalism, it was usually in an equivocal or purely analogous way. As Banaji recently noted, scholars like Labib used these terms largely because they seemed like the best way of talking about large-scale merchant and banking groups who didn’t look that different from those one would later find in Europe.

In other words, these debates were not very conducive for a differentiating historical imagination. While studies of merchant and commercial capitalism had elsewhere provided the means of introducing depth and texture into our image of medieval and early modern commercial praxis, as well as their attendant value forms, when it came to the Islamic world they tended to do the opposite. Consequently, they left little room for curiosity about what economic actors might have thought or felt about their actions, or how they imagined the wider cosmos in which these took place (to say nothing of what their contemporaries or adversaries might have thought or felt about the whole affair). As soon as one strays from the epistemic confines of these debates, however, things begin to look markedly different. Around the same time as Labib, Rodinson, and others were making inroads into a theory of Islamic capitalism, a parallel but distinct conversation with the archives was paving an entirely different path to understanding Islamic juridical and economic discourses. Instead of delinking the two, it sought to better understand their productive interaction.

Rethinking Islam and Capitalism

Abraham Udovitch is something of a household name in the literature on Islamic commerce. Of all the early writers in the field, his work was pioneering in the study of Muslim jurisprudence and legal texts as holistic sources of knowledge that shed light on all facets of social life. Indeed, it highlighted the role of legal texts as arguably the principle means for discussing ‘the economy’. What was rather unique and path-breaking in Udovitch, however, was his insistence on jurisprudence as discourse that shaped commercial practice without necessarily defining or determining it. In fact, he stressed the reciprocal effect of commercial prerogatives, and privileged local knowledge as the key point of mediation between juridical and economic discourse. The implications of this framework for understanding Islamic political economy are far-reaching. As he put it in a well-known essay:

In medieval Islamic urban society, the marketplace and the mosque were the two principal, recognised loci of extra-familial sociability. To be sure, there were other places and other occasions (festivals, ceremonies and public and private celebrations), but it was religion and economic exchange that provided the primary and ongoing opportunities for sociability. If we join this social reality to the ideological ambition of Islamic law which saw itself as all embracing, as an absolute, divine norm for behaviour in this world and as a guide for entry into the next, then it is perhaps not surprising that the treatment of commercial law in Islamic legal compendia becomes more than just a technical discussion, taking on the dimension of a philosophy of economic life and an Islamic constitution for the marketplace.

This thesis has since inspired a rich and expanding body of scholarship interested in historicising social life in medieval Islamic polities, from their expansive merchant laws to their capacious institutions for exchange, property ownership, and material possession.

In an important sense, this has been possible precisely because of the shift away from the metanarratives of ‘comparative capitalism’. Indeed, Udovitch’s famous monograph, tellingly named Profit and Partnership in Medieval Islam (1970), includes ample discussion of capital (ra’s al-mal) but almost no references to capitalism or to contemporaries like Labib and Rodinson. This shift was strategic and consequential for the historiography we have at our disposal now. In a recent review of this trajectory, one scholar sharply observes that ‘[f]or all the richness and detail in their approach, these historians have shied away from addressing the broader debates on capitalism in world history, or even the place of the Islamic world in economic history more broadly.’ However, this is not without exception. Banaji’s A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism (2020) begins with an odd but telling remark about the word ‘factory’. For much of its history, the term referred not to grimy workshops and warehouses but to vibrant communities of traders from distant countries. Usually located in port towns and cities, factories were the key indicator that a locale was actually connected and integrated into a large and complex system, sometimes of global proportions. In this way, Banaji innovates an age-old but critical lesson underlying the most important strands of Marxist historiography: that the story of capitalism need not begin or end with factory workers in industrialised countries, nor does the latter have to determine how we understand capital as a larger historical fact.

From there, the book immediately dives into an exploration of the Islamic Mediterranean and Indian ocean. An exquisite curation of passages from first-hand accounts invites the reader to imagine a world teeming with intrepid characters. Alongside merchants, pilgrims, and itinerant scholars and mystics, there are sailors, pearl divers, and coral harvesters who populated a sprawling web of littoral zones stretching from Ceuta to Malacca. In between, bustling entrepôts connected the two ‘cradles of globalisation’ via trade routes that sustained ceaseless maritime trade and wholesale markets. Premium coral is sourced in bulk from the Algerian and Spanish coasts, and then polished and sold in Alexandria, while pepper and spices travel in the opposite direction from the Malabar Coast by way of the Sudanese port of Aydhab. Along the way, fanādiq (commercial complexes) act as ‘virtual stock exchanges’ where traders, bankers, and artisans conducted business with no separation between production and exchange. According to contemporary observers, the mobility between many of these ports was so high that it became common practice for individual merchants to move between multiple residences which they maintained in different cities. Mobile as they were, though, these adventurers also established long-standing and tenacious communities which became objects of marvel for renowned contemporaries such as Ibn Battuta and Ibn Khaldûn. The Portuguese in contrast found in them an immense nuisance when they tried to expand into the Indian Ocean in the fifteenth century, going so far as to bombard Malabar ports which refused to expel Muslim traders. For Banaji, this level of violence heralded the arrival of a new form of capital that was at odds with Islam’s ‘capitalism of networks.’

It is precisely this eye for identifying socially determinate and qualitatively different forms of capital on an epic historical scale that distinguishes Banaji’s work. A Brief History is really a short summary of several decades’ worth of work that, while expansive in historical scope, focuses on Late Antiquity in particular. The seemingly counter-intuitive (at least to most readers of Marx) reason for this being that the epoch witnessed what can only be described as a ‘precocious’ capitalist revolution. Unlike the European mercantilism of later centuries, which would culminate in the corporate revolution that established the institutional framework of industrial capital, the economies and polities of Late Antiquity gave rise to a rather unique form of commercial capital. That this form of capital seems peculiar to the Islamic world has less to do with Islam itself than with its pre-history, hence Banaji’s focus in earlier works on the Byzantines and the Sassanians. It is not simply that the Caliphate opportunistically invaded large and declining empires. It is rather that it did so at a time when a confluence of economic and geo-political developments had reached a striking maturity. For centuries, Arabia’s neighbours had cultivated intensely urban and highly monetised societies through rather unique fiscal and commercial policies. While the Sassanians built large-scale and market-oriented estates alongside an expansive maritime empire in the Indian Ocean, the Byzantines developed a standardised monetary system based on high value gold coin, as well as a private banking sector that buffered shortages using complex forms of credit. In addition to inheriting and combining both these systems, the Umayyads and Abbasids also integrated the two massive economic zones to which they belonged. As a result, both were definitively transformed.

This transformation is vividly expressed in the novel economic arrangements that took hold at the time. Referring specifically to the Mediterranean basin, Fernand Braudel once said that long-distance trade was ‘the very life-blood of commercial capitalism,’ and this is no less true of the larger Islamic world. There now existed a system of commercial exchange where wealth could be generated as easily by the circulation and rapid mobility of goods across space as by their production. However, the practices that differentiated this context from the one to which Braudel alluded are just as important. Building on Udovitch’s rigorous study of the commenda, for instance, Banaji elaborates the social and historical implications of this unique institution. For the Portuguese and the Dutch, the commenda meant unlimited partnerships in joint-stock companies backed by the state and bearing accountability only to its shareholders, but its Islamic antecedents bore no resemblance to such an arrangement. Instead, it entailed a single-venture partnership entered into by individual merchants and typically lasting the duration of an overseas commercial journey. An important distinction between this and other partnerships common at the time (such as the Byzantine chreokoinonia) was its relatively egalitarian nature which emphasised, among other things, the remuneration of labour regardless of losses, and the shouldering of risks exclusively by the investor. This is essentially the result of Arab business models (such as the famous qirad or mudaraba) finding in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean a vastly expanded investor base where ‘substantial sectors of the population had a stake in the expansion of trade’ and where many became both investors and factors – ‘that is, switched roles within the commenda contract.’

This is clearly no longer the world of either the Byzantines or the Sassanians, where merchant classes remained at the social and economic periphery. But it’s also not the world of mercantile capitalism, where the interests of the state and capital are increasingly indistinguishable. Incidentally, Banaji’s work sometimes returns to the same old question – why did no state-backed mercantile or industrial capital emerge out of the Islamic world? – but offers an entirely different answer to those we find in the Weberians and Marxists like Rodinson. To begin with, the kinds of world-colonising enterprises that exemplify modern forms of capitalism did in fact emerge from this system, however they emerged in Europe instead of ‘Saharasia’. Much as the Caliphates transformed the vast oceanic systems they inherited in a way that was unprecedented, European states transmogrified commercial capitalism in a way that made it unrecognisable. Alongside the commercial techniques and business models like the commenda, Europe also found in this system the surplus that would give its imperial projects their decisive push as early as the Crusades, ‘an enormous plundering enterprise if ever there was one.’ There’s also the fact that at no point do capitalists in the Islamic world form a corporate type of class solidarity that subordinated the state.

This is the most interesting conclusion, and the one that bears the most significance to the historiographic potential of sources like the Nights. Readers of the tales may be forgiven for imagining their urban milieus as self-contained social isolates, rather than as spaces which represent the constant struggle and negotiation between historical forces. The latter view may shed an entirely different light on the context of the tales as well as their ideological character, since the historical record paints a much more differentiated social landscape with greatly instructive structural and geo-political features.

Capital in the Inverted Mirror of the Nights?

Banaji aptly describes the relationship between Muslim dynasties and commercial capital as ‘symbiotic’ at best – that is, it was usually one of contingent cooperation rather than an organised or systemic class coalition. This is expressed, for instance, in the fact that rulers invested in the infrastructures of trade because it facilitated the commercial growth of major urban centres and, hence, expanded their source of taxation. This relationship was even expressed geographically in the consolidation of closely connected but separate spheres of influence, with Abbasid Baghdad and Basra being only the most well-known and documented pair (and unsurprisingly the settings of many tales in the Nights). The accounts of contemporary geographers have always painted this picture, but archaeological evidence also continues to mount in support of it. Yet there is also a clear historical pattern showing a correlation between the decline of centralised dynastic states, the Abbasids included, and the stimulation of metropolitan markets across the oceans. Presumably this has much to do with the dispersal of political power and the breaking of monopolies, and it shows that it was the peripheral entrepôts with their networks, rather than the provincial capitals with their administrations, which formed ‘the true backbone of the economy.’ This indicates the formation of distinct spheres of influence and power, with equally distinct and relatively autonomous social practices and political consciousness. Elsewhere, the late anthropologist David Graeber has speculated, in characteristically pithy terms, that unlike their European counterparts and begrudging successors, capitalists in the medieval Islamic world actually took their free-market ideology quite seriously. They seem to have made a self-conscious effort to keep the state at arm’s length, knowing as they did that it was just bad for honest business. The heavy reliance on complex and versatile systems of credit, on contingent and negotiable contracts and business arrangements, and on institutions like the commenda, with its insistence on the fair distribution of risks and profits, are all proof of this. In a world wherein capital was embodied by the figure of the individual merchant (rather than the industrial corporation), status, honour, and social prestige took precedence, as did the ability to form and maintain networks across vast distances on one’s own terms and through one’s own volition.

For its part, the state seems to have more or less tolerated the relative autonomy exercised by these networks. This is mostly due to geopolitics. Like their contemporaries in China, imperial dynasties in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent as well largely operated as tributary states for whom the biggest external threat came from steppe nomads. A ruler’s main priority therefore was to maintain political alliances with castes of warrior nobles and military entrepreneurs rather than with merchant and financial elites. This effectively meant that a capitalist formation was able, at least to some extent, to chart a path far-removed from the one that Europe would later tread. The social, cultural, and historical consequences were significant, and they go far beyond the celebrated cosmopolitanism and religious tolerance attributed to the Islamic world. A particularly fascinating consequence was the administration of legal systems within these networks that were entirely separate and sometimes even incompatible with those of the state. Another is the development, particularly along the Indian Ocean coastlines, of a peculiar form of urban versatility. Communities that depended on the ocean trade became rather adept at assembling and dismantling maritime infrastructures, to the point where entire townships and even cities acquired a purely seasonal quality. As such, they also proved incredibly irksome to conquering powers, since they could simply retreat into adjacent marshlands. Europeans in particular were mystified by the tendency of entire ports to disappear almost overnight, only to reappear again when the coast was clear. For sociologist Ravi Palat, the ‘peculiarly labile quality’ of these cities and their ‘striking lack of monumentality’ stands in stark contrast to the metropolitan seats of dynastic power, and as such embody different principles of social organisation.

Despite their integration by way of largely stable networks, the worlds of the Islamic Mediterranean and Indian ocean clearly remained precisely that: a plurality of worlds. As more of what Banaji calls their ‘submerged’ histories continue to surface, we may hazard some speculations about the politics and the possibilities these worlds fashioned (and also self-consciously protected and maintained) for themselves. Sources like the Nights may not immediately seem like ideal staging grounds for such inquiries, but in light of ambitious historical frameworks offered by scholars like Banaji, some aspects of the tales become glaringly intriguing. Key among these, for instance, is the recurring theme of reconciliation, rapprochement, and even fusion between figures that seem to represent the state on the one hand, and those that represent capital, on the other. This theme is particularly potent in the more clearly Arabised and Islamised tales with Abbasid origins, such as Sinbad. Stories about the trials and tribulations of intrepid but wayward merchants and aspiring sailors and artisans are so often resolved in their being rescued or redeemed by kings, sultans, and viziers. Even the arc of the wealthy sisters of Baghdad, an apogee of independent and powerful femininity, comes to a close with their marriage to Caliph Harun Al-Rashid and his courtiers. This theme has come under considerable scrutiny using literary, psychoanalytic, and feminist interpretive lenses, but with the foregoing in mind, it would seem we have another way of looking at it that is at least equally as compelling. Put simply, it’s hard not to see in this theme a way of resolving in fiction what remains ambivalent and irreconcilable in fact. Symbiotic though they may have been, Muslim states and commercial capital remained distinct as social formations with different interests and modes of accumulation and self-governance. It wouldn’t be going far to suggest that the Nights seem to act as a screen for a kind of wish-fulfilment, where capital is quite literally domesticated by and wedded to the state.

Actually, this interpretation of tales would make some sense given what we already know about the social context of their compilation. It is well-known that the Nights are derived originally from a diverse array of stories and oral traditions in the wider regions absorbed by the caliphates. The metropolitan centres built and expanded by these states, such as Baghdad and Cairo, provided an environment where these tales and traditions proliferated and later coalesced into the more composite and formally recognised collection familiar to us today. Al-Musawi alerts us to the fact that this prolonged process of assimilation likely involved deliberate thematic organisation and careful selection of additions, since the popular and folk traditions to which the Nights originally belonged were looked down on by urban elites. These elites presided over rapidly expanding cities which, alongside their role as administrative and cultural hubs, were also a reluctant host to those dispossessed from the countryside. If the networks of the littoral zones were characterised by an astonishing degree of physical as well as social mobility, the Islamic world’s interior experienced something verging on the opposite and resembling widespread enclosures. The confiscation of vast tracts of lands, including the so-called reclamation of ‘dead’ lands, and their transformation into private estates was conducted on a staggering and rapid scale. Exemplary in this regard (though by no means exceptional), were the large-scale irrigation projects in the Mesopotamian floodplains, which are now well-known for their use of African slave labor under the Abbasids. Alongside the development of these estates into highly lucrative plantation economies, there was also a market-driven tax system that worked to the detriment of the peasantry at large. As a result, many rural townsfolk simply abandoned agriculture and fled to the cities. While these policies were the notorious legacy of the Umayyads, aptly described as an ‘acquisitive aristocracy’, later dynasties retained them in many ways.

The majority of people residing in the great metropolitan centres were thus immersed in a world that was not just rapidly changing, but also being transformed by emergent social forms which, for all their entanglement and mutual imbrication, were also quite at odds with each other in important ways. This was a world where immiseration, extravagance, and everything in between were on full display, and often in rather perplexing ways. After all, this was the time of the ‘pious bourgeoisie,’ who embodied in earnest what Udovitch described as Islam’s moral constitution of economic life. Recall the words of a contemporary observer who, describing the wealth of Siraf, remarked that one of its merchants had ‘acquired assets worth 4,000,000 dinars, yet his clothes were scarcely distinguishable from those of a labourer.’ This is the kind of situation that is bound to produce a ‘moral confusion’ typical of conspicuous and geographically concentrated forms of inequalities, but it’s all the more peculiar for being one where the value codes of what we usually call capital and the state seemingly belong to two different orders. In other words, it was one of those situations that may be described, following anthropologist William Pietz, as a ‘cross-cultural’ environment conducive for a process of inversion or ‘fetishism’. That is, a social milieu where people tend to marvel at alien material practices, holding them up for view in myths and fables, and in the process end up grappling with moral and political dilemmas that vex their own daily existence. In this case, the production of wealth ex nihilo, the uncertain promises of distance, and the seemingly timeless grandeur of states acquire supernatural dimensions, but so too does the power of social obligation and mutual aid, which take on an appropriately epic character. This after all is the condition of possibility for the era’s capitalism of networks, as the widely travelled Ibn Khaldūn discovered when he observed what remained obscure to many others: that ‘labor is the essential basis of all profit and accumulation of capital.’ But if in his writings we find an early labor theory of value, in the Nights we may have a unique archive with which to expand our historical understanding of what is usually called fetishism: an inverted mirror wherein, being precocious yet far from mature, capital appears in mysterious form and casts an entirely different kind of enchantment on its beholders.

Faisal al-Asaad is a writer and researcher with a PhD from the University of Melbourne. He is currently based at the Victoria University of Wellington, and his work focuses on the critique of race and imperialism.

Prepared with the editorial assistance of Purbasha Das.