Traces the decline of the American trade in the Mediterranean during the Napoleonic Wars. Discusses the downfall of many American merchants in the region and the need to shift to new economic stragegies.

This chapter aims to tie together many of the themes in the preceding chapters with a four-fold strategy. First, it sets out a general overview of the Iberian economy during the medieval period. This includes an analysis of how and why the economic balance of power shifted from the Islamic to the Christian states during the medieval centuries. Then, it provides a broader picture of some major developments in the peri-Iberian European and Islamic-Mediterranean economies in the medieval period, including micro- and macroeconomic developments. Third, this chapter shows how different regions of Iberia connected with elements of the peri-Iberian economies set out in the previous section; specifically how the Islamic states maintained ties with North Africa and points further afield; how the Christian North and West connected with the northern Atlantic economy; how the south-west eventually built ties with the Atlantic islands, West Africa, and more distant markets; and how the Eastern peninsula maintained ties with various Mediterranean markets. Finally, the chapter ends with some general conclusions, including the idea that, as this volume amply shows, it is high time to dispel any lingering sense of an economic “Black Legend” when discussing the economy of medieval Iberia.

This chapter considers the economic context of urban food production of the Middle Ages and situates household-scale production within its wider context. It explores the emergence of evidence for urban markets for foodstuffs and suggests ways in which we might understand the absence of that evidence for the period prior to the eleventh century. In the absence of commercial-scale farming of foodstuffs, household-level cultivation was the principal means of acquiring food for most city-dwellers. The possession of food gardens and their exchange through horizontal networks of families or social groups allow us to see the prominence of family links in the management of urban property and the control of urban food production. The systems which emerged to permit the feeding of urban populations in the early part of our period arose in the context of new ideas about wealth, and emerging communities, such as religious households and priestly households, which required new solutions to feeding urban populations.

The collapse of MBA polities lays the Levant open to Egyptian domination. A network of elite estate dwellers maintains power through Egyptian patronage and participation in the exchange of women and valuable gifts, abandoning large parts of the countryside.

The collapse of MBA polities lays the Levant open to Egyptian domination. A network of elite estate dwellers maintains power through Egyptian patronage and participation in the exchange of women and valuable gifts, abandoning large parts of the countryside.