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This paper reconstructs the organization and development of factor markets in early medieval Iraq. It shows that from the late Sasanian period on, and accelerating in the early Islamic period, there was a relatively unrestricted functioning of markets for goods, labour, and capital. This stimulated market exchange, associated with growing monetization of the economy, especially in the towns, but also in the countryside, even though coercion remained more pronounced there. We hypothesize that these developments brought economic dynamism but simultaneously increased inequality and furthered the rise of new, powerful elite groups, causing the decline of the same markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the evidence for the existence of a labour market, a market for agricultural land, and a market for capital in Babylonia from the sixth to the third century BCE. The argument is informed by our current understanding of the performance of Babylonian commodity markets, for which abundant quantitative information is available. I attempt to establish a connection between the general political and socio-economic development in Babylonia from the sixth century onwards and the increase and decrease of the role that can be attributed to factor markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because the evidence is meagre, this article takes a qualitative rather than a quantitative approach to the markets of land, labour, and capital in Hellenistic and Parthian Babylonia. The evidence consists of administrative documents from Babylon and Uruk (Babylonian clay tablets in cuneiform script), from Dura Europos on parchment or papyrus (in Greek and Aramaic), and from Avroman in (Greek and Pahlavi). These texts suggest that the land market was restricted by the legal rights of king and temple. There is little information on wage labour. Slave labour existed, but neither its role in the economy nor the importance of the slave trade has been adequately assessed. The use of credit, interest, cheques, and other financial instruments is attested, but its significance is small, not least because of the prevalence of iconic interest rates of 20%, set by tradition rather than by market forces. As far as the evidence goes, the markets for land, labour, and capital were restricted by tradition and by the claims of king and temples on land, while the commodity markets were much more market-oriented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]