Joel Blecher

“Profit and Prophecy” retells the history of the spice trade—long appreciated as a catalyst for the birth of early modern Europe—through the eyes of medieval Muslim scholars and merchants who mixed religion and big business along pilgrimage routes and port cities from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean and beyond. In weaving together the economic and religious history of the spice trade, this book project illuminates how the fates of Muslim religious authorities were intertwined with a global marketplace upon which they strove, with intermittent success, to establish and re-establish moral boundaries across time and place.