Agricultural Labor and Technological Change in Iraq

Abstract

Iraq’s economic and social history has seen cycles of tribalization and settlement (Haidar 1942) caused by instability of cultivation in the irrigated Meso-potamian plain and in rainfed areas. In the 200 years following the mid-17th century, nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralism prevailed, and in the center and south, permanent cultivation was limited to small areas around a handful of towns. Under the Ottoman system, cultivation and settlement were more widespread in the rainfed foothills and upland plains, especially along main transport routes east of the Tigris which had government protection. In some mountain valleys farther north and east, agricultural settlements were protected by autonomous Kurdish principalities which survived until about the mid-19th century. Other mountain areas were inhabited by semi-nomadic tribes, some of whom only settled during the 1920s and 1930s (Khisbak 1972). Crop production and sedentary agriculture began to expand and the population grew rapidly from about the 1860s.