In due course, these Muslim gains from trade began to lift Europe out of its self-sufficiency thanks largely to Jewish traders, who in the tenth century abandoned the increasingly oppressive court of the Abbasids in Baghdad for the more tolerant regime of the Egyptian Fatimids. Settling along the southern shores of the Mediterranean and in Sicily, these Maghribi traders developed their own rules of contract enforcement and punishment by ostracism, quite outside the official courts. Like all the best entrepreneurs, they thrived despite, rather than because of their government. And it was they
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