Abstract:

There has been an increasing interest in division of labor in economics literature since 1970s, after almost fifty years from that Piero Sraffa started to embed ‘the increasing return to scale’ notion into the competitive general equilibrium framework in 1926. This interest is quite normal for the increasing return to scale is closely connected to division of labor. It is a well-accepted tradition in the Western history of economic thought that it starts from Ancient Greek and it reaches to Adam Smith via Merchantilism when economic concepts such as division of labor are concerned. The researches on Muqaddimah persuasively suggest that division of labor cannot be properly understood without the contributions of Ibn Khaldun. Although there are some comparative studies in Western literature on Ibn Khaldun’s views on division of labor, there is no such specific research in Turkish literature yet according to Ulakbim data (1 December 2014). The aim of this paper is to make an assessment upon the thoughts of Ibn Khaldun in ‘Muqaddimah’ and those of Adam Smith in ‘Wealth of Nation’ about division of labor so as to be able to fill in the gap on this domain. Such studies are hopefully expected to disclose the contributions that the Islamic thinkers made to Western economic thought, and have been ignored so far, during 774-1274 period called as Great Gap by Joseph Alois Schumpeter

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