Land Tenure, Fiscal Policy, and Imperial Power in Medieval Syro-Egypt.

AuthorReinfandt, Lucian
PositionBook review

Land Tenure, Fiscal Policy, and Imperial Power in Medieval Syro-Egypt. By DAISUKE IGARASHI. Chicago Studies on the Middle East, vol 10. Chicago: MIDDLE EAST DOCUMENTATION CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, 2015. Pp. vi + 264. $79

The state and society of the declining Mamluk sultanate in Egypt and Syria have long been a topic of discussion in the field of Mamluk Studies and among Islamic historians in general. The characteristic features of the sultanate were the leading role of a military of foreign ethnic origin, the institution of military slavery, the introduction of a system of an allotment of arable land in exchange for military service (iqta'), and a deliberate patronage of Sunni religious culture. All these had roots that went back to the fourth/tenth century but came to a certain culmination under earlier Mamluk rule. The first half of the eighth/fourteenth century, when the decline began, witnessed a transformation of the military regime and its accompanying landholding system, which opened up a new dynastic framework for centuries to come and the gradual entering of the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asian worlds into a global economic system that was itself in transition and on the threshold of the early modern era.

The book under review is a Japanese dissertation from Chuo University in Tokyo. Originally submitted in 2006, it has since been enlarged and brought into its present English form after extensive additional research undertaken by the author, Daisuke Igarashi, at the Middle East Documentation Center at the University of Chicago. Its focus is the period from the death of sultan al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun in 741/1341 through the transitional phase that led to the installation of the Burji or Circassian regime in 784/1382 and to the Ottoman conquest and the subsequent downfall of the Mamluk regime in 922/1517. Against the traditional opinion held by medieval historiographers and many modern historians of Islam claiming that this was a period of decline, the author contrarily emphasizes its pivotal importance for both the historical development of the Mamluk sultanate and for medieval Islamic history in general. He maintains that the handling of events in the middle of the eighth/fourteenth century by elites of the sultanate resulted in reforms of the land tenure system and fiscal policy that had long-term implications for the state and societal structure as a whole. Igarashi is especially concerned with the transitional...

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