Land and Trade in Early Islam: The Economy of the Islamic Middle East 750-1050 Ce

Land and Trade in Early Islam discusses the latest developments in the field of early Islamic economic and social history, and explores the notion of polycentrism and the dialectic between global and local between 700 and 1050 CE. The volume explores the political mechanisms and the role of Islamic states in regulating and developing demand in the economy. The chapters question the binary of core/periphery, and demonstrate how the growing scholarship on the liminal regions of the Caliphate has transformed our understanding of the early Islamic world by offering a more nuanced picture of its regional urban and socio-economic dynamics. Changes in the peripheries of the early medieval Caliphate have traditionally been conceived as resulting from initiatives by the core. An increased focus on the comparatively under-explored regions in central Asia, north Africa, south-east Asia and the Caucasus has thrown this into question. Land and Trade in Early Islam draws on this growing body of scholarship to question the notion of peripherality, explore lines of economic influence and interdependence, and to better understand the regional economic, social and political dynamics of this period.

Hugh Kennedy, School of Oriental and African Studies, Fanny Bessard, Trinity College, Oxford

Hugh Kennedy is a historian of the Islamic Middle East between c. 600 and 1050. From 1972 to 2017, he was lecturer and then Professor in the Department of Mediaeval History in the University of St Andrews. Since 2007 he has been Professor of Arabic at SOAS University of London. He is the author of
numerous books and articles including most recently The Caliphate: A Pelican Introduction (Penguin, 2016).

Fanny Bessard is a historian of early and classical Islam with expertise in Arabic historiography, as well as a practicing archaeologist with a decade of field experience in the Middle East and Central Asia. Before joining the University of Oxford, she held a Newton fellowship at SOAS (2013-15), a
Leverhulme ECF at the University of St Andrews (2015-16), and a Lecturership in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Bristol (2016-19). Her main research interest lies in the social and economic transformations of the Middle East, 700-1000.