IMEMS Research Showcase: Marie Legendre (University of Edinburgh), “From the Tax Payer to the Caliph: An Economic and Social History of the Early Caliphate through Taxes (7th-10th century).”

 This paper will present work in progress from the ERC funded project Caliphal Finances (The Finances of the Caliphate: Abbasid Fiscal Practice in Islamic Late Antiquity) the aim of which is to reshape our understanding of the early Caliphate through a study of fiscal matters. The core corpus is composed of papyrus documents written in Arabic, Greek and Coptic dated to the Abbasid period, a mass of documents that has been largely overlooked in previous research about the Abbasid Caliphate in comparison to the earlier periods (Medinan and Umayyad). The papyri reflect the local organisation of tax assessment, tax collection and of the fiscal administration in the Nile valley. They allow for a detailed study of the record keeping related to taxation and of its multilingual aspects. Starting with this micro view the project then expands into a study of the whole administrative hierarchy and of the different types of elites handling the fiscal cycle. It looks into the monetization of taxation and balance with extraction in kind (from foodstuff to luxury products) and what this reveals about the economic conjecture of the early Caliphate. This paper will present a number of case studies from the project on the above topics.