This series of interviews shines a spotlight on researchers working on or with the Caliphal Finances project. Each interview showcases the variety of scholarship that is connected to our project’s research. We can’t think of a better person to kick off this series than our Principal Investigator, Marie Legendre.
Could you briefly tell us about your background and career path?
I grew up in a small city in northern France in a region that does not have a great reputation so I will not dare mentioning it here. My luck was that I was born in a family that travelled a lot and I decided from early on that my preferred part of the world would be Egypt. That was after seeing something in one of my mother’s school books about the pharaohs. I ended up studying archaeology and history of art at the Sorbonne as well as Arabic because I wanted to work on archaeological excavations in Egypt. The highlights of my undergraduate training included internships on excavations in France, studying most stages of the Egyptian language (from the Hieroglyphs to Coptic – though many of the stages in between still remain obscure to me to this day) as well as Greek, and most importantly discovering Islamic studies. I discovered Islam as an academic topic and got hooked from day one. I shifted my interest from Antiquity to the early Middle Ages while I was studying for my masters in Egyptian archaeology. Then I received a scholarship to continue studying Arabic in Cairo. Being in Cairo and eventually working with Egyptians on excavations on the fringes of the desert felt like I could not achieve anything better and I had no clear idea of what I could do next.
It took the expert eye of a fantastic scholar of Egyptian medieval history, Sylvie Denoix, to recognize in my training the potential to work on the multilingual documents written on papyrus from early Islamic Egypt. It has been a joy to make a career out of the study of those documents. I started a PhD – albeit reluctantly at first – that ended up being a regional study of the administrative hierarchy of the early Islamic state in Middle Egypt. Before coming to Edinburgh, I taught two years at Oxford, two years at SOAS and I had a research postdoc in Aix-Marseille Université for two years as well. I have edited a few papyrus documents myself though most of my editions remain in the folders of my computer at this stage. I do like to define myself as a historian first though most of my everyday research work is that of a papyrologist.
Image provided by Marie Legendre
I cannot pinpoint when and why I became obsessed with pre-modern state and empire structures or with taxes but I have been finding it most stimulating to work on such topics for most of the past two decades.
What is your current role, and what does it involve?
I am Senior Lecturer in Islamic History at the University of Edinburgh. I teach introductory courses on the history of Islam until the dawn of modernity. If you pass by my undergraduate classroom you will hear about army sailors getting lost between Umayyad provinces, elite Arab women giving speeches and scolding the caliph and you might also hear Dire Straits (I’ll let you guess why). I used to teach a special subject on the Umayyads that is being suppressed due to university budget cuts and I teach another one on the 7th century with my colleague Yannis Stouraitis who is Senior Lecturer in Byzantine history. I supervise PhD students and my research would be a lot less interesting without the conversations I have with them. Most of my research life at the university happens in the framework of the Centre for Late Antique, Islamic and Byzantine Studies which I co-direct and I am part of the teaching team on the related master as well.
Can you summarise your main research areas (and current projects)?
Papyri from the early Islamic period can help scholars tell many stories and I made the rather unoriginal choice to work on the early Islamic administration, a common interest among historians trained in papyrology. My main PhD supervisor, Professor Petra Sijpesteijn, had written (and is still writing) extensively on the topic and I became a functioning scholar in the history of early Islamic Egypt while working on her project The Formation of Islam, The View from Below at the University of Leiden. I cannot pinpoint when and why I became obsessed with pre-modern state and empire structures or with taxes but I have been finding it most stimulating to work on such topics for most of the past two decades. I especially enjoy joining conversations on those topics in the field of pre-modern history at large. Fortunately, I have multiple occasions to do so as I am co-PI with Antoine Borrut and Michael Cook of the Balzan Seminar on the Formation, Maintenance, and Failure of States in the Muslim World before 1800. Most recently, I have tried to spotlight the role of taxes on one side and elite women on the other as key to our understanding of the early caliphate. I am still astonished to see how little is being written about women in the early caliphate in light of the wealth of material available about them. My interest in multiple languages also led me to study multilingualism – leaving a multilingual life and raising multilingual children I don’t see this part of my research dying any soon.
How did you come up with the Caliphal Finances project?
I tried to write about Abbasid administration based on Egyptian papyri in the last chapter of my PhD and I could not make head or tail of the material. This was nothing new, Jean Gascou wrote in 1983 in a review about Kosei Morimoto’s book on The Fiscal Administration of Egypt in the Early Islamic Period that the papyrological material of the Abbasid period was of lesser quality than that of the Umayyad era. He wrote this before I was born and by the time I was trying to finish my PhD not much had changed. Most historians who are working in the Abbasid period had never seen a papyrus document in their life – this is still largely the case today. I also realised that I needed a team to advance our knowledge of the Abbasid period ‘from below’ as I could not do this on my own. I am lucky to have the most wonderful team now working with me on Caliphal Finances!
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An exemplary specimen of the Caliphal Finances project’s sources: Abbasid fiscal document. |
The same document, but on the other side: list of names in Coptic with Greek numerals. Austrian National Library, Vienna, A. P. 02946 verso. |
What is the main goal or output of the project you want to achieve?
The starting point is the Egyptian material (papyrus documents from Egypt written in Greek, Coptic and Arabic as well as coinage, glass weights, stelas) dated between the mid-8th century and the mid-10th as we stop the chronology of the project with the Fatimid conquest in 969. Papyri dating from this period have been largely overlooked, especially in comparison with the earlier material dating from the immediate post-conquest period and the Umayyad era. Those documents are used to reconstruct fiscal assessment and fiscal collection, to study the different types of taxes, the modes of extraction (cash, kind, labour) and the administration handling fiscal administration. Studying the Egyptian papyri is fruitful in itself as there are aspects of the fiscal process that are only visible in this corpus, but then we face the question of Egyptian exceptionalism. This is why the project does not focus only on Egypt as we aim to reconstruct fiscal practices from the Egyptian tax-payer to the Caliph. We also avoid looking at the papyri in isolation as we are collecting information about fiscal theories and practices in long form sources as well, Egyptian and non-Egyptian.
In your opinion, what is a key argument or prevailing assumption in Islamic fiscal history that needs to be challenged?
One of them is that tax assessment is mostly based on the religious affiliation of taxpayers as some research in Islamic studies – especially those that deal with taxes – are still too often governed by polarized categories of Muslims and non-Muslims. We see so many time that other types of social capital than religious affiliation were prominent in deciding the fiscal burden of a given person or group. Another common assumption is that the early Islamic fiscal system is governed by two taxes (capitation and land tax). This is within a wider perception of Islamic states are simple or even informal entities. My view is that state structures at that time were highly complex and, again, religious affiliation or access to land were far from the main logics shaping the early Islamic fiscal system.
A big thank you to Marie for sharing her thoughts with us this week. We will be talking to many more researchers in the future, so keep an eye out!
Banner image: View on the Nile from Nile taken from the Gebel el-Teir. Image provided by Marie Legendre.
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