This series of interviews shines a spotlight on researchers working on or with the Caliphal Finances project. Each interview showcases the variety of scholarship connected to our project’s research. This week, we feature Rebecca Darley, a former guest of the project and Associate Professor in Global History (500–1500) at the University of Leeds. In the interview, she shares her insights on various topics, including her forthcoming books and her extensive experience using coins as a historical source.

Could you briefly tell us about your background and career path?

My career path has been quite a mix of serendipity and design, and still seems to be going that way! My background is as a historian, and that is still mainly how I think of my disciplinary identify, alongside numismatics and archaeology. But I didn’t actually set out to study history, let alone medieval history. When I chose my degree originally, I applied for courses in German and Russian, having studied both at school.

After a year, I realised I was having more fun doing history classes than language ones, so swapped my programme and, at around the same time, I read a popular book about the Byzantine Empire. In some ways, I’ve just been trying to find out more since then. In my first year doing a History BA, I was also given the chance to work with coins for the first time and fell completely in love with a kind of evidence that is so intimate and everyday and, at the same time, so flexible and so capable of opening up numerous different approaches, from image analysis to quantitative investigation to studies of use and re-use.

Those were the beginnings of a journey that has gradually expanded from Byzantine coins to Byzantine coins in the Indian Ocean region, to other coins that circulated in the Indian Ocean region alongside them, to my recently completed monograph (forthcoming in 2025, hopefully!) on political and economic interactions in the Western Indian Ocean in the first millennium CE.

Over the years, I have been really fortunate to have the opportunity to work closely with archaeologists, numismatists, art historians and classicists, as well as scholars of Byzantium and the Western and Islamicate Middle Ages, and to work with museum collections and public exhibitions. All of these experiences and relationships have shaped how I think, giving me really rich material for comparative study and a deep fascination with how disciplinary and subject backgrounds and professional roles shape our core sense of things like how to construct arguments, what counts as evidence, how to frame a question and the benefits of working with others.

Image provided by Rebecca Darley.

In the end, though, I believe that the best way to identify blind spots in any body of evidence is to have at least some familiarity with as many kinds as possible.

What is your current role, and what does it involve?

At the moment I am Associate Professor of Global History, 500-1500 CE, at the University of Leeds. It is mainly a teaching and research position, with administrative responsibilities that are usual in UK university settings. Over the past year, I’ve really enjoyed bringing administrative experiences from earlier in my career to the job of coordinating a curriculum redesign of the University of Leeds’ very long-running and prestigious MA in Medieval Studies. The programme is very multidisciplinary and so the redesign was a great chance to get to know colleagues in other departments and to think in a really broad and collegial way about what medieval studies means to us, now and for the future. I think we have a fantastic new programme launching next year!

Teaching at Leeds has also been a real pleasure. I teach courses on the Byzantine Empire and have designed a course completely dedicated to the Indian Ocean world for the first time in my career (though it hasn’t yet run). Being in a large group of medievalists also means getting to contribute to great modules about the Middle Ages in broad perspective, for example through individual biographies or objects. The university has a significant coin collection and manuscripts, which also really enriches my teaching.

Can you summarise your main research areas and current projects?

At the moment, my first major big monographic project is out with external readers and I’ve been getting feedback from other colleagues, so I’m looking forward to working on revising that manuscript and getting it out. The project grew and grew over time, so it has been with me for a while, but I’m really glad to have had the time to achieve what I wanted to. The book offers the first full survey of the Western Indian Ocean world in the first millennium CE, focussed heavily on the interactive dynamics of states and state apparatuses on the one hand, and economic dynamics on the other.

With the book manuscript now off my desk(top), I’m working on a number of article-length projects that have come out of that research or out of collaborations over the last few years, and looking towards my next big monographic projects. In particular, I’m excited to be co-authoring an article with a group of archaeologists and historians working in other language traditions than mine, on Sasanian maritime trade. In addition, I’m finishing off an article about barter and monetary economies, that tries to burrow into how these ideas have been theorised and to offer an alternative perspective that starts from medieval evidence rather than modern capitalist economies. A newer focus in my research has also emerged in the form of bilingualism, which has always been an interest, but is now going to be the topic of a collaborative article and a conference presentation next year, so I’m really enjoying bringing in more reading on linguistic theory alongside my more usual diet of economic and political ideas!

Looking slightly longer term, I have most of the work done for a book that I hope will also appeal to a public audience, on the importance of a single ancient text, right from the first century CE to the present, looking at everything from the kidnapping and theft of manuscripts  to the role of ancient history in recent anti-colonial struggles. This also builds on work done for my first book, so, after that, it will be onto the next major monograph and there are a couple of directions that could take, looking at the Indian Ocean and monetary histories, but it is exciting to wait and see what other nudges come along, whether it is meeting new people, having the right conversation with an old friend or opportunities to get to know museum collections or archaeological sites.

What sources do you typically use in your research? What are their strengths, and what challenges do you face when using them for historical research?

Numismatic material is still a huge part of my work. A recent reader of my book manuscript described it as being ‘like a barium meal’ through the body of my ideas, which I loved. However, for me, the key to studying the Western Indian Ocean is bringing in a diversity of sources. This is a region and a period (the first millennium) in which there are massive differences in the type and volume of sources that survive (or were ever produced) across time and space.

With my background in numismatics, I think I naturally gravitate towards sources that provide opportunities to track things across time and space in high volume but perhaps as smaller individual ‘packages’ of information than other things: I really value working with inscriptions. These kinds of sources are great, I think, for identifying and tracing changes that took place across long periods and wide areas. An individual text or site might provide deeper insight into that moment in time, individual author or specific location or community, but materials that were used and dispersed widely can offer different kinds of insight into how societies were held together by long term habits and shared norms.

There are real challenges, though, with using sources like this because you have to be constantly on the look out for clues to how the distribution in the record came to be. Is a particular museum collection or published record representative of what was circulating or available in the past you are investigating or does it reflect other pasts – when things were collected or where systems for recording or cataloguing information have operated and where they haven’t? It is also critical always to bear in mind that, although things like coins and inscriptions had a role in the lives of people up and down the social hierarchy, they still usually tell us very different things about elite and less wealthy or powerful members of society.

In the end, though, I believe that the best way to identify blind spots in any body of evidence is to have at least some familiarity with as many kinds as possible. Having had the chance to study archaeology and spend some time on excavation has been great for enabling me to bring in excavation reports and archaeological summaries. I still love doing traditional close readings of narrative textual sources. Even if they are often very specific to an individual or social class, they are also a very differently close and exciting interaction with the people we study.

How do fiscal theories, practices, and institutions feature in your work? How are you approaching these topics?

The challenge in a lot of my work has been to unpick the ways in which fiscal theories and the understanding of fiscal practices and institutions derived from the recent, globalised and post-industrial world have been applied, both consciously and implicitly or subconsciously, to the distant past. I am very interested in histories of fiscality but I think there can be a real difficulty with people applying concepts that are articulated as ‘universal’ in fiscal theory when they don’t necessarily fit with surviving evidence from my region and period of study. Likewise, there can also sometimes be a conviction that the distant past must have been totally different to the present, without recognising many of the same human and structural similarities.

As a result, I read widely about the practices and institutions that people identify in medieval cultures at a global scale and I engage with more recent fiscal theories, especially concerned with currency and monetary policy, but I always try to set these alongside different ways of looking at the same data. In this respect, anthropological and ethnographic literature is enormously helpful. Much of my work is about identifying what might be called fiscal practices and institutions in the world that I study, but my aim is, in the first place, to figure out who was doing what, when and how and what for. If that fits with existing models for practices and institutions, that is great. If it doesn’t, that is also fine. If it offers insights that can help the Middle Ages to improve our understanding of the present, even better!

In your opinion, what is a key argument or prevailing assumption in Islamic fiscal history that needs to be challenged?

Chris Wickham’s recent book, The Donkey and the Boat, shares a perspective that is very present in my own work on an earlier period: that long-distance, trans-regional trade, especially across political borders, was not especially significant for the trajectory of large states in the ancient and medieval world. I would say that my own work meets Islamic fiscal history but is not currently rooted in it, because of working slightly earlier, so I’m not as well-read in its diverse perspectives as for the centuries beforehand. However, my impression is that there is still perhaps more emphasis than I think is helpful on ‘international’ trade as being critical to Islamic economies and states.

A big thank you to Rebecca Darley for sharing her thoughts with us this week! To read more of these interviews with friends of the Caliphal Finances project, click here.

Banner Image: Five chariots in Mahabalipuram By Ssriram mt – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=102710830

Feb 19, 2025

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