Who is working on Caliphal Finances?
The project’s Principal Investigator (PI) is Dr Marie Legendre, Senior Lecturer in Islamic History at the University of Edinburgh.
Marie is working with two Postdoctoral Research Fellows and two PhD students:
Postdoc Dr Noëmie Lucas is Research Fellow in Abbasid fiscal history and historiography.
Postdoc Dr Eline Scheerlinck is Research Fellow in Coptic Papyrology.
PhD student Dr Dalia Hussein focuses on land ownership and taxation related to land.
Since October 2022, the team has been joined by Georgi Obatnin, who has secured PhD funding independently from the Caliphal Finances project but whose work on the monetization of taxation in Egypt is intimately related to the Caliphal Finances research agenda.
The team members work on the six Work Packages as follows:
- Work Package 1 Study of the published corpus of fiscal documents in Arabic, Coptic and Greek written in the Abbasid Period (Marie and Eline)
- Work Package 2 Edition of new fiscal documents in Arabic, Coptic and Greek written in the Abbasid Period (Marie and Eline)
- Work Package 3 Beyond jizya and kharaj: a nomenclature of all attested taxes in Abbasid Egypt, their weight for tax payers and their place in the fiscal collection (Marie, Eline, and Dalia)
- Work Package 4 Making the link: fiscal practice and the literary corpus (Noëmie)
- Work Package 5 A bigger picture: the system and working of tax collection in Abbasid Egypt and beyond (all team members)
- Work Package 6 Writing a history of Abbasid fiscal practice in Islamic Late Antiquity (Marie)
