A Hard Row to Hoe: Landowning and Land Management in the Medieval Islamic World

A conference organised by the Invisible East Programme, Oxford

12-14 December 2022, Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford

Organised by the Invisible East programme at the University of Oxford, this in person conference examines landownership and the organisation of agricultural production in the medieval Islamic world (ca. 622-1250 CE), from North Africa to Central Asia: the economic relationships between cultivators, landlords, and the state, and how these changed and varied over time and space.

We will address the following questions:

• Where and to what extent can we speak of private landownership in the medieval Islamic world?
• To what extent did landlords and the state involve themselves in agricultural production, and why?
• What obligations did cultivators have to the state and their landlords — tax, rent, or otherwise?

Through this conference, we seek to bring about communication and collaboration across traditional disciplinary boundaries (e.g., history, philology, Islamic Studies, and Iranian Studies) to enable viewing these questions in a transregional and comparative perspective.

Registrations are open: visit the conference webpage for more information.