Committee:

William C. Jordan, co-adviser
Marina Rustow, co-adviser
Michael Cook
Christopher Wickham, University of Oxford

Abstract:

From the eve of the Fatimid conquest of 909 through the rule of Norman king Roger II (r. 1105–54), Sicily went through several regime changes: the Aghlabid amīrs, the Fatimid caliphs, the Kalbids—the Fatimids’ semi-independent amīrs in Sicily—and the Norman counts and kings. Regime changes provide an opportunity to understand what polities carry over from the past and what they built anew. Trade is an equally important part of this story, and allows me to address the state and the sectors of society engaged in primary production, manufacturing and trade. This dissertation focuses on taxes and trade to examine changes in the accumulation and distribution of resources during regime change to understand the relationship among legitimation, coercion, economic prosperity, and the extraction of surplus from non-elites. It does so by examining the contingent and incidental factors that led to the creation, maintenance, and afterlives of economic and political structures.

I focus on the origins of the overseas trade in bulk commodities that developed in the eleventh century among the Fatimid-ruled regions of Ifrīqiya, Sicily and Egypt. I argue that the Fatimid state created the conditions for trade by deliberately centralizing resources in Palermo, and that this was the necessary precondition for the development of the triangular trade between Sicily, Ifrīqiya and Egypt in the eleventh century. Fatimid state demand for strategic resources from Sicily provided the impetus for building networks to circulate resources within the island, connecting these networks to the other Fatimid-ruled regions—Ifrīqiya and Egypt—and ensuring that those networks were under Fatimid control.

When the Normans conquered Sicily, they initially maintained earlier administrative and economic practices. But a generation later, King Roger II introduced new Arabic administrative practices based on Fatimid models developed after the Norman conquest, a false continuity with previous practice. The Normans wanted to provide their Muslim villeins with legitimate frameworks of Islamic law and Arabic administration—to better exploit them and extract their resources. They also sought to continue Sicily’s lucrative trade with Egypt by assuming a level of administrative and linguistic interoperability with the Muslim polity.

A copy of the dissertation will be available for review two weeks before the exam. Contact Lee Horinko for a copy of the dissertation and the Zoom meeting link and password.

All are welcome and encouraged to attend.