Connecting-Africa | Find publications

Advanced search

Find:


Title Revisiting the Maml@k empire: political action, relationships of power, entangled networks, and the sultanate of Cairo in late medieval Syro-Egypt
Full text https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8605811; http://hdl.handle.net/1854/LU-8605811; https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8605811/file/8605830
Date 2019
Author(s) Van Steenbergen, Jo
Contributor(s) Amitai, Reuven; Conermann, Stephan
Abstract This chapter's questions the commonly assumed link between political practices of integration and integrity on the one hand ' which appear as empirical realities from many sources and studies ' and the Syro-Egyptian Sultanate of Cairo (13th-16th centuries) as a dominant, autonomous and imperial historical actor on the other. It problematizes in particular the holistic nature of these assumptions, their merely descriptive value for understanding the region's history, and the potentially misleading consequences of their normative character. At the same time, this chapter proposes to reflect further on the powerful idea of the Sultanate as an empire. It actually considers this notion of 'empire' as a useful way out of this predicament, because it invites to engage with insights from other fields of historical research and to define valuable analytical tools, including from social network theory, to further and refine current assumptions about and understandings of late medieval Syro-Egyptian political action. Confronting such tools with various cases from the center and the peripheries of that Syro-Egyptian political action, this chapter argues that the imperial appearances of the Syro-Egyptian Sultanate were always constructed in the micro-history of people and their negotiation of particular cultural, socio-economic and political relationships, which were extremely fluid and multivalent, permeable, and continuously organized around the court in Cairo.
Subject(s) History and Archaeology; Mamluk Sultanate; Empire; Social Networks; Cairo Sultanate; Egypt; Syria; Medieval History; Islamic History
Language eng
Publisher Bonn University Press at V&R unipress GmbH
Type of publication bookChapter; info:eu-repo/semantics/bookPart; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Format application/pdf
Source The Mamluk sultanate from the perspective of regional and world history: economic, social and cultural development in an era of increasing international interaction and competition; ISSN: 2198-5375; ISBN: 9783847104117
Rights I have transferred the copyright for this publication to the publisher; info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess
Repository Gent - University of Gent
Added to C-A: 2020-12-10;08:04:26