World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies

Barcelona, July 19th - 24th 2010

· NOT_DEFINED date: TUE 20, 9.00-11.00 am

· NOT_DEFINED institution: University of Connecticut (USA)

· NOT_DEFINED organizer: Robin Adele Greeley

· NOT_DEFINED language: English

· NOT_DEFINED description: Concepts of empire and imperialism have long provoked serious reflection and intense controversy. Yet while studies continue to proliferate, troubling elisions remain. While serious investigations of modern empires in the Middle East abound, almost none have been contextualized within the longer history of empire available through the extended archaeological record. Alternatively, few archaeologists have attempted to theorize Ancient Near Eastern empires; even fewer undertake comparative analyses across time and space. Many ANE studies continue to rely on a straightforward model of territorial expansion through military conquest, patterned after standard interpretations of the Roman empire, thus neglecting evidence of other methods of maintaining political control over diverse polities and multiple states. Studies of the modern period, while often more nuanced, frequently maintain a sharp divide between capitalist and pre-capitalist imperial forms, and tend to view the latter, having been ?superseded? by capitalism, as irrelevant. A similar division is often constructed between the Islamic and pre-Islamic periods. This interdisciplinary symposium aims to redress these deficiencies by expanding theoretical and historical investigations of empire and its implications for studies of Middle Eastern civilizations. Fourteen scholars from the disciplines of history, art history and archaeology explore disparate models of the constitution, expansion, structure and destruction of Middle East empires from antiquity to the modern era. This panel, the third of four, treats the Umayyad State, the Fatimid Caliphate and the Mamluk Sultanate.


Chair: Fred Donner, University of Chicago
Discussant: Peter Sluglett, University of Utah
Paper presenter: Fred Donner, University of Chicago
“The Umayyad State as an Empire”
Paper presenter: Farhad Daftary, The Institute for Ismaili Studies
“The Fatimid Caliphate as an Empire, 909-1171”
Paper presenter: Carl Petry, Northwestern University
“The Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt and Syria, 1250-1517”