Historical institutionalists have long been concerned with the conditions under which political institutions provoke their own processes of internal change. This paper explores institutional stability through an examination of changing landholding patterns in Egypt during the Mamluk Sultanate (1250-1517 CE). Although the mamluk state nominally controlled all agricultural land, I find that regime management of land resources declined in the century preceding the regime's fall. Using data from cadastral land surveys of Egypt from two temporal periods, 1376 and 1480 CE, I demonstrate that land shifted from temporary and revocable land grants offered in exchange for service to the state, to Islamic religious endowments and hybridized land types, representing a transformation away from state authority over agricultural resources to more privatized forms of property control. The mamluk regime made use of a number of coordinated protocols meant to protect the core common pool resource (i.e., state agricultural land); over time, however, predation on collective state resources by individual mamluks, state actors themselves, was a negative externality associated with the foundational principle of the impermissibility of transferring mamluk status to one's sons. As mamluk elites sought to engage in intergenerational transfer of wealth to their progeny, the result was a "chipping away" at the state fiscal base with negative long-term implications for the stability of the mamluk regime. My characterization of mamluk political institutions provides an empirical illustration for a self-undermining institutional equilibrium with implications for understanding how Muslim world political institutions differed from those in other world regions, particularly Western Europe.

My paper assesses the reasons why capitalism was late to arrive in early modern Iran, a country that, unlike its neighbors, the Ottoman Empire and the Indian Subcontinent, is rarely subjected to analyses involving economic activity and development. It identifies various elements in Iran that count as conducive to experimentation and innovation, such as instances when an energetic state facilitated entrepreneurship, and a vibrant intellectual discourse that did not shun doubt and disputation. But it argues that these factors were either predicated on individual encouragement or were by themselves unable to spur sustained and self-reinforcing economic growth in the face of substantial impediments to the free flow of goods as well as ideas. The most consequential of these impediments were a harsh geography, a lack of navigable rivers, the absence of easy maritime outlets to the wider world, and a culture that continued to value metaphysical speculation over useful knowledge and practical application.

Historians of the Ottoman craft world have developed two differing interpretations of the relationship between artisans and the sultans’ government. Some scholars believe that by definition, the sultan -- and his bureaucrats-- represented the interests of the Islamic community and even to some extent, those of the sultans’ subjects at large. Other researchers assume that although the Islamic legitimacy of the sultans was never in doubt, there was some scope for craftsmen to develop initiatives of their own, including participation in rebellions when livelihoods were under threat. While adhering to the second option, I discuss why artisans apparently thought that compliance with officialdom was the royal road to success, and why such conformity notwithstanding, Ottoman guilds often defended the interests of the master craftsmen with a reasonable degree of success. While some historians view all artisan initiatives aiming at private gain as non-compliance with the social order deserving strict punishment, I think that this view is one-sided. The eighteenth-century sultans’ orders (nizams) used as the source basis for the present paper document different ways in which master artisans defended their concerns. The involvement of both qadi and grand vizier in mundane artisan conflicts permitted the now often discussed ‘forum shopping’ as complainants chose the venue best suiting their interests. Thus certain prosperous cloth manufacturers might agree to prevent competitors outside of their group from accessing scarce resources, thus hoping to monopolize sales in a given venue. Religious conflicts might intertwine with artisan disputes in the marketplace; and the Ottoman administration, while strongly committed to the right of all established craftspeople to make a living, might occasionally be inclined to place Muslims in lines of work previously dominated by their non-Muslim competitors. While invoking the sultan at every turn, certain master artisans were adept at using the sultans’ policies to promote their own interests. As artisan initiatives to further private gains were thus legitimized through constant reference to the sultan, craftspeople had little reason to call for the limitation of the ruler’s power. When deposing Selim III in 1807, soldiers and associated artisans acted because the ruler’s policies threatened livelihoods, not because the rebels wanted broader participation in policy decisions, or alternatively, because they blindly upheld a system that they viewed as traditional. The fall of Selim III thus differed fundamentally from what had happened in France in 1789

This article focuses on the development of the tobacco industry in Iran during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It uses this discussion as an entry point to inquire about the early modern Iranian economy. Using a wide range of primary and secondary sources, the paper makes several key historiographical interventions. It explains what the development of a completely new agrarian industry meant in the Safavid state, and suggests that innovation and intensification may not have been completely absent in agriculture in the early modern period. In contrast to the way some of the available literature tends to argue, the essay points out that the Iranian economy may not have experienced continuous decline in all its sectors throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition, this article contends that the tobacco industry helped bring about the rise and dominance of merchants and landowners in Iranian society, and with that the further development of mass consumption and ever-increasing cycles of production and accumulation that expanded the commercialization of agriculture, domestic and international trade networks, and Iran’s agrarian economy. The presentation in other words shows that the tobacco industry was anything but an unimportant sector of the Iranian economy. Its value during the first two centuries of its existence was enormous and can only be gleaned from the figures we have for the total revenue collected by the central government from the tobacco industry. The penetration and integration of tobacco (which was a New World crop) deep into the fabric of the Safavid economy made tobacco an unusual commodity—comparable only to certain types of food perhaps—whose production, distribution, and consumption would reflect the general characteristics of the economy as a whole. In following the story of tobacco in early modern Iran, the article shows how landowners and merchants worked in tandem to develop a new industry, how average Iranians took up the habit of consuming a non-essential product, and above all how the place of tobacco in society can tell us about mass production and accumulation of capital. The point is that the tobacco industry in the early modern period could not have functioned without large-scale capital investment in both domestic and long-distance trade, without the development of a consumer society inside the Safavid state, and without highly competitive distributive networks that took tobacco and other consumables to different parts of Eurasia.