BETHANY J. WALKER. Jordan in the Late Middle Ages: Transformation of the Mamluk Frontier.

Abstract

Bethany J. Walker describes the period under study (the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries C.E.) as a medieval “global” moment that witnessed radical changes to political structures and economic systems worldwide. Her monograph marks a turning point in the evolution of scholarship on the political economy of states and societies throughout the premodern Arabic-speaking Middle East. Walker's analysis of the rural hinterlands in Greater Syria during the late Mamluk period (ca. 1382–1517) is a path-breaking revision about the processes and objectives of provincial administration in one of the prominent regimes of the medieval Islamic world. It successfully challenges longstanding attitudes about provincial administration in one of the most prominent regimes of the medieval Islamic world toward the scope of feasible research in light of extant source materials. The North African historian Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) justified his own limitation of inquiry to urban centers by claiming that higher civilization was largely confined to them (The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History [abridged edition], edited by F. Rosenthal [1967], p. 263). Ibn Khaldun's successors followed his lead, assuming that period sources were for the most part written by city people for city people. Walker's study persuasively argues that close analysis of a rural society in the medieval Islamic world is credible, and can decisively alter contemporary thinking about that world as a whole.