Ibn Khaldun was the first scholar to suggest that interactions among pastoralists, city people, and agriculturalists shaped the central dynamic in Middle Eastern state formation, in other words that political history cannot be understood without reference to human ecology. How has Ibn Khaldun influenced recent historians of the pre-modern Middle East?
Ibn Khaldun, al-Muqaddima, F. Rosenthal trans. (various editions since 1958).
Hodgson, M. G. S., The Venture of Islam, vols 1 and 2 (Chicago, 1977).
Chamberlain, M., “Military Patronage States and the Political Economy of the Frontier, 1000-1255”, in Y. Choueiri ed., Blackwell Companion to the History of the Middle East (Oxford, 2005), pp. 135-154.
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So! It's not that hard to see the influence of Khaldun on Professor Chamberlain, partially from our experiences in class, but also from his description of the military patronage states and the economics. The nomad groups are represented by the Turcoman and other similar groups, who the Seljuks have been able to use to create a second tier of leadership as described by Khaldun. But for everyone who is working on this topic, what is the driving connection to Hodgson? Hodgson is widely admired for being literally decades ahead of his time (though still slightly dated), but it is difficult to extricate what Hodgson has to say about the sedentary-pastoral nomad connections.
ReplyDeleteFound at least a partial answer to my own question. Hodgson has a section of Ibn Khaldun and praises him to the skies. The many references to agrarian states also allows us to see the ways in which Khaldun's ideas are translated, but largely unchanged. Or so it seems to me.
ReplyDeletei am not able to load any of the hodgson articles... which internet web browser did you use to access them?
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