85 As with most agrarian societies of the pre-modern period, cereal production was the most important sector of the agricultural regime in the medieval and Early Modern Islamicate world. It was the foundation of the economy. Taxes on cereals contributed the highest revenues for the state; bread and other cereal-based products (such as porridges) were the staple of the local diet1 (fig. 1). From the 11th century, military officers were paid through a decentralized system of tax collection called iqt.āʿs, which gave them the right to collect taxes from designated properties; the most lucrative of these quasi-feudal grants were of agricultural land devoted to cereal cultivation. In times of drought and famine, state officials, who controlled the grain stores, hoarded wheat and barley and sold it off at inflated prices. Economic misery and hunger were, in the minds of the masses, associated with the unethical management of cereal land and distribution of grain. In spite of the central role it played in the economy, Muslim rulers rarely intervened directly in cereal cultivation, compared with the cultivation of plantation-style crops as sugar cane. Where to plant cereals, which cereal to cultivate, and how to do so were entirely in peasant hands. Peasants in the Muslim world, moreover, enjoyed certain freedoms denied to their counterparts in medieval Europe. They were not serfs; in legal terms, they were not “tied to the land”. They were not part of the estate; as freeborn people, they had the legal right to move elsewhere. They did not own the land, but they had generations-long rights to cultivation, and these claims were seldom challenged by the authorities. The reality of peasant life, however, was a different matter. Peasant flight – to escape unbearable taxes and armed conflict – was an economic threat to the state, which brought an urgent response. In the Ottoman period (16th– early 20th centuries CE), peasants in Palestine, for example, were hunted down and returned by force to their villages. In the Mamluk period (13th– early 16th centuries CE), peasants were forced to do corvée labor on imperial estates. None of this was technically legal, but it became regular practice. As a result of these factors, a complex relationship developed between peasants and the state as regards cereal production and distribution, resulting in mutual, but unequal, form of economic and political dependency. Without peasant labor, the state would politically and economically collapse. Peasants needed the law-and-order provided by the state to maintain irrigation canals and agricultural terraces, to sow and harvest, and to keep the land productive. There was never any question, however, who controlled natural resources, whether land or water. Cereals were cultivated on state land, as opposed to other kinds of crops. Peasants had the right to a percentage of the cereals they harvested, but neither the land nor, in fact, the products of their labor were theirs. Conflicts over taxes and use of water regularly erupted between peasants and the officials. Violent confrontations could take place at the threshing fields (where taxes in kind from cereals were collected), irrigation canals (where siphoning of water took place), and cereal storage depots. The asymmetrical dependencies of the peasants of the time are most vividly traced at these places, rather than the fields or the villages. Current fieldwork by the University of Bonn at the site of Tall Hisban in central Jordan has begun to reconstruct the details of cereal cultivation and conflicts centered on this industry in the 13th and 14th centuries (fig. 2). The site is ideally suited to such a study, as it was a regional breadbasket for both the Roman and Mamluk states (fig. 3). We have learned that local peasants cultivated a wide range of wheats and barleys, with certain varieties planted specifically for the state and for long-distance transport and long-term storage, and others for local consumption, and short-term storage. For several decades in the 14th century, wheats were irrigated, at a time of repeated drought and increased demands for this crop from the state2. Grains used for local households in Transjordan and Palestine were typically stored in the numerous caves of the region and repurposed cisterns3. Large-scale storage for transport to the cities was done in built facilities called shunahs. The “grain boom” of the 19th century opened doors to local agrarian entrepreneurs in cereal export. Contemporary with this development were reforms within the Ottoman government (called the Tanzimat), which required individuals, to register land in their own names rather than the community. While this did not in the end benefit peasants, it did urban elites with the means and access to credit to purchase land, hold title to it, and participate in the international business of the cereal trade4. This period, on the other hand, witnessed peasant indebtedness, further alienation from land they had been cultivating, and new forms of dependency, as new forms of land tenure developed. As in earlier times, peasants in this period had little control over their own labor, although there were no formal obstacles to their migration to other places. One of the most vivid expressions of this new form of “cereal capitalism” are the qus. ūr – walled farmsteads that contained shunahs. From there the stored grains were transported to further markets and ports (fig. 4). Bethany J. Walker
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