An experiment in state-building during the medieval Islamic period, the Sultanate emerged in consequence of a junta by Mamluk slave-soldiers against their patron, the Ayyubid ruler al-Salih (647/1249). A junta participant, al-Zahir Baybars (r. 658/1260-676/1277), consolidated the coup into a stable government. His successor, al-Mansur Qalawun (r. 678/1279-689/1290), sustained the regime, but it was Qalawun’s son, al-Nasir Muhammad (3rd r. 709/1310-741/1341), who oversaw the Sultanate’s halcyon era. Egypt, Syria and the Red Sea were united as the leading imperial power of the central Arab lands. Al-Nasir terminated rivalry from the Sultanate’s main opponent, the Mongol Il-khanate in Iran. His descendants presided over the Sultanate as a quasi-dynasty until an officer of Circassian origin, al-Zahir Barquq (r. 784/1382-801/1399) restored the rule of 1st-generation Mamluks. Barquq and his prominent successors, al-Muʾayyad Shaykh (r. 815/1412-824/1421)and al-Ashraf Barsbay (r. 825/1422-841/1438) upheld the regime’s sovereignty against resistance from insurgents in Syria and eastern Anatolia, while enhancing its role as a key participant in commerce with South and East Asia via the Red Sea. They also initiated policies of extraction and monopolies over lucrative commodities that met the fiscal demands of the military hierarchy but compromised the economy long-term. The Sultanate’s final rulers: al-Ashraf Qaʾitbay (r. 872/1468-901/1496) and Qansawh al-Ghawri (r. 906/1501-922/1516) continued these policies until the regime’s defeat by the Ottomans.

This chapter provides a brief overview of the political history of the Islamic world, from the seventh-century Arabian conquests to the formation, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of the three great early modern Muslim empires: the Ottomans in Asia Minor, the Safavids in Iran and the Mughals in India. Its structure reflects the major political formations and transformations of this period: firstly, the Arabian ‘conquest polity’ which replaced the antique balance between Rome and Iran; then, after the demise of that empire in the mid-tenth century, the tumultuous era of ‘Berber’, Daylami and Turkic leaderships; finally, following the cataclysmic Mongol conquest of the eastern Islamic lands in 1258, the assimilation of these conquerors in the east and the political achievements of Turco-Mongol military strongmen and entrepreneurs in Syria, Egypt, Yemen and Anatolia. It looks at the elites and political structures that shaped and underlay this history and at their interaction with Islam. This had developed into a more fully articulated and stable ideological system, whose continued success lay in the new elites’ capacity to adopt and adapt it to their needs.

This chapter examines the experiences of slaves in various sectors of the economy, including agriculture, manufacturing, mining and domestic labor, as well as banking, commerce and the state bureaucracy.