Dr Fanny Bessard
Associate Professor in Medieval Eurasian History
Trinity College
I am a historian of early and Classical Islam with expertise in Arabic historiography, as well as a practicing archaeologist with a decade of field experience in the Middle East and Central Asia. Before joining Oxford, I held a Newton fellowship at SOAS (2013-15), a Leverhulme ECF at the University of St Andrews (2015-16) and a Lecturership in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Bristol (2016-19).
Research Interests
My main research interest lies in the social and economic transformations of the Middle East, 700-1000. Transcending the ‘Long Late Antiquity’ model that perceives the Arab-Muslim conquests and the birth of the caliphate as symptomatic of a world in transition, I put the emphasis on the period of assertion of the Islamic world’s identity and authority.
- Wealth and poverty in the early Islamic world
- Economic transformations from the fall of Rome to the Middle Ages
- Comparative and interdisciplinary Medieval history
My research realises the potential of combining a wide corpus of literary sources in Arabic with physical and epigraphic evidence collected in the field and archives. My approach is both comparative and global. I look at the Middle East in a Eurasian context, drawing parallels between the Islamic world and Western Christendom, Byzantium, South-East Asia and China. My monograph with OUP, Caliphs and Merchants (700-950), Cities and Economies of Power in the Middle East offers fresh perspectives on the origins of the economic success of the early Islamic Caliphate, identifying a number of previously unnoticed or underplayed yet crucial developments, such as the changing conditions of labour, attitudes towards professional associations, and the interplay between the state, Islamic religious institutions, and the economy. While working on my monograph, the fruitful collaborations I had with historians, economists, numismatists, archaeologists and papyrologists inspired me to further develop the comparative aspect of my research. Between 2015-18, I co-directed with Prof. Kennedy (SOAS) a Leverhulme Networking project, investigating the construction and development of the Islamic economy as a world system, stretching from Central Asia to the Atlantic between 700 and 1050. My new project investigates social inequalities in the Medieval Islamic world. The purpose is to radically redefine our understanding of the relationship between wealth, social rank, the political and cultural elite in Islamic Eurasia and to explore the manner in which wealth, originally fostering tribal solidarity during the Arab-Muslim conquests, became a source of authority.
