The analytical framework in chapter 2 identified two parameters that affect political violence: variation in rents and the nature of preexisting “sharing” institutions. This chapter aims to explain why so many Muslim countries have institutions that tend to be less sharing compared to non-Muslim societies. The chapter provides a historical narrative for the emergence of an equilibrium of authoritarian power structures in the medieval period associated with the expansion of Islam via military conquest. The chapter describes how Muslim conquest established a set of governing institutions and associated alliances between political actors that set many Muslim societies on a trajectory towards less democratic politics in the contemporary period.

This chapter traces the establishment, and evolution of military slavery in north India between ca. 1000-1500. It will moreover investigate the interaction between war and society when it involves enslavement of captured civilians. Lastly, it will argue that the expansion of agriculture and the rise of a large peasant population that served as a potential source of mercenaries that eventually competed with slaves as a source of recruitment.

General readers still lack awareness of the prevalence of slavery between the classical period and the post-1420 wider Atlantic World. This phenomenon is not just temporal but geographic, in that Asia, the Indian Ocean World, Amerindian societies and Oceania still receive far less scholarly attention than their populations warrant. This situation exists despite the rapid growth of interest in the general subject of slavery in recent decades. The Islamic conquests and the Mongol expansions generated large numbers of captives, but in fact no society in the Medieval millennium was without enslaved people. While no consensus on the definition of slavery is possible – in this era it assumed a wide spectrum of dependencies - the existence of slave markets across the known world indicates that buyers and sellers shared enough of a common understanding of the practice to sustain a vibrant slave trade. Despite this traffic and major military disruptions, many enslaved people derived their status via birth even though the sources suggest that probably most slaves were female. They also exercised some agency. Prejudice against black people is apparent but the ebb and flow of empires ensured that any group could be a slave, just as any could be a slave owner.

Chapter 4 focuses on the dynastic rise and fall of Razia Sultan to political leadership in thirteenth-century India. Daughter of Iltutmish, the founder of the Delhi Sultanate, Razia was favored by her father to succeed him. But at his death the contestation of the transition of power was rapid, relentless, and ruthless. It all happened in less than a year after the sultan’s death. His son Rukh al-Din wore the crown for only six months and twenty-eight days before being defeated and dethroned by his sister Razia. At the age of thirty-one and unmarried, Razia became the first and only female sultan of the Delhi Sultanate, preceded and succeeded by her half-brothers. Razia Sultan ruled a little over three years, during which time she was able to expand the state’s territory, bring a certain level of peace and prosperity to her people, patronize the arts, and support educational institutions. She was toppled through the treachery of some of her close advisers and her jealous brothers. The alleged Prophetic hadith was never invoked and there was no institutional religious opposition to her leadership.

Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, Muslims experienced multiple crises. The Crusaders and the Mongols destroyed the urban infrastructure and the public order across a vast Muslim geography. On the one hand, the fall of most Muslim states, except the Ayyubids and then Mamluks in Egypt, and Berber dynasties in Morocco/Andalus, weakened the ulema–state alliance. On the other hand, the perils of the Crusades and the Mongol invasions led many Muslims to seek safety from the ulema–state alliance. In general, both the Crusader and the Mongol invasions led to a deterioration of mercantile and scholarly activities in many Muslim cities. Muslim countries still produced such remarkable scholars as Ibn Rushd and Ibn Khaldun. Another scholar, Ibn Taymiyya, wrote on the theory of the ulema–state alliance. Meanwhile Western Europe was protected from destructive invasions after the halt of the Mongol invasion in Eastern Europe. In this context, Western Europe witnessed socioeconomic and political transformations. This chapter first analyzes the Muslim world and then explores these Western European transformations.

This chapter begins by examining Muslims’ military, commercial, and intellectual achievements between the seventh and eleventh centuries. At that time, most of Islamic scholars (ulema) were funded by commerce, while only a few of them served the state. The merchants flourished as an influential class. The chapter goes on to analyze the beginning of the intellectual and economic stagnation in Muslim lands in the eleventh century. It explains how, gradually, the ulema became a state-servant class and the military state came to dominate the economy. The alliance between the ulema and the military state diminished the influence of philosophers and merchants. This changing distribution of authority led to the long-term stagnation, if not the decline, of Muslim intellectual and economic life. This gradual process began in the eleventh century and continued for centuries, as subsequent chapters elaborate.