Property Rights in Medieval Egypt

Property rights are a central institution in Western democracies. But rights to property have existed in one form or another, and at one time or another, all over the globe. Take, for example, Egypt in the Middle Ages.

In Egypt back then, there was a group of people known as the mamluks. Mamluks were both soldiers and slaves. They were not native Egyptians but were purchased in slave markets in Europe and brought to Egypt as children. Trained to fight, these slave-soldiers served Egypt's leaders as a military elite.

In time, the mamluks overthrew their masters and created their own sultanate—their own autocratic state. That was in 1250.

The mamluks suddenly controlled much of Egypt's arable land--and found themselves confronting a property rights question: Who should have rights to the land they controlled, and in what form? They decided to administer the land as a collective, granting temporary rights to pieces of land to individual mamluks in exchange for services to the state.

The mamluks, though, lived by certain rules, one of which undermined their ability to retain their land as a collective: mamluk status—and hence access to the collectively owned land—could not be passed down to one's sons. That was, as they say, a design flaw. Why? Well, most mamluks wanted to provide for their male descendants. One way to do that was to secure for them a piece of land—land that was privately owned and would remain in the family. So, individual mamluks began making deals with the sultan, deals that allowed them to slowly build wealth. Eventually, they built enough wealth to convert what had been temporary rights to land into permanent rights.

The most popular means of securing land for one's sons was to transform the land into a religious endowment, or waqf. Descendants of a mamluk who founded a waqf could be named a custodian of the waqf and enjoy the benefits thereof. But regardless of the means, little by little, the land that was owned collectively by the sultanate passed into other hands. By 1517, the mamluk sultanate no longer owned enough land to support itself and came to an end.

This account of the mamluks is found in an article by Lisa Blaydes, a professor of political science at Stanford University. The article appears in the September 2019 issue of Politics & Society. As Professor Blaydes points out, scholars have paid little attention to the development of property rights in non-European parts of the world. Her analysis of the mamluks of medieval Egypt complements European-centered studies, thereby opening up new new points of comparison and new ways to understand how autocratic regimes manage—or perhaps mismanage—their institutions.