Speaker
Description
In this interdisciplinary paper we build on the work of John Henry (2004) by examining a recent edition of a corpus of medieval Arabic documents which describes aspects of the social, political and financial relationships between Islamic Egypt and Christian Nubia, Arabic Documents from Medieval Nubia (Khan, 2024). We highlight how the corpus has provided further evidence in support of the credit theory of money (Innes 1913, 1914). The theory of credit implies that when we buy or sell a commodity, we exchange a commodity with credit, whilst the value of credit or money is not caused by the value of gold or silver, but on the rights and obligations generated by the exchange (credit-debit relationships). We examine the complex interrelationships between gift exchange, monetary exchange, and barter. We show how the corpus points to the existence of a ‘hybrid’ system of interaction with respect to monetary and gift exchange. The gift exchange between the Arab merchants and the eparch (the king of Nubia’s representative) was important in terms of maintaining the truce between Egypt and Nubia and the success of the gift exchange depended on the assessment of the monetary value of the gift received from the eparch. The part played by barter is also considered. We argue that a difference of opinions as to its role in medieval Nubia emerges as a result of differing interpretations of the material evidence by historians and anthropologists, on the one hand, and archaeologists on the other. We draw upon empirical evidence in support of Karl Polanyi’s approach which stresses the importance of reciprocity as opposed to the neoclassical focus upon the pursuit of self interest. We further suggest that, rather than barter being regarded as a forerunner of money, it should be conceptualised as a process distinct from, and contemporaneous with, both monetary and gift exchange and that the corpus illustrates the role of barter was relatively small when compared to both gift and monetary exchange.
