My computer's knackered and my partner's out of the country, so I'm a bit sorry for myself. …Let's do an off-the-cuff history thread.
In recent years I've found myself thinking about pre-Islamic Arabia in terms of a peasant majority and an aristocratic minority.
This way of conceiving Arabian societies is not very popular at the moment, for a few reasons:
Marxist theory, which is most inclined to acknowledge class in historical societies, has been fairly marginal among academic historians in recent decades, and has never really had much of a presence in Early Islamic Studies.
We tend to think of class societies as marked out by a system of titles and honours, which Arabians didn't seem to place much value on.
In political *language*, the salient boundary in Arabian society was not lord versus serf or nobles versus commoners, but tribe versus tribe.
So rather than slicing Arabian society top-to-bottom into wealthier and poorer strata, we tend to slice it side-to-side into tribal coalitions of variable size and shifting balance of power.
Moreover, students of Early Islam are far more interested in merchant trade than in things like the control of land, water and food.
In part, this is because we (Western Orientalists) like the imagery of camel caravans; we think nomad traders are cool. It's a longstanding romantic obsession.
In part, it's because trade features so prominently in the biographical reports on Muhammad, which are among our go-to sources.
Not to mention the lasting popularity of W.M. Watt's interpretation: that a booming trade economy frayed the ties of tribal solidarity, leaving a social and moral void that Islam would fill.
Even so, we do recognise that wealthier Arabians owned land. The sources have a lot to say about farming estates on the Hijazi oases and up in the Transjordan.
But historians today like to write about these estates as business ventures: a merchant invests in a plot and gets a nice return on it.
These merchants did not farm all of their own food. Perhaps they struck a deal with the locals: we give you the land and the seeds, you grow the crops, and we split the yield.
Echoing the language of the sources, we use terms like 'partnership', as though the landowners and landworkers were cooperating freely. Thus M.J. Kister: 
Now, if you're used to thinking in more Marxist terms, this should ring alarm bells, because the landworkers are the ones doing the actual *work*. How much of a 'partnership' is this, really?
In the specific case that Kister is talking about, the Quraysh tribe owned land in Ta'if that was worked by the local Thaqif tribe.
How did the Quraysh come to own these lands in the first place? Kister explains:
Now, I think Kister is being extremely generous to the Quraysh in this interpretation. Here's another way to describe the same chain of events:
The Quraysh threaten to invade Ta'if unless the Thaqif hand over some of its territory. The Thaqif agree and many of them are reduced from landowners to landworkers, handing over a share of their produce annually to an aggressive foreign power.
As far as I can recall (my notes being on my knackered computer), Kister's idea that the "agreement... facilitated the purchase of land" is entirely his own inference: the Quraysh are not explicitly described as purchasing these lands.
Even if they were, that purchase was backed up by a threat of invasion, so the deal was coerced: the Thaqif did not truly consent to the new arrangement.
And they *knew* they were being cheated, which is why -- as Kister himself describes -- the moment the Quraysh looked weak, they tried to take the land back:
For Kister, this is one party reneging on a deal to their own selfish advantage. I disagree. I think, properly understood, what we're seeing is a peasant revolt.
(Taking a tea break; back shortly.)
So 'partnership' may not be the most helpful way to think about economic relations in Arabia. Now let's consider some parallel cases.
Fadak was an oasis town. In the later sixth century, according to tradition, the people of Fadak paid a regular amount to the chief of the neighbouring Kalb tribe.
When they failed to pay up, the Kalb invaded Fadak and carried some people off into slavery. (Here is Kister's summary.)
In this case, the Kalb are not said to *own* the land, but (like the Quraysh) they can threaten violence to extort some of the wealth from it.
Patricia Crone argued that the people of Fadak were effectively "clients" of the Kalb tribe: they were subjugated, but they still managed their own affairs.
Michael Lecker disagreed in part because the payment given to the Kalb was called in Arabic jaʿālah (جعالة), which "does not mean a tribute but a payment for services", i.e. wages.
Lecker then gives examples where people performed services in exchange for jaʿālah, and he suggests that the Kalb were also being paid for a service.
I think Lecker is putting a lot of weight on semantics here. All we are told is that a weaker party gave a regular payment to a stronger party, and when the payment stops, the stronger party invades. How could this not be tribute?
Whether or not this relationship is strictly 'clientage', it is surely exploitative. As ever, the landworking peasantry is coerced into giving up some of its hard-earned wealth.
Lecker suggests that such payments "can best be conceived of as a playing card in the game of Arabian politics"; but in the game of politics, power writes the rules.
Another oasis community was at Wadi al-Qura. According to tradition, the community gave a portion of its annual crop to the neighbouring tribe of ʿUdhrah.
For Crone, this is another case of subjugation and clientage. For Lecker, this is another case of payment for services.
Lecker rightly notes that, according to our sources, Wadi al-Qura paid the powerful ʿUdhra to drive away smaller tribes of bedouin that might try to raid the community.
From one perspective, this relationship is a mutually beneficial transaction: food for security. But again, the weaker party has no choice but to pay the stronger.
If Wadi al-Qura stops paying, it gets raided. The people who work the land can never choose to keep the wealth they have created: they must always yield a portion to a class that specialises in violence.
I think we can reasonably start thinking in terms of a mobile, militant aristocracy coercing wealth out of a scattered class of oasis peasants.
The coercion takes different forms: rent to a landlord, wages to a service provider, tribute to a warlord. But the basic fact of class society remains: a majority creates the wealth and a powerful minority funnels it away.
I have found John Haldon's notion of an all-encompassing 'tributary mode of production' very useful in this regard: societies may frame the exploitation of the peasantry in utterly different ways (tax or tribute? rent or wages?), but the exploitation is always there.
I could go on, but this thread is already testing the limits of the Twitter format, so I'll leave it here for now. Thanks for listening.
