Famine as policy failure, not fate
Natural shortfalls had struck Egypt before without comparable ruin. What turned a bad harvest into mass death was human mismanagement: venal appointments, extractive rents, and a corrupted currency.
Ighāthat al-umma bi-kashf al-ghumma
6 ideas
Purchased office breeds predatory administration
When governmental and judicial posts are bought with bribes, the officeholder must recoup the purchase price from the people under him. Offices then become instruments of extraction rather than administration. Each layer of the hierarchy squeezes the one below, and the cost finally lands on peasants and townspeople.
Rising land rents choke agricultural production
Military landholders and officials raised the rents and fees on agricultural land far above earlier levels. This pushed up the cost of plowing, seed, and cultivation. Peasants abandoned fields or could not afford to farm them, so the food supply shrank independently of the Nile flood.
Copper debasement disguises rising prices
Al-Maqrizi holds that the only legitimate money is gold and silver. Once copper fulus, valued by weight and count, became the common currency, prices quoted in them soared. Much of the apparent dearness of food was really the collapse of the unit of account, a collapse that hit wage earners and the poor hardest.
Seven-class social incidence of crisis
Al-Maqrizi divides Egyptian society into categories: rulers, wealthy merchants, middling traders, peasants, jurists and students, artisans and wage laborers, and the destitute. He then traces how the crisis affected each group. This shows that the same price shock enriched those who held grain, office, or specie and ruined those paid in debased coin or dependent on the market for food.
Survey of earlier Egyptian famines
The book catalogues Egypt's famines from ancient times through the Fatimid and early Mamluk periods. It records their causes, prices, and outcomes.