This chapter provides a brief overview of the political history of the Islamic world, from the seventh-century Arabian conquests to the formation, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of the three great early modern Muslim empires: the Ottomans in Asia Minor, the Safavids in Iran and the Mughals in India. Its structure reflects the major political formations and transformations of this period: firstly, the Arabian ‘conquest polity’ which replaced the antique balance between Rome and Iran; then, after the demise of that empire in the mid-tenth century, the tumultuous era of ‘Berber’, Daylami and Turkic leaderships; finally, following the cataclysmic Mongol conquest of the eastern Islamic lands in 1258, the assimilation of these conquerors in the east and the political achievements of Turco-Mongol military strongmen and entrepreneurs in Syria, Egypt, Yemen and Anatolia. It looks at the elites and political structures that shaped and underlay this history and at their interaction with Islam. This had developed into a more fully articulated and stable ideological system, whose continued success lay in the new elites’ capacity to adopt and adapt it to their needs.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Islamic frontier and the European colonial frontier met in the Central African interior, augmenting each other as well as clashing. The crucial variable was exploitation, not conquest; mobility and freedom from being accosted while collecting valuable goods (if necessary, forcefully) were key to personal advancement and to the political-economic mode of life. ‘Zariba’ is the Arabic term for the enclosures built to contain the goods (slaves, ivory, food, etc.) that the raiders were able to amass. Some zaribas were temporary, while others became more established, morphing into cities. The chapter focuses on some of the key people involved in these raiding projects to show the personal orientation and skills they developed and the kinds of encounters and confrontations they navigated as they attempted to claim privileged status, or to undermine another’s status. By the early twentieth century, French colonial officials had become leaders in forceful acquisition, either co-opting or eliminating most of their challengers. While the French colonial government saw itself as replacing the acquisition-oriented polities with one geared towards production and the management of people, the French operated in a context of penury, and, as a result, their imposition of a state-bureaucratic form ironically entrenched forceful acquisition as a tactic of rule and profit. Raiding and acquisition retained their prominence less because they expressed values than because they were an improvised response to conflicts of values between people with competing claims and interests.