IMC 2024: Sessions

The historical subjects which gave rise to the term ‘moral economy’ as used by E.P. Thompson and James C. Scott are far from the early Middle Ages, yet ideas about socially embedded exchange interactions, gifts and tributes, and strategies of risk mitigation are at the core of many analyses of early medieval economic practices. The ideas traveling as the concept of a ‘moral economy’ has been used to describe economic decision-making around the good of a community, a bottom-up, peasant-driven view of economic practices, and to explain the radical expansion of the properties of the church and the circulation of assets to the church. The term has been stretched to cover multiple alternatives to political economies and market economies, suggesting that at every social level people acted upon complex principles around exchange, notwithstanding the challenges we face in categorizing them. These sessions seek to explore questions of economy in the early Middle Ages (c. 700-c. 1100) comparatively across early medieval Eurasia and also Egypt. We seek to identify the contours of a shared ‘moral economy’, whether those are to be found in groups of shared social status, or groups of shared linguistic or political association.