Coercion and Surplus

The use of force pervaded medieval societies, including Islamic ones. Sometimes, this force was exerted physically, which could result in acts of great cruelty, but in the majority of cases the mere allusion to it in everyday life, or its reference in rules and customs, sufficed to ensure that the majority of society accepted the dominance of the minority capable of exercising it. This extra-economic coercion permitted a social minority to control the surplus produced by the majority of the population, or in other words, what was left over once the population had guaranteed both its subsistence and the repetition of the cycles of production and exchange. This coercion was always justified in one way or another by legal or ideological arguments, or simply on the basis of tradition.

The institutional form in which the dominant classes acquired their resources could vary greatly. In many medieval European societies, this often took the form of rent, which included the various forms of payment that peasants, artisans and merchants had to give to feudal lords in recognition of their authority. In contrast, in societies such as al-Andalus, its centralised states captured the surplus in the form of tributes, a combination of taxes levied under different forms and periodically by the state's representatives, which were redistributed in numerous ways among the dominant classes.

The difference between rent and tribute was not qualitative, as the social conditions of those paying feudal dues were not necessarily very different from the conditions of those who paid taxes. In both cases, the surplus was obtained by way of extra-economic coercion, and in both cases the beneficiaries accumulated resources on a scale that was unimaginable to those who provided the surplus. Although it is true that, by demanding tributes from all subjects, tax-based formations differed in principle from those based on rent, in practice this was not always the case, as the dominant classes obtained a range of fiscal exemptions that underscored their social superiority.