Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World

For Gibbon, as for Burke, one maxim of extended empire was ‘a wise and salutary neglect’. That was the Roman way. A contrary imperial necessity emerged, however, when Gibbon turned from the Romans to the barbarians and their despotisms: ‘a swift and easy communication with the extreme parts’. Gibbon would have learned much about both Roman and medieval empires and their contacts with their provinces from Adam Silverstein's book; and he would have appreciated its purposeful clarity of exposition and its immersion in an impressive array of evidence. The author's subject is the Barīd, the state postal system of the medieval Islamic Middle East, part courier service, part intelligence-gathering network. At its high point, in the later ninth century CE, it seems to have been a very sophisticated organisation indeed, under its own ‘ministry’. As a later encyclopaedist explained, ‘the Barīd requires its own dīwān, and the letters despatched from all the regions are to be directed to its chief [the postmaster general], so that he can then despatch each item ... to its proper destination. He is charged with presenting the letters of the intelligence and postal chiefs in all the provinces to the caliph ... It is his duty to supervise the affairs of the courier-guides, the endorsers of the mail bags, and the station masters in their stations, and to ensure the payment of their salaries, and to appoint mail bag carriers in all cities’

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