SOCIETIES ARE COMPLEX PHENOMENA that consist in essence of sets of “social” practices that have the effect of both promoting the physical—biological— reproduction of groups and individuals, on the one hand, and creating institutional patterns of behaviour through which systems of belief and social organisation are maintained and reproduced. Anthropology has shown that most societies quickly evolve hierarchies of access to resources, and that access by one group of individuals to more resources than others brings with it a consolidation of social power over others, regardless of the process through which selection occurred. At the same time, social groups evolve in relation to resources and in proportion to their ability to control and manipulate resources. Territoriality is one inevitable consequence of this process, accompanied in turn by notions of identity and solidarity cutting across lines of economic identity, and then by the evolution of systems of social-political organisation dictated by the imperatives of territorial and group survival. A universal consequence of these circumstances has been the evolution of elites, that is to say, groups socio-economically and/ or ideologically distinguished from the rest- the majority- of society by particular features of the ways through which they have privileged access to and control over resources.

The period and the geographical regions with which the contributors to this Workshop were concerned represent already highly developed and complex social formations. Our concern was to examine the ways in which the form and structure of social, political, cultural and economic élites at this time overlapped, or not, how they were affected by various types of change to their environment and circumstances, and how these concerns find expression in the historical record. In particular, we were concerned to locate the processes of change, to see how individuals-in their own particular patterns of behaviour and response to change, and inflected by their own self-perception and group identities-made a difference. The later Roman and early Islamic worlds are ideal fields for research into some of these issues, with their changing relationships between cities and urban centres and local elites, and the state, between civil and military spheres, between secular and canon law, between ecclesiastical administration and authority, and civil law, between the imperial centre and the provinces, and between traditional forms of citybased culture and education and the populist scriptural culture of established religion. When we look at the shape and texture of late Roman society and compare it with that of the eastern Roman empire of, say the ninth century, we meet a very different society, at least in outward appearance; and when we look at the new Islamic society that has grown up on formerly east Roman territory throughout the Middle East, we are struck by just how utterly different things are.