Tahqiqāt-e Târix-e Eqtesâdi (Economic History Studies of Iran)

The Political Economy of Trade Corridors and the Reproduction of Networked Power in the Sasanian Empire across the Arabian Peninsula (Sixth Century CE to the Fall of the Sasanian Empire)

Articles in Press

Document Type : .

10.30465/ehs.2026.54715.2102
Abstract
This study examines the logic of Sasanian imperial governance in its geopolitical periphery, focusing on trade routes and monetary networks in the Arabian Peninsula during the final century before the rise of Islam. In contrast, the central question of this study is: What role did trade corridors and economic networks play in the formation, maintenance, reproduction, or weakening of Sasanian imperial power? Drawing on Michael Mann’s historical sociology and his model of the four sources of social power, the study examines the hypothesis that Ctesiphon structured its strategy for extending influence into the regions of the Hijaz and Najd around infrastructural capacity and network-based mechanisms of power. Ultimately, the decline of Sasanian hegemony was less the result of economic collapse or the debasement of its coinage—which, overall, retained considerable stability until the end of the empire—than of endogenous disruptions within its political-economic networks and the political exhaustion generated by prolonged warfare. These developments provided the material conditions within which the emerging elites of Medina, under the banner of Islam, could redefine existing and newly available nodes of communication and monetary exchange and contribute to the formation of a new regional order.

Keywords

Sasanian Empire
Arabian Peninsula
Infrastructural Power
Trade Corridors
Geostrategic Rationality
Historical Sociology
Subjects
Tahqiqāt-e Târix-e Eqtesâdi (Economic History Studies of Iran)

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 27 September 2026

  • Receive Date 30 May 2026
  • Revise Date 07 September 2026
  • Accept Date 27 September 2026

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