This book is the first study of the administration of this Sudanese sultanate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to be drawn from recently-discovered Arabic land charters. Translations of forty-seven selected charters and related documents are presented to illustrate the complexity of land as an issue in the sultanate. The authors review the principles by which privileged status, rights in people and in landed estates were granted; and examine the nature of the administration in Dar Fur. The volume will be of interest to historians of Africa and the Middle East and to those concerned with land and society in a comparative framework.