Revisiting the Mamlūk empire : political action, relationships of power, entangled networks, and the sultanate of Cairo in late medieval Syro-Egypt

This chapter’s questions the commonly assumed link between political practices of integration and integrity on the one hand – which appear as empirical realities from many sources and studies – and the Syro-Egyptian Sultanate of Cairo (13th-16th centuries) as a dominant, autonomous and imperial historical actor on the other. It problematizes in particular the holistic nature of these assumptions, their merely descriptive value for understanding the region’s history, and the potentially misleading consequences of their normative character. At the same time, this chapter proposes to reflect further on the powerful idea of the Sultanate as an empire. It actually considers this notion of “empire” as a useful way out of this predicament, because it invites to engage with insights from other fields of historical research and to define valuable analytical tools, including from social network theory, to further and refine current assumptions about and understandings of late medieval Syro-Egyptian political action. Confronting such tools with various cases from the center and the peripheries of that Syro-Egyptian political action, this chapter argues that the imperial appearances of the Syro-Egyptian Sultanate were always constructed in the micro-history of people and their negotiation of particular cultural, socio-economic and political relationships, which were extremely fluid and multivalent, permeable, and continuously organized around the court in Cairo

Will isomalto-oligosaccharides, a well-established functional food in Asia, break through the European and American market? The status of knowledge on these prebiotics

This critical review article present the current state of knowledge on isomaltooligosaccharides, some well known functional oligosaccharides in Asia, to evaluate their potential as emergent prebiotics in the American and European functional food market. It includes first a unique inventory of the different families of compounds which have been considered as IMO and their specific structure. A description of the different production methods including the involved enzymes and their specific activities, the substrates and the types of IMO produced. Considering the structural complexity of IMO products, specific characterization methods are described as well as purification methods which enable the riddance of digestible oligosaccharides. Finally an extensive review of their techno-functional and nutritional properties enables to place IMO inside the growing prebiotic market. This review is of a particular interest considering that IMO commercialization in America and Europe is a topical subject due to the recent submission, by Bioneutra INC. (Canada), of a novel food file to the UK Food Standards Agency as well as several patents for IMO production