This article sets out a framework for understanding two key issues in the history of early modern and modern South Asia. First, it addresses the vexed question of the generalizability of the “Western” concept of property to Indo-Islamicate land systems. Rather than beginning from the idea of ‘Islamic property law/relations’ it proposes that we reconstruct concepts relating to the control of the earth’s

Critiquing the commodity-centered frames of reference, this paper looks at property not within an economic logic, but as a set of practices that served to structure and reconfigure social relations. Based on a study of property documents and court papers, the essay argues that property was not simply an index of wealth, but a medium through which social relations were affirmed, reproduced and contested

This essay considers—as an integrated space of discursive practices—disputes over proprietary titles in an obscure locality, debates over the authentic “Indian” proprietary form in British India, and a conceptual recasting of political-economic categories in Britain, over the first half of the nineteenth century. It argues that “property” was produced by this space as a marker of political power/sovereignty

The introductory essay to this special double issue on “Repossessing Property in South Asia: Land, Rights and Law Across the Early Modern/Modern Divide” reviews existing historical scholarship on land control and proprietary right in the Indian subcontinent in order to contextualize the contribution made by the articles that follow. Dividing earlier writings—by historians and anthropologists since

The movement of the Hughli River in 1804-5 resulted in the deposition of alluvion along Calcutta’s river banks which unfolded as an ownership crisis for the East India Company. The Company responded by developing new legal categories and administrative language to manage these newly formed lands and thereby fashioning itself as a public agent of Calcutta’s land and landed property. Focusing on specific

From the late eighteenth century struggles over untitled and unassessed land in Madras became completely entangled with the East India Company’s efforts to craft its sovereign powers. These lands could not be leached of their social meanings and use and instead, competing ideas of ownership incarnated sovereignty as eviction and the Company as a pre-eminent land developer.

The meaning of land revenue farming in Indian history has eluded consensus. Some view it as an administrative aberration indicating weak state control, while others see it as a strategy for consolidating authority. This essay traces the historical development of iqṭāʻ and ijārah , two Perso-Arabic terms frequently translated from the sources as ‘revenue farming estate’. I then suggest that existing

This article reviews the main scholastic norms relevant to property and land rights in ancient and medieval India, and then surveys a range of inscriptions that illustrate the contours of land law in practice. The evidence suggests that India developed a sophisticated concept of landed property from earliest history, with conceptual tools and legal instruments to define the rights of owners vis-a-vis

This article focuses on communal boundaries in nineteenth-century Ottoman Nis, a city located in what is today southern Serbia. In particular, it explores the implications of Robert Hayden’s model of “antagonistic tolerance” for Ottoman urban history. In a first step, by taking into consideration the urban form of Nis from a long-term historical perspective, we consider how urban space was divided

In contrast to other Indian exports, black pepper was widely available throughout the Roman World, and affordable for ordinary working people. The relatively low price of black pepper indicates that Indo-Roman trade goods was not just pitched at the very wealthy, but benefited a much broader segment of the population. This throws new light on the scale and cultural impact of Indo-Roman trade, which

In the present article, I examine the construction and articulation of urban and communal identities in the early modern Ottoman Empire with special reference to the complex and dynamic local Jewish identities in Edirne. I analyse the terminology used for identifying Jewish litigants at the Islamic court in Edirne based on 12 cases selected from the Islamic court registers. In other words, I scrutinize

This article offers an approach to Ottoman urban history that puts boundaries at the focus of attention. It serves as an introduction to four case studies exploring social, communal and political boundaries in different Ottoman cities from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Our understanding of boundaries rests on a theoretical approach that considers urban space as a collection of socially

This article examines the case of Iraklio, Crete, on its passage from the Ottoman regime to the Autonomous Cretan Polity in 1898, to interrogate current categories of ethnic boundaries used in historical and social research. It proposes an ‘archaeological’ method of investigating such boundaries in space. It conceives of the city as a field of interaction between the predominant religious groups of

During the late Ottoman period the city of Gaza was caught up in internal political strife. The city’s elite families tended to operate within rival factions while trying to draw Istanbul into its internal conflicts. In this context, they formed complex relationships with the elite of Jerusalem that dominated Palestine’s politics, as well as with peasants and Bedouins in Gaza’s hinterland. The article

During the Roman Imperial period huge quantities of black pepper arrived into the Empire from southern India and were employed in a range of contexts, from the culinary and medicinal, to the religious. This article seeks to examine the popularity of black pepper in the Roman Empire and test the theory that its consumption was not simply restricted to elite circles, but reached a wider spectrum of the

In the early Middle Ages, while Byzantium was impoverished and Anatolian cities were evolving into fortified kastra , the Islamic Near East enjoyed an age of economic and demographic growth. Exploring the formation of sūq s and the rise of the Umayyad and early ‘Abbāsid states, this article argues that the Arab-Islamic aristocracy’s involvement in establishing sūq s reflected a desire to exert power

The adoption of paper in the Middle East changed literacy practices and improved economic performance, yet current accounts remain unhelpful for understanding why and how it happened. This paper offers a new analysis of the long-term factors behind the adoption of paper in the Middle East, combining insights from economic theory, economic history and evidence from quantitative studies. The paper establishes

Based on quantitative and qualitative analysis of visual representations and written texts, this study argues that officers, civil officials, and urban professionals who came of age in the late Hamidian era adopted the mustache as an expression of a generational identification and a related self-consciously modern masculinity that defined itself against the bearded, Hamidian order. After 1908, when

This article examines the career and writings of the minor poet ʿAbd al-Jalil Bilgrami (1660-1725) in order to explore the relation between the practice of courtly poetry and the work of politics in the Late Mughal empire. Tracing the transformations in ʿAbd al-Jalil’s writings over the first decades of the eighteenth century, this article demonstrates that the poet’s practice, driven as much by literary

The present article is a study of the social history of textile production in the city of Yerznka (Erzincan) in East-Central Anatolia. It examines textile manufacturing as a site in which gender, class, and ethnicity interacted to form the basis of an Armenian community before the Genocide. It brings a fresh perspective to studies on the persistence of Ottoman textile production in the age of European

Offering a micro-historical reading of extant legal deeds from Ashmūnayn in Upper Egypt, this article investigates the history of the diverse communities living in the Egyptian valley during the Ikhshīdid and Fāṭimid periods. It reveals the varied nature of settlements, the large extent of interconnections between towns and villages of different size and character, and the implications these had on

In 1895, a Mandaean priest was captured near the town of Chabāyish in Iraq and brought to the jailhouse in Basra. Shaykh Ṣaḥan was accused of murdering his nephew and, more significantly, of supporting an Arab tribal rebellion against Ottoman authority. Using archival sources and Mandaean oral history, this article analyzes the case of Shaykh Ṣaḥan within the context of state centralization, Ottoman-British

This introduction delineates the contours of early modern apocalyptic thought and practice among Christians, Muslims, and Jews by discussing specific themes explored in the five articles included in this special issue. It also situates the articles in the expansive scholarship on apocalypticism, highlighting the contribution of this collection of essays to the field. Paying close attention to and problematizing

Could early modern messianic movements cross religious boundaries? Drawing on several examples of Jewish messianic movements from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, this paper argues that in certain very specific circumstances they could. The circumstances of such crossover tended to be particular to the early modern period, such as the Converso condition, the participation of Christian Hebraists

This response essay engages with the themes of space, sociality, and sources (of pleasure and of scholarship) in Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s article in this issue, “The Hidden Face of Surat.” I reflect on how the Persianate adab that was a dominant cultural form in this port city might cause us to mitigate our analytical concepts when approaching phenomena from different historical contexts. I propose historical

This article presents a case study of a rebellion conspiracy organized by a group of Moriscos—Spanish Muslims forcibly converted to Catholicism—in the early seventeenth century. In order to carry out their plans, these Moriscos sought assistance from the French king Henry IV (r. 1589-1610). Analyzing a Morisco letter remitted to Henry IV and multiple archival sources, this article argues that prophecy

This article reflects on Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s article on early modern cosmopolitanism entitled “The Hidden Face of Surat: Reflections on a Cosmopolitan Indian Ocean Centre, 1540-1750,” and suggests that the cosmopolitan space was a political space where competing ideas of sovereignty clashed with each other. Therefore, the article argues that the study of political ideas and competing forms of constitutional

This article problematizes the use of messianic discourse in the articulation of political sovereignty in the early fifteenth century Timurid context. It argues that the concept of condominium was among the alternatives that the Timurid authorities considered in order to formulate a novel constitutional framework for the Timurid Empire after the death of Timur, and in specific political circumstances

The great port of Surat in western India dominated accounts of Indian Ocean trade between the late sixteenth and mid eighteenth century. Consolidated first by an Ottoman notable, it became the Mughal Empire’s western window into the worlds of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. In this essay, I explore Surat’s other, less visible, aspect: namely as an intellectual centre, that brought together diverse

This paper explores the genesis, self-understanding and significance of a small messianic commune operating in the late 1520s in southern Germany under the headship of Augustin Bader, an Augsburg weaver and erstwhile Anabaptist. It traces the unique convergence of Christian and Jewish messianic expectation in the 1520s that unexpectedly linked Bader to the kabbalistic prognostications of Abraham Halevi

This article traces the intertwining of contemporaneous Muslim and Christian millenarian beliefs and excitation from the early fifteenth to late sixteenth centuries, specifically as crystalized by the rise of the Ottoman power, the Muslim conquest of “Rome” (Constantinople) in 1453, and the sixteenth century Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry for recognition as legitimate claimants to the world empire of the

This article deals with the development of Kushan royal imagery as known from coins in the period between the 1st and the 3rd centuries AD , i.e. from the so-called Heraios series to the coins of Vasudeva. The aim is to challenge the traditional interpretative models which ascribed a crucial role to a Roman contribution, and to highlight instead first the role of the local numismatic tradition, which

Census data from 8th-century Eastern Central Asian oases, combined with the measurements of the oases and data from archives discovered there, allow us to calculate estimates both of the individual oases’ populations and of their respective feeding capacities, which is to say the number of people who could be fed from the output of one hectare of agricultural land. These numbers in turn have parallels

To date, servility and servile systems in Babylonia have been explored with the traditional lexical approach of Assyriology. If one examines servility as an aggregate phenomenon, these subjects can be investigated on a much larger scale with quantitative approaches. Using servile populations as a point of departure, this paper applies both quantitative and qualitative methods to explore Babylonian

The life of a Mongol named Mahimāsāhi underwent a series of transformations in Persian and Sanskrit texts. Mahimāsāhi was born a Mongol, became a New Muslim, and died a Kshatriya Rajput warrior in 1301. With time, he moved from history into historical memory. This historical memory was further transformed by literary conventions in Sanskrit and Persian texts. While Mahimāsāhi represents a Mongol threat

This paper examines economic aspects of the Arab Revolt of 1936-39, which was, beyond doubt, a national Palestinian revolt. It is suggested that, while the rebels, most of whom were peasants, acted collectively for national causes, many of them also perceived personal economic and rural collective interests in participating and acted to pursue economic and national goals simultaneously. This analysis

A growing number of studies argue that the Ottomans became militantly Sunni in the sixteenth century as they participated in the age of confessionalization. In defining Ottoman Sunnism, state policy and state-appointed jurists and scholars played a significant role. This paper attempts to define Ottoman Sunnism in the sixteenth century in a manner subtly different from that of the jurists, by looking

This paper goes beyond the ideological views of nationalist leaders who positioned the departure of Tunisian volunteer soldiers for Palestine in 1948 in the framework of national-liberation history, and it analyzes the volunteer movement to provide a picture of the internal mechanisms of popular mobilization. This was a dual movement, of spontaneous participation and organized recruitment by local

This paper is based on research undertaken for the Origins of Doha Project. It is a unique attempt to interrogate the construct of the Arab city against rigorously collected evidence and meticulous analysis of historical urban geography. We have found that Doha in its urban layout, physical development, architecture, and pre-oil demographics, combined its disparate cosmopolitan elements into a blend

With the transition from a government led by the military-administrative ruling class to that managed by the civil-servant sector during the Tanzimat reforms, the socioeconomic nature of the Ottoman bureaucracy changed dramatically. Studies have tended to focus on the new civil servants educated in the rusdiye (state secondary schools), but poor, unskilled Ottomans seeking to improve their socioeconomic

The story of an Indian king’s conversion to Islam by the prophet Muhammad and of the subsequent foundation by Arab Muslims of communities and mosques across the sovereign’s former dominion in Kerala appears in various Arabic and Malayalam literary iterations. The most remarkable among them is the Qiṣṣat Shakarwatī Farmāḍ . This legend of community origins is here translated from the Arabic in full

The principal aim of this study is to examine the use of charity as a factor of political legitimation by the ruling elite of al-Andalus in the Umayyad period. Accordingly, it explores the degree to which charity was an instrument in the hands of the authorities, and the manner in which this strategy was decisive in the process of consolidating power. In a broader sense, this analysis enables us to

By examining the main features of the fiscal system of Portuguese Asia and the private interests that clustered around it, this article contributes to the recent historiography on the pluralistic and negotiated dimensions of the colonial government. It argues that, in the context of the European power struggle that opposed the Dutch and the English against the Spanish Habsburgs, the financial needs

For funding the main research, my thanks go to the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge, who provided a Benefactors Research Scholarship. For funding subsequent refinements and the completion of this article, I must thank the Arts and Humanities Doctoral Training Partnership (AHRC DTP) of the University of Cambridge and Robinson College, Cambridge, who have supported my PhD through a

Sennacherib’s campaign to the southern Levant in 701 BC is an extensively studied episode in the Neo-Assyrian period. Nevertheless, despite the abundance of sources, the existing scholarship has left several questions unanswered. Furthermore, although economic growth is suggested to have been a motor behind Neo-Assyrian expansion, current interpretations of the campaign do not consider this to have

The neighborhood of Kababir in Haifa is known as the center of the Ahmadiyya community in the Middle East. It was established in the nineteen century as a hamlet, and was later annexed to the municipality of Haifa. The article traces the history of Kababir since its establishment until 1964 and observes the accelerated transition from rural to urban life at the periphery of an expanding city. The story

The rupture of modernity in the nineteenth century, the ‘disembedding and recombination’ of social space and the new production of local place and global order that it occasioned, are perhaps nowhere more visible than in its most classic location, as expressed by Baudelaire and Benjamin, the city. The ‘city’, that is, both political and physical, the cite of the Enlightenment philosophes that had also

Following the career of General Ḥusayn b. ʿAbdallāh, a prominent Circassian slave who served the Ottoman governors of Tunis from his childhood in the 1830s until his death in Tuscany in 1887, this paper attempts to grasp more than the colonial dimension of the North African past and to assess other global and transnational dynamics that molded the histories of modernity in the Maghrib. His exile in

The critiques of modernity advanced since at least the 1980s have seldom focused on North Africa/the Maghrib, where Europe and non-Europe impinge so closely on each other. Nor have they often allowed us to recover an historical account of the making of modernity as a global condition, beyond the largely dichotomous or bifurcating categories introduced by modern relations of power and unequal exchange

The Algerian-Tunisian frontier zone was much contested in the late nineteenth century, defying the logic of modernity that sought to establish territoriality. This modernity appeared only through an imbrication of raids, warfare, environmental shifts, and competing territorial claims. The violence of the territorial process, the changing geography of sovereignty, and uncertain frontier delimitation:

This article examines how historiography has interpreted the development of Muslim scholarship in early modern North Africa. It focuses on the continuing influence of what I call the “decline narrative” on both national historiographies and Western specialist studies. Elaborated in the context of French colonialism and consecrated by nationalist-cum-reformist discourses, the denunciation of the centuries

The present study draws on interdisciplinary research to establish an interpretative framework for an analysis of the material and textual evidence concerning infant loss in ancient Mesopotamia (c. 3000-500 BCE ). This approach rejects the notion that high infant mortality rates result in widespread parental indifference to infant loss, arguing instead that underlying biological and transcultural realities

Codification was a founding feature of Ottoman legal reform from the 1840s until the demise of the empire. This article seeks to situate the Ottoman project of codification in the context of the global codification momentum, which set the ground for a transnational common imagination of the law during the “long nineteenth century”. When analyzed from the perspective of glocalization , Ottoman codes

This essay argues that a broad survey of the evidence for hunger in ancient Mesopotamia shows that, while it was relatively rare in fact (if familiar enough in theory), the political management of hunger by early states points to its use in simulating their positions, in rhetoric and ideology, as providers of security and political membership as a rational economic choice. In fact, the social marginalization

A series of local geographical texts appeared throughout Iran in the 1870s and 1880s in the context of an attempt by the Qājār dynasty to collect information on its imperial possessions. These texts combine the instrumental approach of compiling knowledge for the court with literary traditions in local historiography. This article explores these local geographical writings through theories on identity

This article demonstrates that Sayyid Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd, a close associate of Ozbek Khan of the Golden Horde, was an expert in sayyid genealogy hailing from Najaf or Kufa and a member of a Twelver Shiʿi network that connected him to the sect’s centers in Iraq. It then discusses the implications of this finding for our understanding of the religious environment surrounding Ozbek and of the activities

Scholarship has argued that the Ottoman timar system was an efficient way to provide military forces in a non-monetized economy. As the state granted its sources of revenue to timariot s in return for military service, it was financially relieved of the need to pay the expenses of the cavalry. Several documents so far neglected by scholars and evidencing the practice of cash loans to timariots during

This paper examines enigmatic, small, Arabic-inscribed copper coins that were minted or circulated in the environs of a Hindu cave temple complex in northern Gandhara. Based on legends and typology, most of these issues can be attributed to the Ghaznavid period. This new numismatic evidence calls into question long-standing narratives of the Ghaznavid invasion of Hindustan, which posit that the Ghaznavids

This article investigates the regulations on grain storage and the ration system during the Qin and Han periods of China (221 BCE -220 CE ), using the Shuihudi Qin legal texts and the Zhangjiashan Han legal manuscripts. The “Statutes on Granaries” (“Cang lu”) and the “Statutes on Rations at Conveyance Stations” (“Zhuan shi lu”) are compared to administrative documents from Liye and Xuanquan to demonstrate

This paper explores the Ottoman Empire’s guarantee of religious privileges for non-Muslims made in 1853 and the struggles that occurred thereafter, between Muslim state officials and Armenian elites. It argues that the guarantee of religious privileges, which prepared a new set of terminology—that is, “privileges,” “religion,” and “politics”—for discussing the scope of the jurisdiction to be granted