At the recent meeting of the Law and Society Association, the winner of the annual Dissertation Prize was announced. The award went to Du Fei (University of Oklahoma), for a dissertation titled "Local Women, Global Histories? Gendering Economic Life, Law, and Islam in Early Modern Transregional India." The citation:
Du Fei, Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma, who earned his PhD from Cornell University, has been selected as the winner of this year’s Dissertation Prize. His dissertation, “Local Women, Global Histories? Gendering Economic Life, Law, and Islam in Early Modern Transregional India,” challenges gendered constructions of Islamic law and reveals how gender-insensitive narratives have shaped dominant histories of trade and travel in global Islam.
Historians have long traced the movements of merchants, colonizers, and legal professionals across transregional India, often casting men as global actors and non-European women as local, domestic subjects. But what was it precisely that made some of these histories “global” and others “local”? What roles did women actually play in the economic life of the time, and how did they engage with legal systems, while navigating financial and social networks? Drawing on extraordinarily rich archival research and sharp theoretical analysis, Fei’s dissertation uncovers a fascinating inversion of mainstream assumptions about the histories of gender in Islam.
While Muslim women in transregional India are often portrayed as passive or economically marginalized, Fei shows that some acted as strategic negotiators—engaging with jurists, judges, and male kin to assert claims through Islamic law on property and inheritance. Rather than being confined to the private sphere, these women regularly negotiated with male kin, jurists, judges, and officials in multiple courts. Taking readers across the lands and seas of South Asia, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, Fei effectively constructs a new archive for the legal history of South Asia, drawing on sources in Persian, Arabic, English, and Dutch.
By positioning the household as a critical site of economic activity, the dissertation also unsettles simplistic accounts of patriarchy and offers a major methodological and substantive contribution to the economic and legal history of global early modernity. It advances scholarship on legal pluralism by demonstrating how women navigated overlapping legal traditions as they engaged in debates among Muslim jurists, colonial officials, and Orientalists. In short, Fei’s dissertation represents the epitome of law and society scholarship.
The committee unanimously praised the exceptional reach of the dissertation, spanning gender studies, legal history, and Islamic studies, and its potential to mark a leap forward in socio-legal scholarship that employs historical analysis. Beautifully written and meticulously researched, the dissertation lays the groundwork for an important interdisciplinary intervention. In a period marked by opportunistic originalism, it offers socio-legal scholars a compelling example of how careful archival rereading can serve as a powerful counterpoint in legal argumentation about global histories.
Congratulations to Professor Fei!
