Welcome, Fahad Bishara!

In October 2019, Fahad Bishara, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia will be guest blogging here. 

Prof. Bishara specializes in the economic and legal history of the Indian Ocean and Islamic world. His  book, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) is a legal history of economic life in the Western Indian Ocean, told through the story of the Arab and Indian settlement and commercialization of East Africa during the nineteenth century. It won the J. Willard Hurst Prize (awarded by the Law and Society Association), the Jerry Bentley prize (awarded by the World History Association), and the Peter Gonville Stein book award (given by the American Society for Legal History). 

Prof. Bishara is currently working on two projects. The first narrates 500 years of world history from the deck of an Indian Ocean dhow, and takes on issues of global capitalism, international law, empire, mobility, and scale in historical writing. The second explores the Indian Ocean trade in dates and uses it as a platform for examining the dynamics of a transregional bazaar economy in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but also sets that story against the backdrop of a longer connected history of the Gulf and Indian Ocean.

Welcome, Fahad Bishara!

--Mitra Sharafi

Special Issue: Indian Ocean of Law

Itinerario's new special issue on "The Indian Ocean of Law: Hybridity and Space" is now out. Here is the table of contents for the journal, 42:2 (August 2018):

Introduction: 

• Mahmood Koorie and Sanne Ravensbergen, "The Indian Ocean of Law: Hybridity and Space"

Articles: 

• Fahad Ahmad Bishara, “Imagining Oceans of Law: Oman and East Africa, circa 1910”
• Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, “On Mobile Legal Spaces and Maritime Empires: The Pillage of the East Indiaman Osterley (1779)”
• Mahmood Kooria, “The Dutch Mogharaer, Arabic Muḥarrar, and Javanese Law Books: A VOC Experiment with Muslim Law in Java, 1747–1767″
• Nadeera Rupesinghe, “Navigating Pluralities Reluctantly: The Marriage Contract in Dutch Galle”
• Sanne Ravensbergen, “Anchors of Colonial Rule: Pluralistic Courts in Java, ca. 1803–1848”
• Elizabeth Lhost, "Writing Law at the Edge of Empire: Evidence from the Qazis of Bharuch (1799-1864)"
• Byapti Sur, “Individual Interests Behind the Institutional Façade: The Dutch East India Company’s Legal Presence in Seventeenth-Century Mughal Bengal”

Further information is available here.

(H/t: Elizabeth Lhost's Law, Religion, History)

Pihlajamäki and friends on the history of commercial law

Heikki Pihlajamäki (University of Helsinki), Albrecht Cordes (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main),Serge Dauchy (CNRS Lille-France, University of Saint-Louis in Brussels), and Dave De ruysscher (Tilburg University, Vrije Universiteit Brussels) have co-edited Understanding the Sources of Early Modern and Modern Commercial Law published by Brill. From the press:

The contributions of Understanding the Sources of Early Modern and Modern Commercial Law: Courts, Statutes, Contracts, and Legal Scholarship show the wealth of sources which historians of commercial law use to approach their subject. Depending on the subject, historical research on mercantile law must be ready to open up to different approaches and sources in a truly imaginative and interdisciplinary way. This, more than many other branches of law, has always been largely non-state law. Normative, "official," sources are important in commercial law as well, but other sources are often needed to complement them. The articles of the volume present an excellent assemblage of those sources. 

 Contents after the break:

1 Introduction

  Heikki Pihlajamäki, Albrecht Cordes, Serge Dauchy and Dave De ruysscher

2 Mercantile Conflict Resolution in Practice: Connecting Legal and Diplomatic Sources from Danzig c. 1460–1580

  Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz

3 Justitia in Commerciis: Public Governance and Commercial Litigation before the Great Council of Mechlin in the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Century

  Alain Wijffels

4 Honore et utile: The Approaches and Practice of Sixteenth-century Genoese Merchant Custom

  Ricardo Galliano Court

5 The Abandonment to the Insurers in Sixteenth-century Insurance Practice: Comparative Remarks and (A Few) Methodological Notes

  Guido Rossi

6 Historiographical Opportunities of Notarized Partnership Agreements Recorded in the Early Modern Low Countries

  Bram Van Hofstraeten

7 How Normative were Merchant Guidebooks? Of Customs, Practices, and … Good Advice (Antwerp, Sixteenth Century)

  Dave De ruysscher

8 Sources of Commercial Law in the Dutch Republic and Kingdom

  Boudewijn Sirks

9 The Files and Exhibits of the Imperial Chamber Court and Aulic Council as Sources of Commercial Law

  Anja Amend-Traut

10 Legal, Moral-Theological, and Genuinely Economic Opinions on Questions of Trade and Economy in Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth-century Germany

  Eberhard Isenmann

11 The Birth of Commercial Law in Early Modern Sweden: Sources and Historiography

  Heikki Pihlajamäki

12 Svea Court of Appeal Records as a Source of Commercial Law: The Founding Year of 1614

  Mia Korpiola

13 Tracing the Speculation Bubble of 1799 in Newspapers, Court Records, and Other Sources

  Margrit Schulte Beerbühl

14 The Rise of Usages in French Commercial Law and Jurisprudence (Seventeenth-Nineteenth Centuries): Some Examples

  Edouard Richard

15 On the Origins of the French Commercial Code: Vicissitudes of the Gorneau Draft

  Olivier Descamps

16 Court Records as Sources for the History of Commercial Law: The Oberappellationsgericht Lübeck as a Commercial Court (1820–1879)

  Peter Oestmann

Further information is available here.

Weekend Roundup

• WaPo’s Fred Barbash on my Georgetown Law colleague John Mikhail: "Trump’s ‘emoluments’ battle: How a scholar’s search of 200 years of dictionaries helped win a historic ruling."  Update: CNN’s Chris Cillizza’s email interview of Professor Mikhail.  DRE

• Now online on C-SPAN: Last month's National History Center briefing, on the History of US Trade Policy.

• Greg Taylor, University of Adelaide School of Law, has posted The Grand Jury of New Zealand, which appeared in LAWTALK 919 (July 2018): “Little is remembered of the grand jury of New Zealand nowadays, but it existed within living memory – after 118 years of operation starting in 1844, the last grand jury sat in Gisborne on 28 November 1961. As late as July 1961 a grand jury in Hamilton refused to permit a prosecution against an electricity worker for failing to provide the necessary safety equipment and thereby causing the death of a worker.”

• This week in the Washington Post's "Made by History" section: Alison Lefkovitz (New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers-Newark) on "Jordan Peterson and the Return of the Men's Rights Movement."

• ICYMI: Josh Blackman & Seth Barrett Tillman on Lawfare: Is Robert Mueller an “Officer of the United States” or an “Employee of the United States”?  Seth Barrett Tillman, What is the "Privilege" of the Writ of Habeas Corpus? on New Reform Club. Michael Klarman in the Harvard Gazette: Are there holes in the Constitution?

• From "Talking Points Memo": Gregory Downs (UC Davis) on the 150-year history of today's voter suppression tactics.

• On the University of Leicester's Carceral Archipelago: Katy Roscoe on 19th-c. Gibraltar convicts and the sea.

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Thai on China's war on smuggling

Philip Thai, Northeastern University, has published China's War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842-1965 with Columbia University Press. From the publisher:

Smuggling along the Chinese coast has been a thorn in the side of many regimes. From opium and weapons concealed aboard foreign steamships in the Qing dynasty to nylon stockings and wristwatches trafficked in the People’s Republic, contests between state and smuggler have exerted a surprising but crucial influence on the political economy of modern China. Seeking to consolidate domestic authority and confront foreign challenges, states introduced tighter regulations, higher taxes, and harsher enforcement. These interventions sparked widespread defiance, triggering further coercive measures. Smuggling simultaneously threatened the state’s power while inviting repression that strengthened its authority.

Philip Thai chronicles the vicissitudes of smuggling in modern China—its practice, suppression, and significance—to demonstrate the intimate link between illicit coastal trade and the amplification of state power. China’s War on Smuggling shows that the fight against smuggling was not a simple law enforcement problem but rather an impetus to centralize authority and expand economic controls. The smuggling epidemic gave Chinese states pretext to define legal and illegal behavior, and the resulting constraints on consumption and movement remade everyday life for individuals, merchants, and communities. Drawing from varied sources such as legal cases, customs records, and popular press reports and including diverse perspectives from political leaders, frontline enforcers, organized traffickers, and petty runners, Thai uncovers how different regimes policed maritime trade and the unintended consequences their campaigns unleashed. China’s War on Smuggling traces how defiance and repression redefined state power, offering new insights into modern Chinese social, legal, and economic history.

Praise for the book:

"Philip Thai skillfully explores how smuggling remade the Chinese state by enabling it to establish better protection of its borders and its revenues and by standardizing regulations; he also examines the ways that political and economic disruptions constantly challenged this process. Thai weaves together a creative combination of social, political, economic, and legal history, ranging from a sophisticated technical discussion of tariff autonomy to a clever explication of the visual representation of smuggling in the public imagination of 1930s China. The combination of a broad theme—illicit economic activities interacting with state power—with many smaller case studies of smuggling incidents brings the story alive." -Elisabeth Köll

"Breaking chronological and geographic conventions, this important book places Nationalist-period state-building and the struggle for sovereignty in a framework of the long-term growth of infrastructural state power in China. By linking the rise of policing, legal regulation of production and consumption, and government intrusion in the economy with the operation of markets and economic life, Philip Thai accomplishes the remarkable feat of a fresh perspective on China from the bottom to top." -Brett Sheehan

Further information is available here.

Davis on Commercial Law in Medieval India

Donald R. Davis, University of Texas at Austin, has published The Dharma of Business: Commercial Law in Medieval India with Penguin. From the press:

Business law in medieval and early modern India developed within the voluminous and multifaceted texts called the Dharmashastras. These texts laid down rules for merchants, traders, guilds, farmers, and individuals in terms of the complex religious, legal, and moral ideal of dharma. This exciting book provides a new perspective on commercial law in this period. In addition to a description of the substantive rules for business, the book reinterprets the role of business and commerce within the law generally and demonstrates that modern assumptions about good business practice could benefit from the insights of this ancient tradition. It thus makes a compelling case for the relevance of the dharma of business to our own time.

 Here's the Table of Contents:

• 1: How to Read a Dharmasastra
• 2: Business Law in Context
• 3: Relationships as the Foundation of Commerce
• 4: Why Government is Necessary for Business
• 5. Virtue in Business

Further information is available here.

Chatterjee on women, monks, and coverture

In 2016, Indrani Chatterjee, University of Texas at Austin, published "Women, Monastic Commerce, and Coverture in Eastern India circa 1600-1800 CE" in Modern Asian Studies 50:1, 175-2016. Here's the abstract:

This article argues that economic histories of the transition to colonial economics
in the eighteenth century have overlooked the infrastructural investments that
wives and widows made in networks of monastic commerce. Illustrative examples
from late eighteenth-century records suggest that these networks competed with
the commercial networks operated by private traders serving the English East
India Company at the end of the eighteenth century. The latter prevailed. The
results were the establishment of coverture and wardship laws interpellated
from British common law courts into Company revenue policies, the demolition
of buildings. and the relocation of the markets that were attached to many of
the buildings women had sponsored. Together, these historical processes made
women’s commercial presence invisible to future scholars.

Bishara on Debt in the Indian Ocean

Out this month with Cambridge University Press is A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 by Fahad Bishara, University of Virginia. From the press:

In this innovative legal history of economic life in the Western Indian Ocean, Bishara examines the transformations of Islamic law and Islamicate commercial practices during the emergence of modern capitalism in the region. In this time of expanding commercial activity, a mélange of Arab, Indian, Swahili and Baloch merchants, planters, jurists, judges, soldiers and seamen forged the frontiers of a shared world. The interlinked worlds of trade and politics that these actors created, the shared commercial grammars and institutions that they developed and the spatial and socio-economic mobilities they engaged in endured until at least the middle of the twentieth century. This major study examines the Indian Ocean from Oman to India and East Africa over an extended period of time, drawing together the histories of commerce, law and empire in a sophisticated, original and richly textured history of capitalism in the Islamic world.

Here is the Table of Contents:

Prologue 

1. Life and debt 

2. Inscribing obligation 

3. Paper routes 

Interlude 

4. Translating transactions 

5. Making Africa Indian 

6. Muslim mortgages 

7. Capital moves 

8. Unravelling obligation 

Epilogue

Full information is available here.