In the late nineteenth century, the Moroccan government`s concern for its image abroad led to a new approach to understanding Jewish rights. Although the sultans never abandoned the Treaty of Dhimma in favor of religious egalitarianism, government officials increasingly adopted a new language of equality to describe how Jewish subjects should be treated. This language of equality borrowed the vocabulary of Western notions of tolerance, but was not fundamentally at odds with Islamic ideals of justice. Mawlāy Ḥasan (reigned 1873-1894) refused to declare that Jews and Muslims were equal, but he increasingly insisted that Jews and Muslims should be treated equally before the law. The Jews walk an equally fine line between crossing the boundaries of their legal rights as dhimmīs and asserting their status as personal protégés of the sultan. Through an examination of the correspondence between Moroccan government officials, Jews, and foreign diplomats, this article situates the evolution of the relationship between the state and its Jewish subjects in the language used by the Machzan to define justice. The chapter explores the “logic of empire” in relation to law, bureaucracy and government practice, from antiquity to the present day. Based on the complex example of Haile Selassie I and the Ethiopian Empire, the chapter analyzes the many universalisms of law and empire before moving on to an overview of the various repertoires of imperial rule. The chapter then explores the many ways in which empires “put the law into action” and facilitate the development of multiple normative orders and institutions that go far beyond the jurisdiction of their own imperial officials. The final section of the chapter briefly presents (post)colonial jurisprudence and the concept of “legalism from below,” with a particular focus on recent archival research in court records. This article focuses on the legal-economic institutions that organized modern Eurasian trade.
He identifies two such institutions that had different models of dispersion, the Society and Commenda. Society found itself as a unique European institution that only migrated at the time of European colonization. The Commenda, originally from Arabia, migrated to Western Europe and China. The article explains their divergent dispersion based on differences in their institutional and geographical environment and on dynamic factors, and argues that institutional analysis is flawed when it ignores institutional migration and provides basic elements for modeling institutional migration. Promoting Liberal Democracy in the Eastern Mediterranean Peter Bang, Christopher Bayly, and Walter Scheidel, eds., The Oxford World History of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021) Café Riche`s Collective Memory of Egypt`s Cultural Elites from 1950-1970. Conference at the First World Congress on Middle Eastern Studies, an international conference organized by the University of Mainz, Germany – 8 -13 Settembre 2002. The article was co-authored with Peggy Bieber-Roberts The central Asian city of Shahrisabz has long been a historical footnote widely regarded as a recalcitrant “province in rebellion” that tormented its most powerful lords in Bukhara from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. In fact, it was an autonomous city-state in itself, and the mechanisms by which it was written in historiography reveal much about the historical methodology and premodern logics of sovereignty. To restore the history of Shahrisabz, this article pursues a non-hegemonic reading of the hegemonic Persian script (a strategy more commonly applied to colonial sources) and assembles fragments of text scattered compound in the city itself. In this way, he illustrates how multiple forms of symbolic submission and coercive violence have overlapped to create complexes that are not easily recognizable to modern binarities.
Seemingly contradictory forms of sovereignty regularly coexisted within the same political system, and greater specificity is needed to capture a kaleidoscope of permutations. Thus, the methodology of sources and sovereignty are two inextricably linked conceptual domains, the understanding of the second being possible only with a careful examination of the first. How do hierarchical nuclei or metropolises legitimize their influence or domination? How do their approaches to legitimation influence resistance? This theoretical note rethinks the functioning of legitimation in hierarchies, emphasizing the variation of nucleus legitimation strategies. I argue that different claims of hierarchical legitimacy shape both action at its core and resistance at the periphery. I develop a four-part typology of legitimation strategies, differentiated along two axes. On the one hand, hearts may be universalistic, not recognizing legitimate equals, or being competitive by recognizing other hearts as peer rivals. On the other hand, they can renew claims of legitimacy mainly internally by drawing them from their own political traditions or from outside and borrowing the claims of others. These strategies form options available for revisionism by rivals and resistance by hierarchical subordinates. I illustrate this with historical examples. Inhitat – The Decline Paradigm: Its Influence and Persistence in the Writing of Arab Cultural History, herausgegeben von Syrinx von Hees International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.