This article examines the interrelations between the political economies of the Ottoman Empire and the administration of justice for European merchants in Ottoman cities during the seventeenth century. By focusing on the sultan’s court of justice, the Imperial Council (divan-ı hümayun), and the Venetian merchants who appealed to it, this piece illustrates how Ottoman commercial interests and political concerns influenced the production and application of Islamic law (Sharia) in Ottoman courts for European merchants. To promote international trade, Ottoman political and legal authorities introduced new norms and procedures in matters of legal evidence and court jurisdiction in commercial cases between Venetian and Ottoman subjects, and they encouraged settlements in favor of foreign merchants and Ottoman-Venetian trade. These politics of justice, I argue, demonstrate the dynamism of the Ottoman legal system in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period characterized by global commercial development and Ottoman military and political ascendancy in the Mediterranean.

Foreign archaeologists working in the Maya region collaborated with the United Fruit Company during the first half of the twentieth century. In Guatemala, the Company funded research projects in Quiriguá (1910–1915) and Zaculeu (1946–1949). These collaborations supported the broad objectives of U.S. imperialism in the region, but comparing the projects suggests the fact of collaboration did not determine how they operated in the field. Drawing on theories of racialization, I suggest that the Company functioned as a conduit through which broader political economies of race and labor conditioned the practice of archaeology. In Quiriguá, archaeologists’ reliance on United Fruit’s administrative mechanisms led to the reproduction of the Company’s notorious labor practices and the exploitation of Afrodescendant labor in the context of a field site. In Zaculeu, a comparable dependence resulted in scientific methods being used to demonstrate Indigenous deficiency and racial continuity in the service of Company public relations and tourism development objectives. Despite wide-ranging changes in archaeological practice and governmental policy, comparing the cases illustrates how the operations of a corporate firm tied a field science into broader political economies of racialized labor. In so doing, I seek to shift analytical attention from the circulation of ideas about the past to the context of archaeological fieldwork, in which relationships of exploitation were renewed—and in which they might be contested today.

The paper reinterprets the East India Company’s state-building effort in late eighteenth‑century Bengal by foregrounding the intertwined evolution of fiscal capacity and institutional reform. It argues that the Permanent Settlement of 1793 emerged not from a desire to follow Indian or English precedent, but from the Company’s struggle to concentrate fiscal powers. A debate on the need to obtain information on taxpayers, which delayed the reform, reveals this struggle. Repeated failures in data collection pushed the state to anchor the reform in an expanding judicial system capable of producing actionable information. The Settlement strengthened revenue flows, enabling the financing of a centrally controlled army and contributing to Britain’s wider imperial expansion. However, its long-term rigidity limited fiscal flexibility and impeded broader developmental outcomes.

This article considers the history of Egypt’s mid-twentieth-century Spiritualist movement through an examination of its periodical, a monthly Arabic magazine called ʿAlam al-Ruh (The World of the Spirit) (1947–1960). As it shows, Egyptian Spiritualists defended and promoted their project by crafting an experimental cosmology, one that blended claims about empirical verification with elements of Islamic and Spiritualist cosmologies. It further shows how this combination of scientism and cosmology reflects a core dynamic within the history of scientific exploration in the Islamic world. Like spiritual seekers and occult practitioners in Muslim societies elsewhere, Egyptian Spiritualists positioned their project as one of eradicating superstition from religion, modernizing the nation, and advancing science. By attending to the Egyptian Spiritualist effort to scientize religion and spiritualize science, this article foregrounds the Islamic tradition’s entanglements with scientific discourses and navigates beyond claims about epistemological rupture that often characterize the study of Islam’s relationship to modern science.

Working closely with a detailed 1582 register of the free Afro-Peruvian population of Cusco, Peru, this article explores how the strategic representations of individual registrants reflect the intersectional impact of unfree labor practices and increasing racial marginalization in the early colonial Andes. The growing population of free Afro-Peruvian men and women navigated practices and policies that promoted racial inequalities and coerced labor based on race, class, and gender. The 1582 registry reflects municipal attempts to subject Cusco’s free Afro-Peruvians to ordinances that acknowledged the relative independence of skilled workers (oficiales), while requiring others to reside and serve in the homes of Spanish masters (amos). Analyzing entries for the nearly 150 people registered reveals ways that intersectional status and identity affected the experience of registration and the strategies for providing personal information to the Spanish notary. The declarations and omissions contained in the document highlight personal choices that people made to preserve their independence and that of their families. The social and economic independence displayed by many oficiales contrasts with the silence of individuals who lived and worked in the households of wealthy and powerful Spaniards, navigating unequal and enmeshed relationships. The range of individual experiences and statuses evident in the 1582 registry helps explain why the restrictive goal of the proceeding failed in the following years, as well as why a free Afro-Peruvian community did not flourish in Cusco during the later colonial period.

Flows of Spanish American silver have long been bound up in narratives of early modernity, the growth of globalization, and the coming of capitalism. This article reconsiders these narratives through a trial held in seventeenth-century Ottoman Istanbul of imported lion dollar coins that were suspected of being false. The trial shows the different ways groups—both within and outside the state and transacting on different scales from local to interstate—sought to impose criteria of evaluation on coins as they crossed oceans and empires in an era of incomplete state power and growing interstate trade. The trial worked to align competing understandings of money and restored confidence through a performance of measurement. In reckoning with competing understandings of money before multiple monetary authorities, social relations, as much as the physical coins, were on trial. By moving past a traditional divide between thinking globally about money as a trade commodity and thinking comparatively about money as a creature of the state in distinct polities, the trial of the lion dollars shows how early modern money was made and remade through a process of global circulation and far-reaching interactions with competing authorities.

Public rituals of buffalo sacrifice have a prominent place in the political history of eastern India. They were productive activities in agrarian livelihoods, stages for intercommunal politics, unifying spectacles for regional kings, and justifications for colonial military interventions. While their historical scale is much reduced today, in parts of southern Odisha, they remain important political events. Drawing on historical research and long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Odisha’s Kandhamal Hills, this article examines how public rituals of sacrifice form a site of commensuration: a space where interlocal relations of mutuality and difference are temporarily made visible, and where value is defined in the presence of diverse audiences. By focusing on one specific ritual event, I show how these “sacrificial publics” are structured around the tensions of sovereignty (togetherness and transgression) and have long been spaces where different kinds of sovereign power have become legible. Historicizing an enduring sacrificial politics at India’s upland margins, I outline a distinctly anthropological concept of sovereignty—one that reflects the ways human relationships are made commensurable in lasting political formations, sustained through interlocal and intercommunal patterns of recognition.

This comparative article examines the iterative interactions between the French conception of guerre contre-révolutionnaire and the (re-)legitimation of modern torture techniques from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Based on a threefold argument, and drawing on multilingual historical sources and museal artifacts, it argues that the ideological campaign against the “revolutionary war” was a specifically military-intellectual approach to dealing with real or imagined subversive enemies. This dispositif promoted torture as a method of obtaining information and intimidating victims. First, this article shows how torture and the corresponding knowledge production can be traced back to colonial Indochina. There, archaic techniques were peculiarly blended, often with other experiences and indigenous practices. Later, leading military officers believed that the resulting doctrine of counterrevolutionary warfare was successful largely because of the use of methods of torture that left no trace. This key feature facilitated the export of its techniques to other regions. Therefore, in a second step, this article shows how this intertwined knowledge system was applied to the Algerian War, where it was widely employed and exploited. Subsequently, the fear of the spread of global communism facilitated the emergence of torture as a covert science of the Cold War. Third, this essay demonstrates how leading French theorists globalized their teachings by influencing their South American counterparts through their cross-continental interactions from the 1960s onward. Since the end of the Cold War, traces of this savoir-faire have remained potent, culminating in their influence on U.S. American counterinsurgency doctrine.

This article examines how scientific research on lactose digestion from 1950 to 1980 became entangled in shifting discourses on race, heredity, and population. It traces how scientific framings of lactose digestion changed during this period—initially racialized as a disorder (lactase deficiency) affecting Black Americans, later reclassified as an ethnic trait, and ultimately reinterpreted as a biomarker of European ancestry. Drawing on medical research on “lactose science” and archival sources, this study explores how geneticists, medical researchers, and anthropologists jointly navigated the complexities of race and human variation in the postwar period. Using Peter Galison’s concept of trading zones, the paper traces how ethnicity and population emerged as strategic alternatives to race, facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration while preserving racialized assumptions about biological difference. The paper argues that despite efforts to align with UNESCO’s post-racial scientific agenda, research on lactose digestion came to produce a normative discourse around whiteness. In doing so, it raises a critical question: how did an ostensibly anti-racist science inadvertently revive older racial biologisms?

What made a sovereign, and a messianic one at that? Such questions were repeatedly posed in the sixteenth century, when vigorous new imperialisms compelled the articulation of grand visions of universal rule across Eurasia. In the Islamic world, now bereft of a living Abbasid caliph to serve as a touchstone of sovereignty and ruled by Turkic dynasties seeking to emulate Mongol and Timurid patterns of sacred kingship, the answers to these questions were articulated in ad hoc and heterodox ways. Indeed, there is now increased appreciation of the fact that the history of Muslim sacred kingship in the lead up to the Islamic millennium (ca. 1591–92) was one of occultist experimentation, messianic fervor, and charismatic demonstrations of sacred power, almost as much as it was one of state consolidation and canonization of the law. But where recent studies have shed light on how astral conjunctions, heavenly constellations, and the cosmic letters of the Arabic alphabet constituted the theoretical desiderata of Ottoman sacral kingship, they have tended to eschew royal spectacle and performance in favor of close readings of texts of mystical-occultist political theory. This study offers a close reading of a pyrotechnical performance staged in front of Ottoman sultan Murād III in 1582. Through drawing productive comparisons and connections with a similar, near-contemporaneous pyrotechnical performance staged in early modern Europe for the Holy Roman Emperor, it will argue for courtly pyrotechnics as a means of communicating the “wholly other” nature of the sovereign’s body at times of great cosmic import.

This paper compares the experiences and conclusions of two imperial investigations into diasporic Chinese communities of the Asia-Pacific in the 1880s. These were the official investigations undertaken by the specially appointed Qing Commissioners Wang Ronghe and Yu Qiong, and the unofficial mission carried out by the British translator, orientalist, and diplomat Edward Harper Parker. At a crucial moment in the history of Chinese immigration, these two parties undertook almost simultaneous expeditions to investigate the conditions of the vast Chinese diaspora across Southeast Asia and Oceania. Both missions engaged with some of the most contentious issues surrounding Chinese migration of the era. In particular, I focus on their documentation of the brutal exploitation of trafficked Chinese workers on the tobacco plantations of Deli, in the Dutch East Indies, as well as the rising tide of white supremacist efforts to exclude Chinese migrants from British Australia. Arguing for bold new approaches to imperial engagement with Chinese diaspora, both parties faced significant resistance to their work. Using Chinese, British, Dutch, and Australian sources, this paper traces these journeys to reveal unexpected commonalities between two very different imperial systems, demonstrating the surprisingly global reach of the late Qing state. Moreover, it uses the materials created by these missions to paint in-depth portraits of two Chinese communities and situate the period’s “Chinese Question” of migration to white settler colonies in its broader diasporic context.

In the wake of the 2015 attacks claimed by the Islamic State on the satiric magazine Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan theater, cafés in Paris, and the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, survivors were granted reparation based on an already existing legal framework. This article traces the history of compensation for terrorism in France back to a previous campaign of bombings carried out by Lebanese Hezbollah on iconic Parisian sites in 1985–1986 and, beyond the conjuncture of the late 1980s, to the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). While genealogies of human rights have so far focused on the aftermath of World War II and the history of the Holocaust, the paper uncovers the wars of decolonization as a key historical conjuncture for the emergence of contemporary humanitarianism and for the structuring of its fundamentally ambivalent discourse. A review of the successive arguments over how to draft, amend, and rewrite the reparation statutes in the late 1950s reveals how compensation was weaponized as an integral part of the “war on terror.” The paper then brings the analysis into the 1980s and the creation of a compensation fund as part of the 1986 Prevention of Terrorism Act. Reparations for terrorism emerge not only as a form of humanitarian intervention but also as a tool of counterinsurgency warfare in its own right. On a historiographical level, I draw on David Scott’s concept of “problem-space” to analyze the late 1950s and 1980s as imbricated conjunctures bearing an exceptional testimony to the history of the present.

This article examines the Nine Emperor Gods Festival as a site of religious transformation among Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, offering a lens through which to theorize how migration, memory, and marginality reshape ritual life. While the festival originated in Qing-era China, it was reconfigured across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through colonial labor migration, local ritual innovation, and the institutional life of overseas Chinese organizations. Adopting a longue durée perspective, we trace the shifting identities of the Nine Emperors, also known in the diaspora as the Nine Emperor Gods, and their mother, the Dipper Matriarch, alongside the transformation of the festival’s ritual structure. We propose the concept of diasporic religious ecology to theorize how Southeast Asian Chinese communities reconstituted religious authority outside East Asia. These communities invoked China as a cultural origin while simultaneously rejecting its political legitimacy. The Nine Emperor Gods, often recognized as exiles, martyrs, or liminal figures, mediated these tensions: their ritual features became metaphors for the diaspora’s tenuous but enduring relationship with China. By treating the festival not as evidence of survival but as a method of reckoning with displacement, this study positions religious transformation as a medium through which exile, rupture, and authority are not merely remembered but actively reconceptualized.

In January 1972, Egypt’s university campuses were shut down by a wave of student protest, after President Anwar Sadat appeared to be abandoning plans for a military response to the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The uprising, culminating in hundreds of arrests, marked the first significant mobilization against Sadat’s new regime and drew widespread public sympathy. Drawing on life history interviews, memoirs, press archives, lawyers’ records, and student publications, this article examines how solidarity with the Palestinian cause shaped the political formation of the Egyptian student movement and catalyzed its emergence. It argues that the students engaged in profoundly affective solidarity practices with Palestine, first in affirmation of longstanding Egyptian nationalist frameworks of opposition to Zionism, and further in contestation of wider political relations under Sadat. Whilst transnational solidarity features prominently in global histories of decolonization, it has rarely been used to interrogate Egyptian popular politics in the 1970s. By foregrounding Egyptians’ evolving affective solidarities with Palestine, this article challenges dominant narratives around the decline of Arab nationalism after 1967 and the rise of Islamism in its place. In doing so, the article reveals the complex dynamics of Egyptian-Palestinian relations over time, within a broader landscape of Arab and global anticolonial struggles.

Oran—Algeria’s second-largest city—is an archive of displacement, containing the imprint of overlooked, erased, or forgotten (often violent) pasts stored in everyday things like trees, trash, talk, and translations. Uniting all these unintended archival deposits are the dead—especially the uncommemorated, forgotten, or abandoned dead—and the urban spaces they co-inhabit with the most marginalized of the living. Based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper centers on urban cemeteries as archival nodes that gather together impressions—physically and psycho-semiotically—of uncommemorated pasts that nevertheless have left their mark on the urban fabric and people’s lives. This material “documentation” embedded in the built environment provides a vernacular alternative to the “fantasy” of official, national archives, foregrounding the blurry colonial-postcolonial divide in ordinary people’s historical imaginaries. Urban traces of displaced people and pasts show how complex semiotic residues get carried across otherwise disparate urban spaces where the postcolonial present has yet to reckon fully with colonialism’s mortal remains.

Following the proclamation of constitutionalism on 23 July 1908, villagers throughout the Ottoman Empire occupied and reclaimed çiftlik (plantation) lands from which they had previously been dispossessed. This article approaches the Ottoman 1908 Revolution as part of the “global wave of constitutional revolutions” by shifting the historiographical focus of the 1908 revolution from urban to agrarian spaces. It investigates a series of land occupations that emerged across the Ottoman çiftlik geography, conceptualizing them as the “constitutionalism of the dispossessed.” I argue that this constitutionalism of the dispossessed was a response to what I call the “order of dispossession” that emerged in the late nineteenth century: a class project of çiftlik owners reacting to global economic, imperial fiscal, and local ecological crises that aimed to subordinate labor to the circuits of global capital. Furthermore, this article discusses the failure of the constitutionalism of the dispossessed in the face of a social counter-revolution by çiftlik owners, which culminated in the codification of imperial property law. It demonstrates that the post-revolutionary government—having been concerned with the credibility of the empire in European credit markets for new loans to sustain the empire in fiscal crisis—desired the restoration of the order that the çiftlik owners insisted upon, and which the circuits of global capital required. This article ultimately offers a fresh and radical history of the Ottoman 1908 revolution and counter-revolution, suggesting a novel perspective to understand the modes of protest of the dispossessed in response to the imperatives of global capital.

Widowers make occasional appearances in Icelandic sagas of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and—even though Old Norse did not even have a word for them—they exhibit some distinctive behavioral patterns. This article uses the framework of bereavement studies to examine the interplay of gender, affect, and small-scale politics in the wake of the loss of a wife. It proposes two archetypes of dysfunctional bereaved husband, observable in the medieval Norse world which the sagas describe (ca. 800–1300): the widower on the warpath and the widower on the bridal path. Both followed cultural scripts for widowers’ conduct, but did so imperfectly, in a manner that exposes their society’s constructions of masculinity, its prescriptive family codes, and the clandestine channels linking private emotional turmoil with public socio-political disruption. My typology of maladjusted Norse widowers offers heuristic tools for further study of bereaved husbands in other periods and places, as well as for comparison with bereaved wives and with men in other life-stages.

This article reveals late Ottoman (1876–1908) debates over agrarian policy in the empire’s Arab provinces that set the parameters for a fully articulated discourse of national economy emerging after the constitutional revolution of 1908. Debates between imperial officials, regional capitalists and foreign consular agents produced protectionist restrictions on the newly constructed agrarian land market, especially in an extended geography encompassing Palestine and the Hijaz Railway. Ottoman officials viewed the Arab provinces both as an untapped resource and as a possible alternative base in the event of Anatolia’s occupation. Restrictions on the land market constructed Muslim cultivators as ideal landholders and non-Muslim subjects, both Christian and Jewish, as potentially suspect and unfit for landholding. Protectionist and exclusionary agrarian policies responded to a wider context of imperial capitalism in which Ottoman officials occupied a subordinate, but still sovereign, position. These policies had an unrecognized legacy in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, creating a durable state domain that aimed to shield large swaths of land as territory from foreign investment and occupation. The much-discussed work of Frederick List on national economy focused on practices of import substitution and tariffs with empirical examples culled mainly from the United States and Germany. In the Ottoman Empire, in contrast, agrarian policy played a crucial role in practices of national economy because of the urgent prerogative to maintain territorial sovereignty in the face of imminent colonial expansion. The article suggests a reappraisal of the contributions of Ottoman policy debates to the broader history of capitalism.

This essay examines a scene of late Ottoman parliamentary politics characterized by verbal disruption, raucous applause, and strident indignation: in short, clamor. Centered on the brief period in late 1918 following the empire’s exit from World War I but prior to the rise of the Turkish nationalist movement, the essay focuses on a moment shaped by remarkable uncertainty about how to narrate the political present—what aspects of the historical past remained relevant to defining a possible political future? It looks at the efforts of a Greek Orthodox deputy of parliament, Emmanouil Emmanouilidis, to rebuke the promise of the nearly century-long process of reform (ıslahat). As part of this effort, he also historicized the interruption of his own speech, identifying the traces of his own frailty of voice in the stenographic records from prior parliamentary sessions. Attention to noise requires a careful unpacking of seemingly contingent moments of communicative misfire, places where denotational discourse is disrupted and therefore unheard, or what speech act theorists have referred to as infelicities. I offer a critical reimagining of the concept of infelicity, attentive to Emmanouilidis’ own preoccupation with the historical weight assumed by the fact of being persistently drowned out by his colleagues. I contend that Emmanouilidis was challenging regnant assumptions about the historical unfolding of freedom in Ottoman political life. The essay argues for the importance of interrogating the labile and contested character of historical temporality at the end of empire.

What explains the contested conditions for migrant worker citizenship under socialism? Migration scholarship often elides socialist contexts, tracing migrant deservingness to the neoliberal rise of labor-based conditionality for legal status across Western states in the late twentieth century. However, a broader historiography suggests that socialist states, despite their institutional differences, conditioned migrant inclusion on labor performance throughout the twentieth century. To explain how this form of civic conditionality operated under socialism, this paper draws on the case of migrant “limit” worker management in Moscow from the early 1960s to 1987. Using archival materials, I show that state-owned enterprises operated as migration intermediaries, establishing and enforcing a labor-based conditionality for local citizenship even as the state pursued additional civic aims. I find that civic campaigns initiated in the early 1960s provided an ideological framework and material base for enterprises to govern migrant workers at their dormitories. Managers and officials at the dormitory redirected resources intended for social activism and cultural tutelage toward ensuring baseline productivity and compliance. Enterprise managers and union officials additionally substituted the material conditions at the dormitory for the assessments of individual migrants’ moral and productive status. This paper extends the literature on migrant deservingness to a socialist context, showing how conditionality for civic inclusion develops beyond the neoliberal shifts in contemporary citizenship.