Pub Date : 2021-11-26DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341552
H. L. Stebbins
Extraterritoriality and nationality were crucial to the legal landscape of the Late Persianate world and relations between Iran and British India. Extraterritoriality not only protected British subjects from Persian prosecution but also afforded the British Empire the means to rule Indians in lands beyond the Raj. Iran’s opposition to extraterritoriality led to laws that expanded Iranian nationality to include many Indians living in Iran and the Iranian diaspora living in India—who often navigated these rules as it best suited their interests. These developments reveal the significance of imperialism and state building to the emergence of modern international law and the fate of the Persianate world.
{"title":"Extraterritoriality, Nationality, and Empire in the Persianate World, 1890-1940","authors":"H. L. Stebbins","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341552","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341552","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Extraterritoriality and nationality were crucial to the legal landscape of the Late Persianate world and relations between Iran and British India. Extraterritoriality not only protected British subjects from Persian prosecution but also afforded the British Empire the means to rule Indians in lands beyond the Raj. Iran’s opposition to extraterritoriality led to laws that expanded Iranian nationality to include many Indians living in Iran and the Iranian diaspora living in India—who often navigated these rules as it best suited their interests. These developments reveal the significance of imperialism and state building to the emergence of modern international law and the fate of the Persianate world.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41263444","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-26DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341546
N. Chatterjee
A necessarily widespread feature of language practice in the Persianate world was the need for translation of speech and text, with a range of lexical and semantic challenges involved in taking meaning from one language to another. This article focusses on legal translation, with its highly functional aims, by following the career of a pair of Indo-Persian legal forms known as tamassuk and fārigh-khaṭṭī, used for recording obligation and requital respectively. Tracing their reincarnations from Persian into Marathi, Hindi and Bengali, this article reveals several forms of boundary-crossing: doctrinal, jurisdictional, political and linguistic. In doing so, it explores the legal mindscapes in the early modern Indo-Persian world, spilling from the late Mughal into the colonial, and shows how multilingualism functioned within specific parts of the Persianate cosmopolis.
{"title":"Translating Obligations: Tamassuk and Fārigh-khaṭṭī in the Indo-Persian World","authors":"N. Chatterjee","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341546","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341546","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000A necessarily widespread feature of language practice in the Persianate world was the need for translation of speech and text, with a range of lexical and semantic challenges involved in taking meaning from one language to another. This article focusses on legal translation, with its highly functional aims, by following the career of a pair of Indo-Persian legal forms known as tamassuk and fārigh-khaṭṭī, used for recording obligation and requital respectively. Tracing their reincarnations from Persian into Marathi, Hindi and Bengali, this article reveals several forms of boundary-crossing: doctrinal, jurisdictional, political and linguistic. In doing so, it explores the legal mindscapes in the early modern Indo-Persian world, spilling from the late Mughal into the colonial, and shows how multilingualism functioned within specific parts of the Persianate cosmopolis.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45883116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-26DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341547
Prachi Deshpande
Kaulnāmās were ubiquitous in early modern Marathi bureaucratic documentation. They were issued as deeds of assurance offering protection and confirming various rights, especially during warfare or invasion. Such documents were issued at different levels of the administrative hierarchy in the Adilshahi and Maratha administrations to prevent flight from troubled areas, extend cultivation, and encourage commerce. They also recorded grants of waste land to cultivators on graduated rates of taxation, or to merchants for developing market towns. This paper historicizes the kaulnāmā form from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries, exploring the kinds of transactions of power, sovereignty and property it was part of. Through this focus on the trajectory of particular documentary forms, it reflects on the nature of the Persianate within Marathi bureaucratic practices, and the history of the Marathi language more broadly.
{"title":"The Marathi Kaulnāmā: Property, Sovereignty and Documentation in a Persianate Form","authors":"Prachi Deshpande","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341547","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341547","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Kaulnāmās were ubiquitous in early modern Marathi bureaucratic documentation. They were issued as deeds of assurance offering protection and confirming various rights, especially during warfare or invasion. Such documents were issued at different levels of the administrative hierarchy in the Adilshahi and Maratha administrations to prevent flight from troubled areas, extend cultivation, and encourage commerce. They also recorded grants of waste land to cultivators on graduated rates of taxation, or to merchants for developing market towns. This paper historicizes the kaulnāmā form from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth centuries, exploring the kinds of transactions of power, sovereignty and property it was part of. Through this focus on the trajectory of particular documentary forms, it reflects on the nature of the Persianate within Marathi bureaucratic practices, and the history of the Marathi language more broadly.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46420356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-26DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341556
{"title":"Modified Transliteration Chart, based on the IJMES Chart for Arabic, Persian and Turkish, and the LOC Romanization Tables for Hindi, Bengali, and Gujarati","authors":"","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341556","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341556","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42687495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-26DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341545
F. Bishara
This article explores the contours of debt and labor in the early twentieth-century Persian Gulf pearl dive. It examines the barwa, a declaration exchanged by nakhodas (dhow captains) about the amounts that divers owed and the terms by which they might be hired out. By looking both through and at the barwa, we find a window into the Indian Ocean maritime bazaar, and into the artifacts through which mobile and itinerant laborers were bound to the dhow and its captain. Maritime actors used these papers to navigate the boundary between person and property, and between free and unfree, all within a changing commercial and legal world.
{"title":"The Diver’s New Papers: Wealth, People, and Property in a Persian Gulf Bazaar","authors":"F. Bishara","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341545","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341545","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article explores the contours of debt and labor in the early twentieth-century Persian Gulf pearl dive. It examines the barwa, a declaration exchanged by nakhodas (dhow captains) about the amounts that divers owed and the terms by which they might be hired out. By looking both through and at the barwa, we find a window into the Indian Ocean maritime bazaar, and into the artifacts through which mobile and itinerant laborers were bound to the dhow and its captain. Maritime actors used these papers to navigate the boundary between person and property, and between free and unfree, all within a changing commercial and legal world.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49180782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-04DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341541
B. Liebrenz
An illustrated cosmographical and geographical manuscript at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, known as the Book of Curiosities, has recently seen a rare confluence of public and scholarly attention. It is widely regarded as one of the outstanding Arabic works of geography, with stylistically idiosyncratic maps and a text that can be traced back to Egypt in the Fatimid period. However, few concrete facts are known about the history of this unique artefact. This article will identify and analyse the traces left by some of its previous owners and thus unlock the Ottoman history of this Fatimid work. By placing it in a concrete temporal and geographical context, we are better able to envisage the intellectual, social, and political environment in which this book could make sense to its owners and readers.
{"title":"Curious Readers: The Bodleian’s Book of Curiosities as a Fatimid View of the World Through Ottoman Eyes","authors":"B. Liebrenz","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341541","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341541","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000An illustrated cosmographical and geographical manuscript at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, known as the Book of Curiosities, has recently seen a rare confluence of public and scholarly attention. It is widely regarded as one of the outstanding Arabic works of geography, with stylistically idiosyncratic maps and a text that can be traced back to Egypt in the Fatimid period. However, few concrete facts are known about the history of this unique artefact. This article will identify and analyse the traces left by some of its previous owners and thus unlock the Ottoman history of this Fatimid work. By placing it in a concrete temporal and geographical context, we are better able to envisage the intellectual, social, and political environment in which this book could make sense to its owners and readers.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49085263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-04DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341542
Svetlana Jacquesson
In this article I focus on the importance of folklore archives in staking heritage claims and in disputes over cultural “ownership.” I use as a case study the Manas epic which is shared by post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan and China’s Kyrgyz minority. By analyzing the actors who took part in the transcription of the epic, the conditions under which these transcriptions were conducted, and the results they yielded, I show how, in the case of Kyrgyzstan, turning the epic from an oral tradition into a literary monument that could be claimed as national heritage was a long story of suffering and coercion, aspirations for reward and recognition, disaccords between holders of official authority and subordinates, and never-ending personal conflicts, all under the constantly looming threat of political repression. I contrast the uses of collections of transcripts under Soviet rule and in the post-independence period which overlapped with the UNESCO-driven heritage rush worldwide. I argue that while under Soviet rule the transcripts of the epic were “raw data” which editors, translators and scholars could bend according to their needs or their expertise, after independence these transcripts have been used both as a means of authenticating the epic and claiming it as heritage. I conceptualize this process as the “transvaluation” of folklore archives, or a process in which transcripts were turned into valuable historical artefacts by downplaying the agencies involved in their production and the circumstances under which it took place.
{"title":"On Folklore Archives and Heritage Claims: the Manas Epic in Kyrgyzstan","authors":"Svetlana Jacquesson","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341542","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341542","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In this article I focus on the importance of folklore archives in staking heritage claims and in disputes over cultural “ownership.” I use as a case study the Manas epic which is shared by post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan and China’s Kyrgyz minority. By analyzing the actors who took part in the transcription of the epic, the conditions under which these transcriptions were conducted, and the results they yielded, I show how, in the case of Kyrgyzstan, turning the epic from an oral tradition into a literary monument that could be claimed as national heritage was a long story of suffering and coercion, aspirations for reward and recognition, disaccords between holders of official authority and subordinates, and never-ending personal conflicts, all under the constantly looming threat of political repression. I contrast the uses of collections of transcripts under Soviet rule and in the post-independence period which overlapped with the UNESCO-driven heritage rush worldwide. I argue that while under Soviet rule the transcripts of the epic were “raw data” which editors, translators and scholars could bend according to their needs or their expertise, after independence these transcripts have been used both as a means of authenticating the epic and claiming it as heritage. I conceptualize this process as the “transvaluation” of folklore archives, or a process in which transcripts were turned into valuable historical artefacts by downplaying the agencies involved in their production and the circumstances under which it took place.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44995833","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-04DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341543
M. Borroni
A close reading of two poetical sources provides new data on the reforms of the fiscal schedule of the Abbasid state in the ninth century. This paper reconstructs the calendrical complications in those Abbasid regions that followed Iranian administrative tradition and its solar calendar without intercalations. Two reforms were issued under al-Mutawakkil and al-Muʿtaḍid to correct the fiscal schedule of these regions. A panegyric by al-Buḥturī allows us to confirm and contextualize al-Mutawakkil’s reform in the final years of his caliphate. A few verses by Ibn al-Muʿtazz give a significant description of the close connection between al-Muʿtaḍid’s reform of the Iranian New-Year’s day and the construction of his public figure.
{"title":"Wandering Days: Two Sources in Poetry on the Abbasid Reforms of the Fiscal Schedule","authors":"M. Borroni","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341543","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341543","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000A close reading of two poetical sources provides new data on the reforms of the fiscal schedule of the Abbasid state in the ninth century. This paper reconstructs the calendrical complications in those Abbasid regions that followed Iranian administrative tradition and its solar calendar without intercalations. Two reforms were issued under al-Mutawakkil and al-Muʿtaḍid to correct the fiscal schedule of these regions. A panegyric by al-Buḥturī allows us to confirm and contextualize al-Mutawakkil’s reform in the final years of his caliphate. A few verses by Ibn al-Muʿtazz give a significant description of the close connection between al-Muʿtaḍid’s reform of the Iranian New-Year’s day and the construction of his public figure.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49299407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-04DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341540
Guy Burak
The article examines the rise of standardized collections of fatāwā issued by officially appointed provincial Hanafi muftis across the Ottoman Empire in the long eighteenth century. The article focuses on the earliest compilation, that of the Jerusalemite Ḥanafī mufti, ʿAbd al-Raḥīm b. Abī al-Luṭf. This compilation was commissioned by the famous chief imperial mufti Feyzullah Efendi. The article then traces the proliferation of the standardized fatāwā compilation over the course of the eighteenth century, from Medina to the Balkans. This essay seeks to examine the emergence of local/provincial compilations of fatāwā over the eighteenth century as yet another chapter in the long intervention of the Ottoman dynasty (through its learned hierarchy) in the regulation of the doctrines of the Ḥanafī madhhab at the imperial and provincial levels. Focusing on Feyzullah Efendi’s initiative and its aftermath may cast light on specific venues and practices in which this intervention took place in a particular historical moment.
{"title":"Şeyhulislâm Feyzullah Efendi, the Ḥanafī Mufti of Jerusalem and the Rise of the Provincial Fatāwā Collections in the Eighteenth Century","authors":"Guy Burak","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341540","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341540","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The article examines the rise of standardized collections of fatāwā issued by officially appointed provincial Hanafi muftis across the Ottoman Empire in the long eighteenth century. The article focuses on the earliest compilation, that of the Jerusalemite Ḥanafī mufti, ʿAbd al-Raḥīm b. Abī al-Luṭf. This compilation was commissioned by the famous chief imperial mufti Feyzullah Efendi. The article then traces the proliferation of the standardized fatāwā compilation over the course of the eighteenth century, from Medina to the Balkans. This essay seeks to examine the emergence of local/provincial compilations of fatāwā over the eighteenth century as yet another chapter in the long intervention of the Ottoman dynasty (through its learned hierarchy) in the regulation of the doctrines of the Ḥanafī madhhab at the imperial and provincial levels. Focusing on Feyzullah Efendi’s initiative and its aftermath may cast light on specific venues and practices in which this intervention took place in a particular historical moment.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46038645","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-06-04DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341539
Danielle Ross
This article explores how the Islamic elegiac genre of marthiya can shed new light on the social and cultural history of the Muslims of Russia’s Volga-Ural region in the late imperial period (1870s-1917). The marthiyas enjoyed great popularity across geographical, ethnic, and factional lines as a medium for asserting and affirming social bonds and expressing collective identities. Volga-Ural marthiyas reveal the links between Sufism and Tatar national history-writing, demonstrate the interrelation between Sufi literature and Muslim revolutionary culture, and point to historical figures and groups that were left out of the evolving Tatar national historiography.
{"title":"The Promiscuous Life of a Genre for the Dead: The Marthiya as an Instrument of Community Construction in Muslim Russia","authors":"Danielle Ross","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341539","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341539","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article explores how the Islamic elegiac genre of marthiya can shed new light on the social and cultural history of the Muslims of Russia’s Volga-Ural region in the late imperial period (1870s-1917). The marthiyas enjoyed great popularity across geographical, ethnic, and factional lines as a medium for asserting and affirming social bonds and expressing collective identities. Volga-Ural marthiyas reveal the links between Sufism and Tatar national history-writing, demonstrate the interrelation between Sufi literature and Muslim revolutionary culture, and point to historical figures and groups that were left out of the evolving Tatar national historiography.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41824484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}