ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Stanford University Press eBooks · 2023

• Computer Science
• Computer Science

discussed the place of Burma in South Asian history over the course of a semesterlong works-in-progress group

Into the bazaar: Indian Ocean vernaculars in the age of global capitalism

Journal of Global History · 2020 · 21 citations

• Sociology
• Political Science
• History

Abstract Drawing on a far-flung, multilingual archive of contracts and financial instruments from around the western Indian Ocean, this article highlights how cross-cultural trade depended on the ability of groups to translate between one system and another, rendering one commercial lexicon legible to another so as to produce commensurability and allow for conversions to take place. Law constituted a foundational building block of this process: Indian Ocean merchants drew on a deep well of legal concepts and forms as they attempted to make their worlds legible to one another, mobilizing the grammars of law to bridge commercial systems. We situate these dynamics within the context of the Indian Ocean ‘bazaar’, establishing it as a site for thinking about the place of cross-cultural trade in world history, and the histories of global capitalism more broadly. We suggest that Euro-American capitalism’s very agents had to adapt their commerce to the idioms, logics, and contracts of their business partners around the Indian Ocean – a vernacular world of the bazaar that was itself already in motion.

Histories of law and economic life in the Islamic world

History Compass · 2020 · 4 citations

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law

Abstract In this article, I survey the long‐standing debate on the place of Islamic law in the history of capitalism. I first mark out a literature that has thought, either explicitly or implicitly, in comparative terms about the capitalist trajectories of the Islamic world and “the West,” and has grappled with the place of Islamic law in shaping that trajectory; I then explore a parallel literature that sidestepped the question of capitalist development altogether in favor of a more textually grounded approach to the study of Islamic law and Muslim economic life. I end with a set of reflections on how to better situate the study of Islamic law and capitalism in a more textured historical context, drawing on a nuanced literature on colonial legal history. Rather than studying Islamic law and capitalism within a sealed‐off civilizational container, as many had done in the past, I suggest that a more fruitful approach might involve embracing a broader world of connections, circulations, and historical entanglements.

The Many Voyages of<i>Fateh Al-Khayr</i>: Unfurling the Gulf in the Age of Oceanic History

International Journal Middle East Studies · 2020 · 31 citations

• Political Science
• History
• Oceanography

Abstract In this article, I make the claim that the time has come to re-situate the Gulf historically as part of the Indian Ocean world rather than the terrestrial Middle East. I explore the historical potential of thinking “transregionally” – of what it means to more fully weave the history of the Gulf into that of the Indian Ocean, and what the ramifications are for orienting it away from the terrestrially-grounded literature in which it has long been situated. The promise of an oceanic history, I argue, is both academic and political: first, it opens up the possibilities of new narratives for the Gulf’s past, suggesting new periodizations, fruitful avenues of historical inquiry, and new readings of old sources. But more than that, an oceanic history of the Gulf allows historians to push against the discourses of nativism that have pervaded the public sphere in the Gulf States.