International Conference

OCEAN OF LAW Intermixed Legal Systems across the Indian Ocean World, 1550-1950

7 Monday – 9 Wednesday December 2015

Gravensteen 11 Leiden University The Netherlands

Conveners Mahmood Kooria MPhil Sanne Ravensbergen MA

Advisory committee Prof. Jos Gommans Prof. Léon Buskens Dr. Alicia Schrikker Dr. Adriaan Bedner

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Contents

Introduction

4

Sponsors

6

Map

7

Locations and addresses

8

Programme Schedule

9

Keynote lectures

15

Abstracts and bios

18

E-mail addresses

58

Notes

59

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Introduction Legal history in connection with the Indian Ocean world is relatively a new field. Recent work by many scholars in this area has added value to the cultural history of such regions as South, Southeast and East Asia, and the Middle East and of the workings of imperial and colonial structures. Interdisciplinary research and cooperation of scholars working on early-modern and modern history of the broader Indian Ocean world help trace back the journeys of legal ideas and to reconstruct these legal histories. This conference will provide a platform for scholars to discuss and share their work. We will address questions such as: how were legal systems formed regionally through interactions? To what extent did law play a role in the shaping of societal, multicultural or maritime settlements, and of empires and colonial states in general? How did law function in the cosmopolitan communities and how did the legal systems influence each other? The existing historiographies on legal pluralism, spatialization of law, movement of ideas, information networks, and cultural brokerage serve as stepping stones for further discussions. The main themes of the conference would be: 

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Religious and secular laws: the construction, generalization and/or homogenization of laws varying from Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist to Confucianist legal notions against/with the ‘secular’ laws. Colonial and non-colonial laws: colonial legal discourses and the saving/reforming enterprise of noncolonial laws. Legal institutions: continuities, discontinuities and ruptures in differently functioning (pluralistic) legal institutions and their organizations.

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 

Micro and macro legal systems: macro legal theories’ regional functionality, micro legal practices’ negotiations with the broader systems. Relationships between theory and practice of law: texts and juridical manuals in practice, the exclusions and inclusions, selections and deletions.

We have received a good number fascinating papers dealing with the cultural mechanisms of law in the Indian Ocean world. We aim this conference to be an interdisciplinary platform as we already have contributions from historians, anthropologists, legal scholars and others whose research is related to the legal aspects of this oceanic rim. In the following days, we hope to have intensive discussions on the connections and comparisons in legal cultures across different regions, time-periods and themes.

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Sponsors The conference is generously sponsored by: Leiden University Institute for History Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction Asian Modernities and Traditions, Leiden Leiden University Fund Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society

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Locations and Addresses Conference Venue Gravensteen 011 Pieterskerkhof 6 2311 SR Leiden Leiden Special Collections University Library Witte Singel 27 2311 BG Leiden Lunches: Huizinga Building (History Department) Doelensteeg 16 2311 VL Leiden Dinner: Het Koetshuis de Burcht Burgsteeg 13 2312 JR LEIDEN

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Programme Schedule

Day 1: 07 December, 2015 (Gravensteen Building 011) 8.30 Registration and coffee 9.00-9.10 Welcome 9.10-10.30 Keynote Speech I: Prof. Paul Halliday (University of Virginia) Longing for Certainty, Across Law’s Oceans 10.30-10.45 Coffee 10.45 – 12.15 Panel 1 Chair: Prof. Nira Wickramasinghe (Leiden University Institute for Area Studies) Nurfadzilah Yahaya PhD (National University of Singapore) Powers that Bind: Tracing the Impact of Powers of Attorney in the Indian Ocean from 1880-1970 Joel Blecher PhD (Washington and Lee University) From Mamluk Egypt to British India: Recasting Islamic Penal Law in Colonial South Asia Mahmood Kooria MPhil (Leiden University) Arabic al-Muḥarrar, Dutch Mogharaer and Javanese compendium: VOC’s experiments with Muslim law 12.15 – 13.30 Lunch (Huizinga Building)

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13.30 – 15.00 Panel 2 Chair: Prof. Jos Gommans (Leiden University Institute for History) Fachrizal A. Halim PhD (University of Saskatchewan) The Formation of the Shāfiʿī school of law revisited: A study of prosopography and fiqh works Stewart Motha PhD (University of London) Liminal Legality: Provincializing Contemporary Legal Thought Gijs Kruijtzer PhD (Vienna University) Equivalence Encountered: Christians and Muslims in the Face of Divine Law 1500-1700. 15.00-15.15 Coffee 15.15- 16.45 Panel 3 Chair: Prof. Petra Sijpesteijn (Leiden University Centre for Islam and Society) Sanne Ravensbergen MA (Leiden University) Anchors of Colonial Rule: Pluralistic Legal Courts and Criminal Justice in Colonial Java 1803-1848 Nikitas Hatzimihail PhD (University of Cyprus) The Indian Ocean in the Mediterranean Sea: law reform and Indian transplants in British colonial Cyprus Elizabeth Lhost MPhil (University of Chicago) The Qaẓī of Bharūch and the Changing Tides of Islamic Law in South Asia, c. 1835–1880

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Day 2: 08 December, 2015 (Gravensteen Building 011) 08.30-08.45 Coffee 08.45-10.00 Keynote Speech II: Prof. Engseng Ho (Duke University and National University of Singapore) Islam across Cultures in the Indian Ocean: Legal, Mystical and Mythological Faces 10.00-11.30 Panel 4 Chair: Prof. Manon van der Heijden (Institute for History) Kirsty Walker PhD (Harvard University) Policing Intimacy: Khalwat and the Everyday Life of Islamic Law in British Malaya Nathan Perl-Rosenthal PhD (University of Southern California) The Osterley: Law, community and the sea in French Mauritius (ca. 1779-1780) Nadeera Rupesinghe MPhil (Leiden University) Navigating Pluralities: Colonial Lawmaking in Eighteenth-century Galle 11.30-11.45 Coffee 11.45-12.45 Panel 5 Chair: Prof. Egbert Koops (Leiden University, Law Faculty) Arthur Weststeijn PhD (Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut te Rome) Provincializing Grotius. International Law and Empire in a Seventeenth-Century Malay Mirror

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Stephanie Jones PhD (University of Southampton) General histories and piratical geographies: the Indian Ocean as a cultural formation of justice 12.45-14.00 Lunch (Huizinga Building) 14.00 - 15.30 Panel 6 Chair: Dr. Adriaan Bedner (Van Vollenhoven Institute, Leiden) Renisa Mawani PhD (University of British Columbia) Imperial Circuits of Law: The Case of Gurdit Singh (1859-1954) Byapti Sur MA (Leiden University) Local Agency in the Dutch East India Company’s Power-politics for Combatting Corruption in Bengal, 1684-1688 Guo-Quan Seng PhD (University of Chicago) Dutch and Chinese Patrimonial Legal Discourse and the Domestication of Women’s Commerce in Colonial Java (1830s-1890s) 15.30-15.45 Coffee 16.00 – 17.00 Visit to the Special Collections, University Library 19.00 Dinner at ‘Koetshuis de Burcht’ (Speakers and chairs only)

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Day 3: 09 December, 2015 (Gravensteen Building 011) 08.30-08.45 Coffee 08.45-10.15 Panel 7 Chair: Esther Zwinkels MA (Leiden University Institute for History) Prof. Léon Buskens (Leiden University) Constructing a colonial Shāfiʿī law canon in Indonesia Santhosh Abraham PhD and Visakh Madhusoodanan Subha MA (Indian Institute of Technology Madras) Recasting and Reimagining the Islamic Law and Jurisprudence: Colonial and Post-colonial Discourses on Muslim Law in Malabar, Kerala Hassan S. Khalilieh PhD (University of Haifa) The Holy Qur’ān, the Prophet, and the Islamic Genesis of the Free Sea 10.15-10.30 Coffee 10.30 – 12.00 Panel 8 Chair: Dr. Alicia Schrikker (Leiden University Institute for History) Fahad Bishara PhD (College of William and Mary) Dhows, Empire, and International Law: “Law Talk” and the Muscat Dhows Case, 1890-1905 Naveen Kanalu MPhil (University of California, Los Angeles) Governing, Decreeing and Administering Political Authority: Encountering Persiante Styles in the Legal Cultures of the Early Modern Deccan

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Seán Donlan PhD (University of Limerick) and Mathilda Twomey PhD (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Seychelles) Island, Intersection, or In-Between? Legal Hybridity and Diffusion in the Seychellois Legal Tradition 12.00 – 13.15 Lunch (Huizinga Building) 13.15-14.15 Roundtable Moderator: Dr. Carolien Stolte (Leiden University; Managing Editor, Itinerario)

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Keynote lectures Prof. Paul Halliday (University of Virginia) Longing for Certainty, Across Law’s Oceans Legal historians have long been ‘realists', countering the claims of ‘formalists'. Our impulse, especially in recent decades, has been to write histories of law that focus on those in positions of weakness who used law in surprising ways, or on those who were subjected to law's most vicious possibilities. Realist accounts of law’s pluralities help explain both of these experiences. But for all the importance of socially- and culturally-informed understandings of law in complex crosscultural interactions, legal formalism has to be taken seriously. After all, many in the past took formalism seriously—none more so, perhaps, than justices in imperial superior courts. Such courts were created across the Indian Ocean, and other oceans, too, in the century after 1763. In the face of law’s unavoidable pluralities, English judges in imperial courts longed for certainty. Why, and with what consequences? The answers connect legalities across the Indian Ocean and other oceans beyond. Reading: Paul Halliday, “"Laws’ Histories: Pluralisms, pluralities, diversity” in Lauren Benton and Richard J. Ross, eds., Legal Pluralism and Empire, 1500-1850 (New York University Press, 2013), 261-77. Paul Halliday is Julian Bishko professor of history and chair of the University’s Corcoran Department of History. He writes about the legal history of Britain and its empire from the 16th to 19th centuries. His most recent book, Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire, was published by Harvard University Press in 2010 and won the 2011 Inner Temple Book Prize. He frequently consults in the writing of briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court on issues connected to English legal history.

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Halliday's research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society. He is now working on two research projects: one exploring the archival and other material forms of judicial authority in the 18th century and the other concerned with the formation of the imperial constitution, and in particular, with the judicial role in the making of empire. Through all his work runs a persistent interest in rethinking English law’s history and the use of that history in U.S. courts, as well as an interest in the relationship of English law to other legal regimes around the globe.

Prof. Engseng Ho (Duke University and National University of Singapore) Islam across Cultures in the Indian Ocean: Legal, Mystical and Mythological Faces Across the Indian Ocean, new societies, cultures and polities have been created and recreated by the constant mobility of people to places across cultures. Accounts of cross-cultural encounters -- the founding of settlements, coming of foreigners, and creation of sovereignties -- are widespread, and take many narrative forms, including mystical, mythological and legal ones. What changes in the movement from one genre form to another? What consequences do these changes have for the meanings and markings of lines of distinction and inclusion between persons and communities? This lecture places law next to other faces of Islam across cultures in the Indian Ocean. Readings: Engseng Ho, “Mobile Law and Thick Transregionalism” Law and History Review 32: 04 (2014): 883-889

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Fahad Bishara, “Paper Routes: Inscribing Islamic Law across the Nineteenth-Century Western Indian Ocean” Law and History Review 32: 04 (2014): 797-820. Engseng Ho is professor of cultural anthropology and history at Duke University and Muhammad Alagil Distinguished Visiting Professor at National University of Singapore. He was previously Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and Senior Scholar at the Harvard Academy. After graduating from Stanford with undergraduate degrees in economics and anthropology, Ho spent a few years as an international economist in Singapore before pursuing a masters and PhD at the University of Chicago. His dissertation on a society of Yemeni people that had a 500-year history of migration broke the mold of a traditional anthropology program that focuses on the study of contemporary society in one geographic locality. He spent two years in Yemen conducting research that revealed a rich history of a people who traveled throughout East Africa, the Arab world, India and Southeast Asia, intermarrying and contributing to the establishment of new Muslim religious, political and legal institutions. The dissertation grew into a book: The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (University of California Press, 2006). He is currently interested in the international and transcultural dimensions of Islamic society across the Indian Ocean, and its relations to western empires. Ho also has conducted research in Saudi Arabia, India, and Southeast Asia.

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Abstracts and bios

Nurfadzilah Yahaya (National University of Singapore): “Powers that Bind: Tracing the Impact of Powers of Attorney in the Indian Ocean from 1880-1970” This paper explores the role of the Power of Attorney and its closest Dutch equivalent known as the volmacht (plural: volmachten) more accurately translated as ‘mandate’ or ‘act of proxy’. Both the Power of Attorney and the volmacht were legal devices that transferred power to someone to act on someone else's behalf in a legal or business matter. These legal devices were heavily utilized by Arab merchants from Hadhramaut (in present-day Yemen) in order to authorize their representatives in the British Straits Settlements (Penang, Malacca and Singapore) and Netherlands Indies (Indonesia). Often conceived according to Islamic law, but administered according to British or Dutch legal procedures, these Powers of Attorney demonstrated how Arab migrants negotiated at least two very different legal systems to construct durable trust networks across the Indian Ocean. Originally written in Arabic, the Powers of Attorney were subsequently translated into Malay, and then further translated into English or Dutch. Court cases involving Powers of Attorney and volmachten illustrated common complications presented by these documents namely, jurisdictional complications, limitation of written documents as valid evidence in Islamic law, the uncertainty surrounding women’s agency in Islamic jurisdictions, translation problems and the complications of multiple versions of same documents competing for legal recognition. Heavy reliance on this particular legal device by members of the Arab diaspora firmly tied them to state legal institutions that authorized, ratified and enforced legal terms in these documents. In their desire for legal enforcement, members of the Arab diaspora entrenched themselves within political and

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economic hierarchies of formal legal colonial systems. These Powers of Attorney offer a window into the logistics of commercial operations across lands not ruled by a unified state or integrated by a common currency. The uniformity of style of these Powers of Attorney could be a testament to a truly global mercantile culture. Nurfadzilah Yahaya is a legal historian, and a Research Fellow at Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. She is also the Regional Editor for SHARIAsource for Southeast Asia, a go-to site on Islamic law for researchers, journalists, and policymakers. From 2012 till 2015, she held the Mark Steinberg Weil Early Career Fellowship in Islamic Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her PhD in History from Princeton University in November 2012. She is currently preparing her book manuscript on mobile Muslim merchants in the Indian Ocean which is based on her doctoral dissertation which won a Book Prize from the Al-Wehdah Arab Association of Singapore in 2015. The book, tentatively titled Fluid Jurisdictions,explores how members of the Arab diaspora utilized Islamic law in British and Dutch colonial courts of Southeast Asia.

Joel Blecher (Washington and Lee University): From Mamluk Egypt to British India: Recasting Islamic Penal Law in Colonial South Asia The Islamic legal tradition’s transmission across the Indian Ocean was as much about preserving the past as it was about addressing the needs of the present time and place. As a case study, this paper shows how Islamic religious authorities in colonial India repurposed Mamluk-era Islamic legal commentaries on discretionary punishment (taʿzīr) to address a pressing question of their place and time: what were the proper

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limits of Muslim jurists’ authority in light of the growing obsolescence of traditional institutions of Islamic law? In in the midst of British colonialism in 19th-century South Asia, a diverse landscape of traditionalist and modernist Islamic reform movements emerged. The Ahl-i Hadith movement in Bhopal and the Ḥanafī scholars at the Dar al-ʿUlūm in Deoband navigated this landscape by circulating and composing supercommentaries on 14th- and 15thcentury Egyptian Islamic legal texts in Arabic. That both reform movements claimed to base their own commentaries on the works of luminary legal scholars in late Mamluk-era Egypt did not prevent stark disagreements in their approach to Islamic law and its derivation in the colonial period. One point of intersection that lays bare the divergent strategies of the Ahl-i Hadith and scholars of Deoband is the chapter on discretionary punishment (taʿzīr) in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, a foundational source of the Islamic legal curriculum. Islamic laws regulating corporal punishment had come under fierce criticism by British observers, and South Asian Muslim legal scholars found themselves locked in internal debates about how best to respond. In cases of offenses requiring taʿzīr, were judges limited by authenticated hadiths that restricted penalties to “no more than ten lashes,” as the Ahl-i Hadith maintained? Or should they defer to the opinions of their traditional legal school that gave judges far broader powers in sentencing, as the Deobandis argued? Building on the work of legal anthropologist Brinkley Messick and social historian Muhammad Qasim Zaman, this paper draws on Arabic, Urdu and English sources to show how reformist scholars revised, edited, recompiled, omitted, and elaborated upon the Islamic legal traditions they inherited from Mamluk Egypt in diverse ways to speak to an age in which traditional institutions of law were suffering unprecedented criticism from within and from without. This paper further reflects on what direct influence either of these schools had in implementing or shaping the state

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judiciary’s position on corporal punishment. Ṣiddīq Ḥasan Khān (d. 1890), the principal figure behind the Ahl-i Hadith, may have enjoyed some executive power through his marriage to Shāh Jahān Begum (r. 1847-1868). Despite the fact that British authorities marginalized Ḥasan Khān’s views by likening them unfavorably to those of the Wahhabis, his opinion that jurists’ authority in cases of discretionary punishment ought to be strictly limited was ironically in consonance with those of most British legal observers. Meanwhile, Anwar Shah al-Kashmīrī (d. 1933), a leading figure in the Deobandi school, had relatively limited political power, serving as an educator in a madrasa setting whose patrons were merchants of Gujarat and the South Asian diaspora in South Africa. Kashmīrī’s views on discretionary punishment, which strongly asserted the privilege of traditionally trained experts, should be read in the context of a new socio-political context in which secular educational institutions, under the direct influence of the British, were allowing Indian Muslims to re-encounter the Islamic legal sources without the help of traditional Muslim authorities. Joel Blecher (Ph.D. Princeton) is Assistant Professor of Religion and Adjunct Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. His current research tracks the social and intellectual history of the hadith commentary tradition as it migrated from classical Andalusia, to postclassical Egypt, to modern India. His recent work on hadith commentary has been published in Oriens.

Mahmood Kooria (Leiden University): Arabic al-Muḥarrar, Dutch Mogharaer and Javanese compendium: VOC’s experiments with Muslim law Not many scholars have worked on the circulation of Islamic legal texts and ideas across the Indian Ocean world. In my doctoral dissertation, I look into the movement of Shāfiʿīte legal

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texts between eastern Mediterranean and Indian Ocean rims. I focus on a particular text called Minhāj al-ṭālibīn by Yahya bin Sharaf al-Nawawī (d. 1277), and by extension a few more other texts. I argue that Minhāj became a turning point in the textual history of Shāfiʿīsm eventually forming a textual longue durée across different nodal points of the Indian Ocean world from South-and East Africa to Southeast Asia. In this paper, I focus on the base-text and intellectual predecessor of Minhāj called alMuḥarrar, written by ʿAbd al-Karīm bin Abī Saʿīd Muhammad al-Rāfiʿī (d. 1226). This text is claimed to have been utilized by the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, VOC) in the eighteenth-century while it was formulating an “indigenous” legal code to administer its Javanese subjects. I examine to what extent this claim is true; why did the imperial power end up at this particular text while there were a plenty others in the Islamic (Sunni-Shāfiʿīte) world; and, how did this “authentic” Islamic legal corpus played a role of colonial agent for the European imperial networks in a Javanese atmosphere? Since the mid-seventeenth century, the VOC officials have been encountering local legal cultures of Indonesia. But they preferred to circumvent those in favour of European laws whenever it was possible. In the eighteenth century, however, they had to address indigenous legal systems more directly when VOC was seeking out the possibilities of direct or indirect rules. It sequenced to the production of many codes directed towards the legal varieties of Muslim or Chinese subjects of Indonesia. While some officers went on identifying or codifying pure customary laws, some collected the Javanese legal variants, a few others endeavoured to bring out compendia of Islamic law consulting the fuqahā. The last group is said to have consulted Shāfiʿīte legal texts with the help of local scholars in the course of their codifications, and al-Muḥarrar was their major reference. I argue that this assertion is baseless. I also try to demonstrate that the very claim is part of a larger colonial project that sought legitimacy from the indigenous subjects at a time of political and economic crises.

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Mahmood Kooria is a doctoral candidate at the Leiden University Institute for History since 2012. He received his M.A. and M.Phil. in History from the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Fachrizal A. Halim (University of Saskatchewan): The Formation of the Shāfiʿī school of law revisited: A study of prosopography and fiqh works The formation of the Islamic schools of law has been the subject of scholarly investigation since the establishment of modern Islamic Studies in Western academia. In his famous Selected Works, C. Snouck Hurgronje (1957) argued that before the establishment of the schools of law, legal traditions were grouped in loose geographical terms and that al-Shāfiʿī and eponyms of other schools were singled out as representatives of the infallible will of the community. Likewise, in his classic The Ẓāhirīs, Ignaz Goldziher argued that al-Shāfiʿī was the most important figure who introduced a legal paradigm that later became the characteristic of each schools of law. Later generations of scholars, such as Joseph Schacht (1964) and George Makdisi (1981), further developed this theory, which perpetuated the images of the great scholars such as al-Shāfiʿī, Abū Ḥanifa and Mālik as the founders of the schools of law. Serious challenges to this theory only appeared in Wael B. Hallaq’s work (1993) in which he argued that even if eponyms of the schools were great jurists, they did not always command loyalty from their followers. In a similar vein, Christopher Melchert (1997) opined that the great jurists were recognized as the founders of the schools only after the proliferation of writing activity that began far beyond the lifetime of these jurists. Adding to the findings of Hallaq and Melchert, I offer a new detailed formation of the Shāfiʿī school by highlighting the existence of sub-schools or community of interpretations among Shāfiʿī jurists. My paper promises to unravel the emergence of

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these sub-schools, their members, and how they were synthesized by a later jurist, Yaḥyā b. Sharaf al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277). By reading al-Nawawī’s works and biographical dictionaries of Shāfiʿī jurists, I argue that the Shāfiʿī school may have been fully canonized only in the seventh/thirteenth century. Dr. Fachrizal Halim is a lecturer of Islamic Studies at the Department of Linguistics and Religious Studies, the University of Saskatchewan. He received his doctoral degree from McGill University Institute of Islamic Studies in 2013. Before coming to Saskatchewan, he was a visiting fellow at the Islamic Legal Studies Program (ILSP), Harvard Law School. His areas of specialization are Islamic legal and intellectual tradition of Muslims in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, Muslim societies’ interaction with European colonialism, ChristianMuslim relations, and digital history of Islamic law. His publications include Legal Authority in Premodern Islam: Yaḥyā b. Sharaf al-Nawawī in the Shāfiʿī School of law (Routledge, 2015).

Stewart Motha (University of London): Liminal Legality: Provincializing Contemporary Legal Thought To be sovereign is to be alone at the moment of decision. Apparently nothing mediates the novelty, creativity, and singularity of the sovereign event. On this Schmittian account, the sovereign is an island. And yet, the sovereign decision is in need of an alibi. While the sovereign decision can create its own frame of reference, it never proceeds on the basis that arbitrariness is valid. Sovereignty, like art and fiction, moves by way of a parergon. It is framed by an archive that is its mode of legitimation. Among these archival and parergonal forms are a range of literary figures, such as Crusoe and Friday, that appear and reappear in juridical formulations. This paper gives an account of what sustains and undoes the enisled sovereign. Despite the claims to autonomy and

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monopoly of the decision, I argue that the sovereign cannot be (a) castaway - cannot be alone being alone. The enisled sovereign, like Robinson Crusoe on his island, wrestles with the beast as savage other, and the beast that is within himself. The discussion will focus on the Chagos Archipelago. Stewart Motha is Reader in Law at Birkbeck Law School, University of London. He is a critical legal theorist working on sovereignty, violence, and aesthetics. His current research is focused on the Indian Ocean region – including Australia, the Chagos Islands, Sri Lanka, migration and refugees, and South African post-apartheid jurisprudence. He is currently working on a book, Archiving Sovereignty (forthcoming with Michigan University Press).

Gijs Kruijtzer (Vienna University): Equivalence Encountered: Christians and Muslims in the Face of Divine Law 1500-1700. When Europeans arrived in the Indian Ocean World through the Cape Route, they did not enter an altogether unfamiliar world. Islam and Muslims in particular were seen as nodes of familiarity. Not only had southern Europe long had direct contact with the Islamic world, there was also a shared heritage that predated that contact. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam has pointed out, the inheritance of ancient Greek philosophy and Alexander legends combined with west Asian monotheism formed the basis of some shared expectations between the Tagus and the Ganges in the early modern period. John Tolan, moreover, points to parallel developments in Latin and Arabic concepts of “religion” and “law,” which led to their overlapping in crucial ways in both cases. In their search for the familiar and equivalent, which they needed to explain the Indian Ocean World to themselves and their audiences, European merchants and travellers thus often presented Islamic law in terms of The Law, that is the Old

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Testament. Sometimes Islamic law was also explicitly presented as comprehensible through the lens of Judaism already in this period, though that became more common in the nineteenth century. But what I want to stress here is the search for equivalence that Post-Orientalist scholars so often overlook. Moreover, the partly recognised shared background gave rise to a common understanding of what constituted abidance by and transgression of divine law. Europeans were able to point out the strictness, laxity or hypocrisy of Muslims in following divine law precisely because they understood so well the mechanisms through which strategies of circumvention and exception operated in Europe. Europeans asked themselves and their interlocutors the question: how can people be conscious that x is forbidden and still go ahead regardless? Which leads us to the question: how can instances of this approach in the sources contribute to our understanding of legal consciousness in the western Indian Ocean region? Gijs Kruijtzer is a historian of the early modern period with an eye for visual culture, legal history and global comparison. He studied history at Leiden University, Delhi University and the University of Arizona, and has been a research associate at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Yale University and Humboldt University. His publications include Xenophobia in Seventeenth-Century India (2009), “Pomp before Disgrace: A Dutchman Commissions Two Golconda Miniatures on the Eve of the Mughal Conquest” (2010), and “The Fighting on the Wall: Deccan Animal Symbolism in a Eurasian Perspective” (2014). He is currently engaged in a project comparing the early modern Persianate and Latinate worlds, hosted by the WISO institute of the University of Vienna. The resulting book looks at how some people in these two areas tried to generate acceptance for instances of transgression of divine law.

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Elizabeth Lhost (University of Chicago): The Qaẓī of Bharūch and the Changing Tides of Islamic Law in South Asia, c. 1835–1880 When qazi (qāḍī) Syed Ahmad Husain wrote to the Governor in Council of Bombay in 1842 asking for the restoration of his annual Eid tribute, he appealed on the basis of more than his judicial function. Emphasizing his family’s long-standing history with the East India Company, the qazi stressed his continued importance as an intermediary and promoter of Company interests in his hometown of Bharūch (Broach)—a port city in western Gujarat. Indeed, as the qazi’s correspondence with Company officials demonstrates, he helped in more than one way to extend the reach of British authority from the administrative hub of Bombay to his native entrepôt. Drawing upon his correspondence with the Company as well as records produced and maintained by the qazi and his nā’ib (deputy; assistant), this paper examines the work of the qazi at the time of the Company’s rapid expansion along the western coast of India. Granted authority under Islamic law and confirmed by the law codes of the East India Company (specifically, the Bombay Code of 1827), the qazi of Bharuch played a significant role in promoting and maintaining order at a time of expanding British dominance and increasing interference in the management of everyday life. At the same time, as a pinnacle of the community in Bharuch, the qazi also performed functions central to the city’s commercial, social, and legal activities. Moving between petitions and papers he sent to Company officials and the local records and registers he kept, this paper considers the qazi’s service in extending the authoritative reach of Company law while also creating an environment of contractual stability and consistency within the maritime world of western India. Taking a cue from recent work by Fahad Ahmad Bishara and others, I consider the way in which the legality and locality of the qazi’s register provided a foundation for commercial activity

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in this well-established port city, not through their circulation but rather in their capacity to document and preserve social relations in the face of increasing mobility. In particular, by recording marital transactions and solemnizing social relationships, the qazi’s register provided an anchor for Bharuch’s mobile commercial communities, including elites as well as low-level sailors and laborers. More specifically, a review of these records suggests that contracts of marriage often served as a way to wed commercial interests; the qazi’s register created a legal record of these engagements in an effort to mitigate the uncertainty of oceanic travel and trade. Even as changes in British policy stripped away the qazi’s more explicitly commercial functions, by recording social transactions, the qazi’s register remained instrumental in promoting and protecting the city’s commercial activities. As his status among locals relied on his family history and reputation, his relevance to outsiders rested in his authority under Islamic law. Studying the qazi of Bharuch from his position as legal official and community leader, as Company correspondent and plaintive petitioner, provides a microcosmic view of local transformations in the practice of Islamic law. Elizabeth Lhost is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations & History at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, tentatively entitled “Between Community and Qānūn: Documenting Islamic Legal Practice in 19th century South Asia,” examines responses among Islamic legal practitioners to the challenges of colonial bureaucracy. Focusing on the writings and documentary practices of qazis and muftis, she studies the history of legal modernization in the context of religio-legal practice across the subcontinent.

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Sanne Ravensbergen (Leiden University): Anchors of Colonial Rule: Pluralistic Legal Courts and Criminal Justice in Colonial Java 1803-1848 Central to this paper is the practice of criminal justice conducted by the Landraad (plural: Landraden), a pluralistic regional legal court in colonial Java. During the 19th century, imperial justice in Java was predominantly mediated during sessions of the Landraad, where the European resident as well as the Javanese regent, the Chinese captain, the Islamic penghulu (cleric and mosque administrator) and the indigenous jaksa (public prosecutor) made their appearance. Criminal cases and legal correspondence in the archives in Jakarta and The Hague show that verdicts administered in this pluralistic setting were the product of a transcultural process. The Landraad served as a site where several knowledge and power networks connected and interacted. Therefore, these councils inform us not only about colonial justice, but also about the daily dynamics of colonial rule, and the uses of colonial justice by the officials, advisors and judges themselves. This paper investigates the workings of the Landraad in Java during the first half of the 19th century, but it also traces back the origins of this pluralistic legal court being introduced in Java during the 18th century. The VOC era (16021799) and the period of the developing colonial state in the Netherlands Indies (1800-1942) are often researched as two separate time frames with its own characteristics. However, this paper aims to focus on continuity rather than change. First, it will argue that the actual purposes and pluralist organisation of the Landraad in Java did not change much during the 18th and 19th century. Second, it will describe how the network of Landraden expanded during the first half of the 19th century and how uniformity became an important new feature. Third, it shows the importance of the Landraad and criminal justice for early colonial state formation in Java. The Landraden were anchors which made colonial rule - necessarily based on indirect rule - visible into every corner of Java.

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Sanne Ravensbergen is a PhD-candidate at the Leiden University Institute for History. She is currently working on a NWO-funded PhD-research project entitled Crime and punishment in the Dutch East Indies 1816-1918. By studying colonial legal archives in Indonesia and the Netherlands, this project analyzes the complexities of criminal law practice in a colonial multi-ethnic society. Colonial legal correspondence and criminal cases serve as historical sources to unravel political and social processes in the colony.

Nikitas Hatzimihail (University of Cyprus): The Indian Ocean in the Mediterranean Sea: law reform and Indian transplants in British colonial Cyprus My paper examines the diffusion/transplantation of British colonial legislation first enacted in nineteenth-century India (and subsequently circulated across the Indian Ocean, from British African colonies to Australia) in the British-controlled territories of the Eastern Mediterranean, notably Cyprus, in the first half of the twentieth century. My principal emphasis lies in two landmark pieces of legislation (veritable codes): the Indian Contract Act 1872 and the Indian Penal Code 1862, which were both enacted in Cyprus in 1930. In telling the story of the two codes, from their inception to their travels across the Empire to their new life in the Mediterranean, I wish to explore themes such as: (a) the global governance effected by British colonial rule and the web established by the circulation of colonial officials and written material (even in a colony that saw no immigration from other parts of the Empire, apart from rotating colonial officers). (b) Notions, then and now, about law’s connection to society, as we observe near-identical legal regimes being enacted in different regions and different times

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(c) Notions, then and now, about English law and the common law and its suitability for the various parts of the Empire. What made the British colonial officials decide to transplant Indian legislation to Cyprus in the so-called (Hatzimihail) second wave of colonial law reform in the late 1920s and then shift to English law for the third and fourth wave in the 1930s and 1950s?) Nikitas Hatzimihail is Associate Professor of Private Law and vice-chair of the Law Department at the University of Cyprus. He obtained his LL.B. from the University of Athens and his doctorate from Harvard Law School and worked as a senior research at the University of Brussels (U.L.B.). He is the author of Pre-Classical Conflict of Laws (forthcoming in 2013 from Cambridge Univ. Press) and the co-editor (with Arnaud Nuyts) of Cross-Border Class Actions: The European Way (Sellier, 2013) and International Litigation in Intellectual Property and Information Technology (Kluwer, 2008).

Kirsty Walker (Center for History and Economics, Harvard University): Policing Intimacy: Khalwat and the Everyday Life of Islamic Law in British Malaya Since the turn of the twentieth century, khalwat has been enshrined in Islamic legal enactments in the Malay world as a crime of illicit proximity between unrelated, unmarried Muslim men and women. As it travelled into legal practice in British Malaya, khalwat reshaped Islamic conceptions of personal morality governing social and intimate interactions, infusing them with creole, local meanings. As Asia’s mobility revolution and the economic transformations wrought by colonial capitalism deepened and diversified the ethnic and religious landscape of Malaya, khalwat increasingly became a crime of interethnic intimacy. While British reforms reinvented the hukum shara as a Muslim personal law, limited in scope and

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content to matters of family law and religious practice, they cemented the union of Malay sovereignty with Islam, empowering a new, formal Islamic administration to exercise near total control over the intimate lives of its Malay, Muslim subjects. Yet whilst the Islamic authorities had no claim to jurisdiction over the lives of the non-Muslim migrants, domiciled and creole inhabitants of Malaya, crimes of intimacy challenged the conflation of religious identity with race, and the binaries of indigeneity and foreignness on which the law was based. Khalwat exposed a legal fault line within the unruly terrain of multiple, overlapping legalities in British Malaya. This paper explores the everyday life of interethnic intimacy through the lens of khalwat and its positioning at the intersection of competing Islamic and colonial, religious and secular jurisdictions. It argues that laws of intimacy became a site for authoritative discourses on normative and illicit sexualities, as well as a contested terrain for the negotiation of Malay sovereignty. At the same time, they were shaped by mobility, urban modernity and poverty, kinship structures and local politics, and crucially, by the individuals who encountered them. Through the voices of the Malay, Chinese, Indian, Javanese shopkeepers, labourers, ticket sellers, clerks, prostitutes, widows, divorcees and others who found themselves called before the Shari’a courts in breach of Islamic laws of personal morality, the social life of the law comes into view. Their testimony offers an encounter with the visceral ways in which Islamic law was understood and misunderstood by those who were subject to its punishments. In their fearful, brazen and often unapologetic confrontations with the law and its officers, this paper explores the silent narrative of absorption, accommodation and everyday resistance which lay at the heart of legal practice in the Indian Ocean world. Kirsty Walker is a social and cultural historian who specializes in transnational approaches to intimacy, race, and colonialism in Southeast Asian history. Her first book project, Creole Shadow Empire: A History of Intimacy in Southeast Asia, examines an

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intersecting network of creole diasporas in colonial and early post-colonial Southeast Asia. Through a series of intimate histories of interethnic encounters, the book reveals the ways in which creole families used cultural, legal and political arenas to negotiate their own definitions of identity, legitimacy, and citizenship. She received her PhD in History from the University of Cambridge in 2015, and she also holds an MA from Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang and a BA from the University of Cambridge.

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (University of Southern California): The Osterley: Law, community and the sea in French Mauritius (ca. 1779-1780) In May, 1779, a pair of French warships captured the homeward-bound British Indiaman Osterley off the Cape of Good Hope and brought the vessel in to Port Louis, Mauritius, for condemnation. What might have been just another routine prize procedure, however, took a dramatic turn. Somewhere between the moment of capture and when the French authorities examined the Osterley in port, a quantity of silver worth several hundred thousand pounds seems to have disappeared from the Indiaman’s hold. Though criminal proceedings against privateering captains were relatively rare by the late eighteenth century, the royal prosecutor in Port Louis took the “rumors” of theft seriously enough to open a probe. His investigation into the Osterley quickly expanded into a massive inquiry, which drew in not only the crews of the capturing vessels but also a substantial number of Mauritians from all walks of life: wealthy merchants and officials as well as stevedores and enslaved boatmen. The investigation resulted in criminal charges against a number of individuals. Just as important, however, was the record that it left behind: three large cartons of interrogations, procedures and documents, which together constitute a snapshot of the legal worlds of privateersmen and their interlocutors as

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they straddled empires and the land-sea divide in the late early modern era. These records have to my knowledge never been the subject of extended study. The paper I propose for “Ocean of Law” will use the case of the Osterley, broadly contextualized, to investigate histories of law and legality in the eighteenth-century Indian Ocean world. The paper will consider both the social construction of law and the socio-economic effects of imperial law’s operation at the margins of empire. In some respects, the case covers familiar territory: just another example of how imperial law operated in a colonial context. Yet the case has two features that make it uncommon and instructive. First, it involved an unusually complex legal landscape, with considerations of imperial prize law, local and colonial criminal law, and naval (military) law. It thus offers an exceptional window into how actors on the imperial margins navigated across multiple legal regimes with overlapping spheres of jurisdiction. Because large sums of money were at stake, moreover, the actors’ ability to successfully negotiate through these legal thickets had potentially significant economic consequences. Second, and perhaps most fruitfully, the nature of the surviving sources offer a rich ground for examining how actors of different social statuses in Mauritius interpreted and understood a single legal system, prize law. The prosecutor interrogated most of the suspects and witnesses not only about their knowledge of facts and events but also about their understanding of prize law. (He was trying to determine whether violations of the law were intentional or the result of ignorance or misinformation.) This line of questioning revealed a remarkable range of different understandings of prize law, which drew on texts, customs, even rumor. This plurality of interpretation, the evidence suggests, owed much to the Indian Ocean context—a world that reshaped the dictates of European prize law as it filtered them through pluralistic, multi-national local communities.

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Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is assistant professor of history at the University of Southern California. He works on the political and cultural history of the early modern world, with a particular focus on the North Atlantic and the first age of revolutions, circa 1760-1815. His first book, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution, was published by Belknap/Harvard in October, 2015. It shows how mariners helped define the idea of national citizenship in the United States during the era of the American and French Revolutions. He is now working on a book, loosely related to his dissertation, that aims to offer the first transnational cultural history of politics in the age of revolution.

Nadeera Rupesinghe (Leiden University) Navigating Pluralities: Colonial Lawmaking in Eighteenth-century Galle This paper discusses selected aspects of the law employed in a judicial forum set up by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1741. The Landraad, a kind of district court in Galle in southern Sri Lanka had a majority of VOC officials and a minority of subordinate local headmen. It shows a form of coexistence of two apparently competing sets of norms, that of the VOC and the local normative order, within a single system. It was a space in which custom was potentially negotiated, and where agency was multifarious. It exemplifies a forum where a choice of laws came into play, that choice being significant at varying degrees for different areas of the law such as evidence, inheritance, land and marriage law. Such integration is a key feature of legal pluralism. This paper describes the lived experience of inter-legality within the Dutch legal regime. The existing literature on Roman-Dutch law in Sri Lanka has suffered from a lack of empirical research and inattention to the developing field of socio-legal studies of legal pluralism. While there was inevitable conflict in such inter-legality, in practice the local normative order was as much a social fact for the early Ocean of Law

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colonial rulers as Roman-Dutch law. The nuances of everyday practice must be studied, as they reveal potentially unexpected results such as rejection and manipulation of legal practice by local actors. Nadeera Rupesinghe is a doctoral candidate at the Leiden University Institute for History. Her interests lie in the study of colonial law and social history. She began her BA in history (honours) in 2001 at the University of Colombo. Thereafter she studied for six years at Leiden University, the latter half as an assistant-in-opleiding (aio; teaching and research assistant) at the Institute for History from 2010 to 2013, a position funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and the Leiden University Fund.

Arthur Weststeijn (Koninklijk Nederlands Instituut te Rome): Provincializing Grotius: International Law and Empire in a Seventeenth-Century Malay Mirror This paper opens up a ‘peripheral’ perspective on the conflated history of international law and empire, in particular the seventeenth-century Dutch empire by law in Southeast Asia, by ‘provincializing’ the paramount figure of Hugo Grotius. To collapse the dominant hierarchy of centre and periphery, the paper looks at Grotius from a contemporary non-European mirror: the Malay treatise Taj al-Salatin [‘The Crown of All Kings’], composed by the author Bukhari al-Jauhari in 1603 in the Sultanate of Aceh in north Sumatra. Through a contextualised and comparative reading of tis treatise, the paper poses the hypothetical question how the Southeast Asian readers of Taj al-Salatin might have read Grotius’ De jure praedae. This exercise of contextual comparison (that is also an exercise in establishing the possibilities of commensurability between East and West), reveals how certain crucial aspects of Grotius’ theory,

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particular the theme of recognition and obligation, were dominant features of political thought in the Malay region. At the same time, however, the Southeast Asian perspective shows that Grotius’ proposition of the Dutch East India Company as a sovereign actor with international legal personality, as well as his distinction between the legal, the religious and the political realm, must have been absolutely alien to his imagined Southeast Asian readers. Taj al-Salatin, a treatise conceived as a mirror of princes, thus serves as a Malay mirror that reflects the oddities of international law and empire in its Grotian guise. Arthur Weststeijn is since 2011 the director of historical studies at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome. He obtained his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence and he specializes in early-modern Dutch intellectual history from an international perspective.

Stephanie Jones (University of Southampton): General histories and piratical geographies: the Indian Ocean as a cultural formation of justice Scholars of empire commonly acknowledge that the terms pirate and privateer, buccaneer and corsair (as well as raider, rover, sea thief, marauder, freebooter, swashbuckler…) were used lightly and interchangeably within colloquial, literary, personal and administrative contexts. But in recent and popular accounts of the British empire, those shifty and extended legal moments in which either the pirate (outlaw predator of maritime commerce) becomes the privateer (state-sanctioned predator of maritime commerce) or the privateer becomes the pirate have acquired the weight of both origin and paradigm. For example, in his prominent Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003), Niall Ferguson finds both actual beginning and broad analogue for the history of imperialism in the life-myth of Henry Morgan’s rise from pirate to admiral to governor to planter

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(circa 1635-1688). To very different political effect, Lauren Benton’s much referenced A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires 1400-1900 (2010) finds an origin in the moment that the pirate loudly performs himself as a privateering vanguard, initiating both the imposition of European law on further geographies, and the regionalisation of that law. Focusing on scenes of maritime encounter, Miles Ogborn’s high profile Global Lives: Britain and the World 1550-1800 (2008) recognises definitive transformations from ‘sea-going noblemen in the sixteenth century’ into ‘mercantile buccaneers in the seventeenth century’ into ‘merely common sailors helping themselves to booty in the early eighteenth century’. Ogborn uses the privateer-pirate to summarise key political and perceptive changes marking epochs of imperialism, as well as the changing class politics of empire. Such turns to the figure of the pirate to exemplify comprehensive dynamics are methodologically troubling: and not least because they heavily rely upon the narratives of piracy offered in ‘Captain Charles Johnson’s’ The General History [of the Pyrates] (1724). The fictional nature of this text has been curiously irrelevant to scholars in search of anecdotes to exemplify large arguments about history and law. But while the book has been influentially deployed to expansive and assertive effect, it remains remarkably under-studied. This paper offers a reading of the text’s ranging, contradictory (sometimes earnest, sometimes feckless) approaches to order and resistance, and to legitimate and illegitimate violence. It moves from tracing the book’s intricate fictional narrative forms towards an appreciation of its central and critical engagements with Indian Ocean geographies and geolegal forms. In understanding how oceans and islands—real and fictional—are represented as piratical geographies, the paper understands it’s representation of the Indian Ocean as intimately bound to narratives of justice. Dr Stephanie Jones BA and LLB (ANU) PhD (Cambridge) is an Associate Professor in English at the University of Southampton, UK. She currently works on texts about the Ocean of Law

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Indian Ocean, and within the field of law and literature. Her publications include papers on the poetics of maritime law; fictional and historical piracy and privateering; literary and legal belonging; and East African and South Asian literatures.

Renisa Mawani (University of British Columbia): Imperial Circuits of Law: The Case of Gurdit Singh (1859-1954) In this paper, I begin to chart one itinerary of British law across the Indian Ocean region. My interest is not in colonial lawyers or elites but in the circuitous movements of colonial subjects and in the critical legal imaginaries their travels facilitated. Specifically, my focus centers on the peregrinations of Baba Gurdit Singh, a fifty-six year old literate but not formally educated railway contractor. In May 1914, Singh became wellknown across the British Empire. He chartered a Japanese steamship - the Komagata Maru – and transported 376 Punjabi migrants from Hong Kong to Canada. The journey was intended to challenge Dominion and imperial restrictions on Indian migration and to address the question of British subjecthood. Originally from the Amritsar district of Punjab, Gurdit Singh left home at the age of 26. He lived and worked between Singapore and Malaya, first for a Chinese pork dealer, then operating a dairy business, and eventually joining the flourishing railway contracting industry. His travels across the Eastern Indian Ocean region, I argue, were vital to his critical imaginary, including the racial violence and anticolonial possibilities he ascribed to British law. Through a close reading of Gurdit Singh’s memoirs, this paper considers how law travels, not through the formal channels of colonial authorities, legal statutes, and judicial opinions but in the counter-movements of anticolonial dissent. Law circulated across the Indian Ocean region not solely through the mobility of colonial elites but also along the itineraries of imperial

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subjects. To be sure, the travels of law were initiated through shared legal forms, in texts and documents, in decisions and decrees. But law also moved through the promises and possibilities it evoked for colonial subjects. In Singh’s view, law was an oppressive force and an emancipatory ideal. It accrued its meanings, gained its power, and demonstrated its promise through its own imperial circulations and instantiations: Malaya, India, Canada. For Singh, the mobility of law did not follow a straightforward, smooth, or unidirectional line. Law was not initiated in London and then extended effortlessly to the colonies. Rather, conceptions of legality and their implementation as law traveled through colonial and anticolonial struggle, critique, and contestation. Law, we might say, moved in much the same way as the Komagata Maru, traversing and connecting disparate regions of the British Empire through oceanic migrations and in newly emergent forms and sedimentations. Renisa Mawani (PhD, University of Toronto) is an Associate Professor of Sociology and inaugural Chair of the Law and Society Program at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Mawani works in the fields of critical theory and colonial legal history and has published widely on law, colonialism, and legal geography. Her first book, Colonial Proximities (2009) details the legal encounters between indigenous peoples, Chinese migrants, “mixed-race” populations, and Europeans in latenineteenth and early-twentieth-century British Columbia. Her second book, Across Oceans of Law (under contract with Duke University Press), is a global and maritime legal history of the Japanese ship, Komagata Maru. The book draws on oceans as method to trace the ship’s 1914 route across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, to advance the argument that legal forms of colonial and racial violence are deeply entangled, and to consider time as a critical register of empire. With Iza Hussin, she is co-editor of “The Travels of Law: Indian Ocean Itineraries” published in Law and History Review (2014). In

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2015, she received the Killam Prize for Graduate Instruction, a Dean of Arts Faculty Research Award, and was named a Wall Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.

Byapti Sur (Leiden University): Local Agency in the Dutch East India Company’s Power-politics for Combatting Corruption in Bengal, 1684-1688 The notion of corruption as a menace began occurring more frequently in the administrative vocabulary of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) from the latter half of the seventeenth century. As a counter-measure, the Heeren XVII (Company’s Board of Directors) started dispatching investigation committees to the overseas factories for checking into corruption and other malpractices. The most prominent of these committees was the one sent in 1684 to the western quarters of the VOC under the command of Hendrik Adriaan van Reede tot Drakestein, Lord of Mijdrecht. His executive powers were unprecedented in the history of the Company as he had full authority to reside at any place and interrogate or put on trial any director or governor he suspected. However, the desperation of the VOC in trying to curb corruption faced repeated challenges – firstly with the sudden death of Van Reede on his way to Surat with rumours of him being poisoned by his opponents and secondly, the almost sham success of the committee. Can it possibly be denied then that Van Reede was treading on dangerous grounds that hid the darker and deeper secrets of power-politics within the VOC bureaucracy? By exploring this factor further, my paper seeks to find answers to the reasons behind the failure of this committee. In studying the case of Nicolas Schagen, the then director of Bengal who along with his wife was accused of smuggling and illegal activities by the committee and tried in the Raad van Justitie (Council of Justice in Batavia), the informal networks of the Company is revealed and consequently a whole game of

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bureaucratic power-politics. The fact that corruption was used as a tool to attack political rivals and install men of one’s own faction affected the investigation and judicial processes of the VOC which I argue, provide an explanation for the unsuccessful story of the committee. Patronages and friendships formed the basis of multiple factions within the administration so that allegations of corruption or rather what constituted corruption was dependent on the policies of the dominant group in power. As this created a system where the key players in the political space within the Dutch Republic could sync their networks with the Heeren XVII, the situation of the VOC in Asia seemed different. The intrusion of local elements (brokers) in the Company’s networks who were beyond the jurisdiction of the legal court (Raad van Justitie in Batavia) in the seventeenth century but were powerful enough to disturb the harmony of this political game of corruption, added to the frustrated anticorruption efforts of the committee. In the end the absence of a conscious public gaze in Asia which was present in the Republic also made a difference in influencing the judicial decisions. Thus focusing on these hidden politics behind the more visible policies and decisions on corruption, my paper attempts to show how the Company’s legal processes or decision-making bodies were more connected to personal networks rather than static categories of an official Company – State – and the locals. Byapti Sur is a doctoral candidate at the Leiden University Institute for History. Her research looks into the trans-imperial networks of the Dutch East India Company agents and their local counterparts under the Mughal Empire in Bengal in the seventeenth century. She uses the politics of corruption in the administration as a tool for studying these networks. Her supervisors are Prof. dr. Jos Gommans and Dr. Lodewijk Wagenaar.

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Guo-Quan Seng (University of Chicago): Dutch and Chinese Patrimonial Legal Discourse and the Domestication of Women’s Commerce in Colonial Java (1830s-1890s) This paper examines the history of Dutch colonial jurisprudence in Java at the intersection of global Orientalist knowledge production and particular ethnographies of the Chinese family between 1862 and 1892. Beginning from 1862, Sinology-trained Dutch translators advised colonial judges and jurists on “Chinese law” and the drafting of a Chinese private law code for colonial Java. Trained by members of the Chinese literati class in Southern Chinese treaty ports, these professional Sinologisttranslators brought classical neo-Confucian visions of the Chinese family to bear on judicial decisions over Chinese inheritance. The first half of the paper analyzes the midnineteenth century transimperial knowledge formation of a field of comparative Chinese family law discourse. I trace the emergence of this body of Chinese family law discourse to the imperial politics of Henry Sumner Maine’s comparative law project, which identified the absolutist patria potestas as an intermediate stage in the progress of Western civil law, and prescribed Roman legal evolution as the standard for all colonized cultures. Within this framework, Sinologists (British, French, German) based in the Chinese treaty ports and French Indochina discoursed over the evolutionary place of Chinese family law through textual analyses of Chinese ethics and law from the 1860s to 1890s. Although the Dutch did not participate directly in these transimperial Chinese family law debates, the Sinology-trained Dutch translators responded to the same ethnographic questions in the legal advice they offered to colonial judges. The second half of the paper analyzes the legal ethnographic knowledge these new experts brought to bear on debates over creole Chinese women’s rights as daughters, wives and widows over the thirty year period. Three schools of thought emerged among the translators. The first, held by what I call the Sinology purists

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(Gustaaf Schlegel), translated Chinese ethical and legal textual norms directly into the civil law discourse of rights and duties. The purists concluded that the Chinese woman had no rights and was treated as a “thing” (zaak) by the Chinese patriarch. The pragmatists (W. P. Groeneveldt), however, countered the purist view by arguing for a pragmatic reading of Chinese legal inheritance-in-practice. The Chinese woman had partial rights in some instances. Finally, a third realist school (P. Meeter) emerged in the commercially flourishing city of Semarang. The realists agreed with the purists that the Chinese woman had no rights. But they went even further by arguing that pragmatist jurisprudence condoned the Chinese patriarchal manipulation of their womenfolk to abuse law under the cover of women’s rights. Although judicial policy fluctuated along with the translators’ varying visions of classic Chinese patriarchy, the general trend over the course of these three decades was the curtailment of the rights of the Peranakan Chinese wife, widow and daughter in favor of classic Chinese patrilineal inheritance. Guo-Quan Seng recently obtained his PhD in History from the University of Chicago, with the dissertation, "Disputed properties, contested identities: family law, social reform and the creole Chinese in Dutch Colonial Java (1830-1942)". He is now a Visiting Fellow with the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University, working on turning the dissertation into a book. He is broadly interested in the histories of the Overseas Chinese, Global Capitalism, and Postcolonial Asia.

Léon Buskens (Leiden University): Constructing a colonial Shāfiʿī law canon in Indonesia In less than a century Dutch scholars in oriental philology and law constructed an understanding of what Shafi`i law should look like, thereby both advancing scholarship and answering questions emanating in colonial administration. The formation of the colonial canon started with the edition of the first

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handbook on Shafi’i law in Malay by Meursinge in 1844. His successor at the colonial institute in Delft Salomo Keyzer greatly contributed to the increase in knowledge, applied in his education of colonial civil servants, by his editions, translations, and handbooks on Shafi`i law. He also met with severe criticism and disapproval by “practical men” in the field who considered knowledge of customary law and local languages much more important for the maintenance of law and order in the Dutch colony. His successor in Delft the orientalist A.W.T. Juynboll contributed to the field with several learned studies on specific issues, but died rather young. His successor, the former adviser for Islamic affairs in Batavia L.W.C. van den Berg, continued the approach of Keyzer in publishing editions, translations, and a handbook of Islamic law, destined at colonial administrative practice and the teaching of civil servants. Van den Berg is now mainly remembered for the devastating criticism of his work that Snouck Hurgronje published. Snouck Hurgronje wrote many learned studies on specific subjects, but would leave it to his younger colleague Th.W. Juynboll to write an authoritative handbook on Shafi`i law which incorporated the master’s views on the relations between Islamic law as found in the scholarly treatises and the practice of local customs, which he promoted together with Van Vollenhoven to be transformed into adatrecht. Juynboll’s synopsis of 1903 was reprinted several times, even in the United States during the Second World War, and translated into German and Italian. On the basis of a tradition of sixty years of research, and the publication of a handy “teach yourself” Islamic law handbook Juynboll produced a canonical view of the Shafi`i school for colonial purposes, which would remain in use until the end of the twentieth century. In my paper I will focus on the different textual genres which the scholars practiced to produce this canon, their collecting and selecting of sources, and the use of typography to present their findings. I will also take into consideration their relations with local Indonesian and foreign European scholars.

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Léon Buskens is an anthropologist studying law and culture in Muslim societies. He studied anthropology, standard and Moroccan Arabic, and Islam, at Radboud University in Nijmegen, where he specialised in historical and Mediterranean anthropology (BA and MA, both cum laude). From 1987 he was a Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Law of Leiden University. Since 1991, he works as a lecturer on anthropology and Islamic law at the faculties of Humanities and Law of Leiden University. From 1998 until 2008 he also held a chair for Law and Culture of Islam at Utrecht University. Since 2009 he has a chair for Law and Culture in Muslim societies at Leiden University. Since 2009 he is director of the Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society (LUCIS) and since 2010 also of the Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies (NISIS). Buskens was a visiting fellow at the department of Near Eastern Studies of Princeton University, the Escuela de Estudios Árabes in Granada, and a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Santhosh Abraham and Visakh Madhusoodanan Subha (Indian Institute of Technology Madras) Recasting and Reimagining the Islamic Law and Jurisprudence: Colonial and Post-colonial Discourses on Muslim Law in Malabar, Kerala The ‘incommensurable divide’ between the secular language of state law and customary practices (often understood within the framework of religious laws) has become a heated debate in post-colonial India. Some of these divisions are expressed in the contemporary debates over the uniformity in law applicable to the citizens. Often framed within the state Vs religion dichotomy, these debates posit the issue as a confrontation between the uniform civil code and the religious/cultural rights of minority communities to adhere to customary practices in a liberal secular polity. Working within this logic, the state legal authorities and

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the public debates generally view religious laws as a ‘formal system’ which revolves around texts (legal codes) rather than as an ‘interpretative system’, embedded in customs and alternative dispute resolution mechanisms within the religion. The former understanding serves to reinforce the authority of the formal practices of law and to limit the functioning of the latter. This legal positivist approach to law is concomitant with the rise of the modern nation states; place of law in state formation, governmentality and making of modern citizens. What is being lost here is a crucial insight into the ‘interpretative informal system’ situated within the ‘vernacular’ dynamics of law internal to Islamic religion. It is at this juncture that a critical analysis into the historical, sociological and philosophical background of the problematic with specific attention into the codification process, colonial legal reform, religious authority, place of custom in Islamic law and religious reform become important. Many of the contemporary engagements between state and Islamic law should be seen as a continuation of early British colonial attempts to transform Islamic law into Muhammadan law. The early British attempts exhibited the anxieties the intermixed nature of religious identities posed to the colonial project of governance vis-à-vis land, tradition and the exercise of sovereign authority. This ensued in the construction of monolithic religious identities through a sovereign exercise of state legal power as evidenced in the colonial legal reform starting from Hasting’s plan of 1772 till the Shariat act of 1937. The post colonial state’s concerns over the Muslim Personal law can be considered as a continuation of this approach to religious laws with poor regard to the vernacular and culturally embedded nature of customary practices constituting what is understood as ‘Muslim law’. However, the problem assumes new significance when secularism as a political doctrine is increasingly challenged with respect to its potential in protecting minority religious rights and the resurgence of religion in public sphere in newer ways. It is at this post-secular context that we

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need to have a disaggregated view of both religion and law (including the so-called religious laws) with special focus on the secularization processes within the religion, transformation in the nature of religious authorities, changes in the legal reasoning and modes of argumentation. What is the customary language of law that unravels in such specific social, political and cultural contexts? This paper particularly focuses on the case of British Malabar and contemporary Kerala Islamic society to bring out the debates and interactions between the state law and Islamic law (focusing on ‘custom’ in Islamic law and ‘customary’ nature of law as a theoretical category) during colonial and post-colonial periods in India. What is at stake here is the changes and transformations internal to Islamic law as it is practiced in the socio-political, historical and cultural terrain of Malabar region. The study proposes that such attempts at understanding the grammar of customary practices is crucial in reimagining the way in which Islamic law and jurisprudence is generally understood. Dr. Santhosh Abraham received PhD in History from University of Hyderabad, India in 2010 and is currently working as Assistant Professor in History in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), Chennai, India. Abraham’s research interests include Studies on Muslims of Early British India, Indigenous Resistances to Colonialism, Colonial Law, Social and Cultural History and Colonial Psychiatry. Abraham’s recent publications include, ‘Constructing the Extraordinary Criminals: Mappila Muslims and Legal Encounters in Early British Colonial Malabar’, Published in Journal of World History, Volume 25, Issue 2-3, December 2014, University of Hawai’i Press and ‘Formal Writing, Questionnaires and Petitions: Colonial Governance and Law in Early British Malabar’, Published in Indian Historical Review (Sage International), Vol.40, No.2, December 2013, pp.285-305. Abraham recently

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received Wellcome Trust, UK Research Grant for a project on Psychiatry and Asylums in Colonial Kerala. Visakh Madhusoodanan Subha is a PhD scholar in the department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), Chennai, India. Visakh currently works on ‘Grammar of Customary Practices: Religious Authority and New Legal Sensibilities among Mappila Muslims of Malabar, Kerala’ as part of his PhD program under the supervision of Dr. Santhosh Abraham. His research interests include sociology of law, religion, jurisprudence, comparative legal systems and identity politics. Visakh has been nominated for the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellowship 2016 to pursue nine months of research as a visiting scholar at a US university and is awaiting final confirmation.

Hassan S. Khalilieh (University of Haifa): The Holy Qur’ān, the Prophet, and the Islamic Genesis of the Free Sea It is generally accepted that the doctrine of modern law of the sea developed out of Renaissance Europe attributing its inception to the Dutch’s foremost jurist Hugo Grotius (15831645), whose Mare Liberum is none other than Chapter XII of his treatise De Jure Praedae written in winter 1604-1605 is considered a milestone for the subject. In an attempt to defend and justify the right of other nations to navigate freely the seas, Grotius contends that, with the exception of limited offshore zone, the seas are free and not susceptible to appropriation by States. In reaction to his thesis, a legal debate sparked among contemporaneous European lawyers, who either espoused or challenged his theory, prompting scholarly contribution to the principles of the law of the sea. Both, the advocates and the opponents of the freedom of navigation, were either inspired by the Natural Law theories as instituted in the Justinianic Institutes and Corpus Juris Civilis, or the Hebrew Bible in applying the

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concept of sovereignty to the open sea, as the Protestant John Selden (1584-1654) does in his Of the Dominion or Ownership of the Sea (Mare Clausum sive de dominio maris), published in 1635. Astoundingly, the seventeenth-century European lawyers deliberately or “accidently” overlook the contribution of the “infidels” (non-Europeans), especially Muslims, to the evolution of the customary law of the sea leaving an impression as if the Law of Nature and Nations governing access to the sea are a European establishment. Until the emergence of the Portuguese the freedom of navigation in the eastern seas was a common practice. By the beginning of the seventeenth-century and the appearance of the Dutch East India Company the concept of mare liberum and the freedom of commerce between littoral countries along the Indian Ocean were no longer confined to indigenes and Asians. The ocean which was common to peoples of Southeast Asia and Near East was now shared by European naval powers so that in 1615 the Makassarese Sultān ‘Alāuddīn Tumenanga ri Gaukanna (10021049 A.H./1593-1639 C.E.) asked the Dutch East India Company not to interfere with the ships of the Makassarese kingdom of Goa on the high seas. A statement attributed to him says: “God made the earth and the sea, has divided the earth among mankind and given the sea in common. It is a thing unheard of that anyone should be forbidden to sail the seas.” In saying so, the Sultān acknowledges that unlike the land, Islamic divine law considers the boundless sea as a common heritage of mankind; any governing authority or nation can neither claim proprietorship over it, nor exclusive right of navigation. However, what has not then been elaborated by the Sultān will be explored throughout our essay aiming to explain how Islamic Law of Nature and Nations entitle human beings to share the sea and enjoy equal rights of exploring and exploiting its natural resources. Furthermore, it will present the Prophet’s practical attitude towards the access to the sea, freedom of navigation, jurisdiction over the vessel at sea, and the legal status of subjects aboard national and foreign ships.

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Fahad Bishara (College of William and Mary): Dhows, Empire, and International Law: “Law Talk” and the Muscat Dhows Case, 1890-1905 Over the last decade of the nineteenth century, British patrol ships in the Western Indian Ocean encountered a recurring problem. Dhows from the small port of Sur, in southern Oman, would raise the French flag whenever they were approached by British gunboats or present naval officers with papers declaring them to be French protégés. Their actions raised concern in official circles, as the Suri dhows were often suspected of transporting slaves. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the matter had taken on international proportions: the government of Great Britain brought the French government before the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, where the parties grappled over on major questions of international law like extraterritoriality and imperial subjecthood in dealing with the question of whether the French consul had the right to grant flags and passes to Suri dhows. The case became foundational to studies of the law of the sea, and the ruling is still cited in footnotes in law school textbooks today. Buried in the case’s proceedings, however, are materials that give historians a window into the legal imaginaries of Indian Ocean mariners in an age of empire. In statements collected by different consuls, Suri mariners revealed how they saw their place in a world of empires and regulations, how they understood imperial law to manifest itself in artifacts like flags and passes, and how they articulated claims to particular rights as members of a trans-oceanic community of sailors with property and kinship ties to French possessions around the Indian Ocean. This paper draws from material in England, France, Zanzibar, and Oman to chart out the multiple understandings of international law that animated the proceedings in Muscat Dhows case. It focuses on the claims made by the dhow captains and mariners themselves, and how they drew on the language

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and artifacts of international law to effectively “speak law” to the Sultan of Muscat and to French and British officials in the Western Indian Ocean. Suri mariners used particular words and phrases to locate themselves within an imperial legal geography, and appropriated legal technologies – passes and flags – to help them navigate an oceanic space marked by increasingly cumbersome regulations. The claims they articulated and the practices they engaged in at sea illuminate a maritime legal culture at work – one animated by a long history of encountering regional and global empires at sea. This sort of “law talk” formed the backbone of a regional maritime legal culture in an age of high imperialism, illustrating how a regime of international law manifested itself in an ocean that ran thick with legal idioms. Fahad Bishara is Assistant Professor at College of William and Mary. He received his PhD from Duke University in 2012 and subsequently held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University’s Center for History and Economics. He specializes in the history of law and capitalism in the Indian Ocean and Islamic world. His current book manuscript 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, a period of emerging modern capitalism in the region, and the transformations in Islamic law that accompanied it.

Seán Donlan (University of Limerick) and Mathilda Twomey (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Seychelles): Island, Intersection, or In-Between? Legal Hybridity and Diffusion in the Seychellois Legal Tradition All legal—and normative—traditions are hybrids. The laws and legal institutions of the Seychellois micro-jurisdiction clearly

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reflect the diffusion of Europe’s most influential imperial legal traditions. Located in the vast Indian Ocean and virtually uninhabited before the late eighteenth century, the archipelago would be subject alternatively to French and British rule. Both Anglo-British and French law would apply. The result was a legal métissage that parallels the blend of races, cultures and languages in Seychelles. This paper explores the complex history and changing legal and normative hybridity of Seychelles. Hybridity is used here in several senses. The first is related to the complex origins and organisation of legal and normative systems, institutions, and ideas. The second relates to the gap between the principles and practices of legal orders, not least in colonial regimes. The third is the recognition that individual and communal identities in colonial encounters and post-colonial situations are singular blends of mixed parentage. The paper takes a trans-disciplinary approach that draws on research on mixed legal systems, legal pluralisms, and post-colonial theories. Unlike other colonial encounters between natives and newcomers, however, the absence of an indigenous people on the islands meant that there were no systematic autochthonous or traditionally-organised normativities to resist the laws of the imperial powers. In addition to French laws that applied to the free whites and enslaved blacks, free blacks and ‘coloureds’ lived in a legal in-between. The laws were buffeted, too, by the legal and political tsunamis of the revolution in France and the Anglo-French wars that followed. The two decades between c1794-1814 saw repeated, ephemeral capitulations to the British, before its rule was clearly established over a Francophone population that was some ninety percent black or ‘coloured’. For a time, French laws applied largely unchanged, but the English language and laws were gradually imposed. Still more slowly, the integration of the races began. By the early twentieth century, both laws and peoples were deeply mixed through a process of creolisation. In addition

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to the gap between principle and practice, alternative normativities inevitably arose alongside official law: some intra legem, some praeter legem, some contra legem. No less important developments within Britain and France were occurring in Britain and France. After the French Revolution, European laws and legal institutions underwent profound change. The nineteenth century saw a move from the poly-juralism common to the pre-modern period to organised, centralised, and exclusive systems of common national laws. Indeed, it was a period in which both many nations and modern states—along with mature legal nationalism and legal positivism—were created. And Europe’s colonial encounters were central to those developments. It is too easy to portray islands like Seychelles as isolated peripheries away from the imperial centre. They are better seen as intersections of laws and customs that generated complex legalities in-between their mother traditions. And they would, as a result, change their parents, too, as all children do. Seán Patrick Donlan (JD (Louisiana), PhD (Trinity College Dublin)) lectures at the University of Limerick, Ireland. He has published in the areas of comparative law, history and legal history, and legal philosophy, especially mixed legal systems, legal pluralism, and micro-jurisdictions. He edits Comparative Legal History, is Vice-President of the World Society of Mixed Jurisdiction Jurists, past President of Juris Diversitas, and a member of the International Academy of Comparative Law. His latest publications are Donlan and Dirk Heirbaut, The law’s many bodies: studies in legal hybridity and jurisdictional complexity, c1600-1900 (2015) and Sue Farran, Esin Örücü, and Donlan (eds), A Study of Mixed Legal Systems: Endangered, Entrenched, or Blended (2014), which includes Mauritius and Seychelles. Mathilda Twomey (PhD (Galway)) is Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Seychelles and a Justice of the Seychelles Court of Appeal. She graduated with a BA in English Ocean of Law

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and French Law from the University of Kent, holds a degree in French Law from the University of Paris-Sud, and was admitted as a Member of the Bar at Middle Temple, London. She also served in the chambers of the Attorney General of Seychelles, as an Attorney-at-Law in private chambers, and a member of Seychelles Constitutional Commission. She holds an LLM in Public Law from the National University of Ireland – Galway, where she recently completed a PhD on ‘Legal Métissage in a Micro-Jurisdiction: The Mixing of Common Law and Civil Law in Seychelles’.

Naveen Kanalu (University of California, Los Angeles): Governing, Decreeing and Administering Political Authority: Encountering Persiante Styles in the Legal Cultures of the Early Modern Deccan Legal expressions of administrative politics in the early modern South Asian context have rarely been studied as interlocked mappings of “vernacular” legal conceptions that were infused by Persianate and Islamicate influences through oceanic connections. Reading royal decrees such as firmans, sanads and administrative decrees such as the i’lamnamahs, ahkams, and ruq’ahs from the Qutb Shahis (1518–1687), I wish to examine how legal instruments enact political sovereignty and produce discourses necessary for its diffusion. Furthermore, legal documents are also practices in recording, codifying, and promulgating regulations about instances of social institutions such as religion, caste, and land rights. Thus they can inform us how the “social life of the ordinary” was regulated. Presenting a genealogical account of the formation of administrative measures and how they are invariably inscribed as law – decrees, measures, procedural regulations, I wish to analyse how these practices emerged in peninsular South Asia through the expansion of transregional Persianate cultural registers across the Indian Ocean world.

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To do so, my paper will examine the legal culture of the Deccan Sultanate from three perspectives. First, I will explore their material form: what are the commonalities in legal instruments as they develop through interaction with a Persianate form of writing, recording, and chronicling? Are there Islamicate codes of legalisation that are specified in the Deccan through the incorporation of “vernacular” practices? In what way do they share a common framework with Ottoman, Mughal, or Safavid legal cultures? Second, reading the Persian chronicles of Golconda, I will also bring in a subjective dimension in the legal conception to administrative practices by studying migration of savants and literati. Further, in the increasingly competitive environment of sea faring and trading around the European settlements on the littoral coasts, such legal instruments were necessary to acquire political favours. Hence, I will explore legal instruments as modes of not only translating migratory connections across the Indian ocean world but also a shared conception of polity that law produces. Third, can linguistic and idiomatic registers show us how legal cultures were adapted in plurilingual societies such as the Deccan? Rather than take the transmission of legal codes or texts as my source material, I wish to argue for a genealogical account of the formation of categories of thinking political authority and law in the early modern period. What kind of legal epistemes emerge across the Indian Ocean World in the early modern period and how do we render them intelligible as regimes of political practice and thinking? What can lexical indices to name the legal processes in early modern times tell us about the status community groupings such as nobilities, castes and religions? Examining chancellery and chronicle sources, I will explore how we can archive (in the Foucauldian sense) legal idioms in an ever more diffused Persianate cosmopolis of the Indian Ocean World. Naveen Kanalu is PhD student in South Asian History at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2014-15, he was

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a Teaching and Research fellow (ATER) at the Université de Strasbourg. Ancien élève of the Ecole Normales Supérieure, Paris, he obtained Masters in Philosophy, Iranian Studies, and the History of Economic Thought. His research interests include medieval and early modern South Asian history, Persianate culture and Critical Theory. In the South Asian field, his publications include “Le Sāhasabhīmavijayam ou Gadāyuddham de Ranna: une adaptation du Mahābhārata dans la littérature de l’ancien kannada” in Bulletin d’études indiennes (2010-2011) and “Pirla Panduga: Muharram practices of the Deccan Weavers, their Migrations, Songs and Memories” in Vijaya Ramaswamy (ed). Migrations in Medieval and Early Colonial India. Routledge, 2016. He has also published articles on cinematic representation in Walter Benjamin and the social relation in Judith Butler and Michel Foucault and an article on the Post-Sraffian debates on Ricardian theory of rent and Marshallian Marginalism has appeared in the recent issue of the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought.

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E-mail addresses Guo-Quan Seng [email protected] Hassan S. Khalilieh [email protected] Kirsty Walker [email protected] Stephanie Jones [email protected] Santhosh Abraham [email protected] Léon Buskens [email protected] Nurfadzilah Yahaya [email protected] Gijs Kruijtzer [email protected] Fahad Bishara [email protected] Renisa Mawani [email protected] Nadeera Rupesinghe [email protected] Naveen Kanalu [email protected] Elizabeth Lhost [email protected] Nathan Perl-Rosenthal [email protected] Seán Donlan [email protected] Mahmood Kooria [email protected] Sanne Ravensbergen [email protected] Joel Blecher [email protected] Stewart Motha [email protected] Nikitas Hatzimihail [email protected] Visakh Madhusoodanan [email protected] Fachrizal Halim [email protected] Arthur Weststeijn [email protected] Byapti Sur [email protected]

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Notes

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