Capitalism is a slippery term. For some scholars in the Marxist or World-Systems traditions it can explain almost everything in world history since the 19th century. Other scholars might retort that a concept which explains everything, doesn't really explain very much at all. Bringing such critiques on board, this panel seeks to use the methods of cultural and legal history to interrogate capitalism as an idea and as a system of political economy in the Middle East. Rather than using capitalism as an analytical lens through which we can understand historical phenomena, we seek to examine capitalism as a historical object entrenched in the particularities of Middle Eastern societies. The Middle East is also a particularly productive region to examine histories of capitalism because of its long and rich history of trade and economic production, but also because of the unique confluence of Muslim, Zionist, colonial and nationalist ideologies that characterize these economies.
The three papers in this panel trace different histories of capitalism in the Middle East but also share three common methodological approaches. First, the papers are all undergirded by legal sources and use court cases to uncover how people pursue their economic objectives through legal institutions. Secondly, each of these papers examines people at the interstices of legal systems and state jurisdictions. The economic actors uncovered in these papers operate across jurisdictions, moving between legal systems to enhance their economic rights and pursue their commercial objectives. Lastly, these histories do not approach Middle Eastern economies as the periphery of a capitalist world system or explain underdevelopment as simply the result of corruption or bureaucratic sclerosis. These papers examine capitalism from the ground-up. We are interested in using micro-historical approaches to shed light on micro-economic questions.
One paper uses a 1956 suit by Palestinian citrus growers against Barclays Banks to explore how individuals pursue their economic rights when a whole system of economic governance is replaced overnight. A second paper looks at fatwas and court cases in Southern Arabia to uncover how exactly trust and agency relationships were constituted in diasporic commerce. The third paper examines documentary practices of dhow captains in the Gulf, asking how they maneuvered between Islamic and colonial legal regimes to further their trade. By delving into such issues we hope to understand capitalism as a human experience and to provide a granular depiction of everyday life in a global capitalist system.
The Principal-Agent Problem in economics is concerned with the problem of commercial agents/employees having altogether too much power. Historians on the other hand, are constantly searching for agency where structure or discourse seems to overwhelm any individual’s free will. Why do these disciplines view agency in such profoundly contradictory ways?
This paper uses fatwas on wakala or “agency” relationships from Ibadhi Oman and Shafi’i Hadhramout to seek new avenues of understanding how this commercial relationship has evolved in the Muslim World. These fatwas are also contextualized through an examination of court cases and contractual documents that illustrate how such agency relationships operated in practice. The paper examines the complex cases where wakala contracts are drawn up, when they are not, and how the powers of a wakeel (agent) are exercised and constrained. This historical evidence particularly addresses the construction and operation of trust in agency relationships; a topic of long interest stemming from historical research in the medieval Geniza records. While some historians have simply assumed that trust is something that exists between members of the same family or community, this has been challenged by economists who have suggested that trust is really the reflection of informal cultural mechanisms of contractual enforcement.
The paper tries to rescue trust from the enormous condescension of economics. The evidence from Arabic fatwas and legal documentation suggests that trust is better conceptualized as the consequence of efforts to build group identification, self-effacement and even altruism. Drawing on different forms of legal and economic documentation, the paper pieces together how trust is established within communities and across community lines. But also when trust is broken and when contractual enforcement mechanisms in Islamic and colonial law are drawn up to compensate for this lack of trust. Ultimately the paper will demonstrate how trusted agents act not in their self-interest or in the interests of the principal but rather conceive of their interests as subsumed within the larger whole of the family, partnership or community. This research suggests that the historical experience of capitalism cannot be extrapolated from the model of a rational economic individual but is deeply contingent on specific religious and social norms.
In October 1956, a group of former Palestinian citrus merchants, all of whom had become refugees in 1948, sued Barclays Bank in a Jordanian court in Jerusalem for £1 million. This amount represented the total value of the citrus crop exported collectively by them in the 1947 season via the Palestinian Citrus Marketing Board, which was a marketing board set up by the- then Mandatory Government of Palestine to regulate all citrus exports from Palestine.
Since the termination of the Palestine Mandate in 1948, the Palestinian citrus merchants had tried, for eight long years, to be paid for their 1947 crop. They had appealed, unsuccessfully, to the British government; the Jordanian government; the Israeli government; the United Nations Conciliation Committee for Palestine (UNCCP); and finally to Barclays Bank in London, which had received their cheques in 1948 from the former Palestinian Citrus Marketing Board. But none of the institutions or governments to which they appealed was willing to help the Palestinian citrus merchants, each claiming in turn that the problem was not its responsibility. Barclays Bank, for its part, explained that the money was no longer even in its possession, as it had been transferred over to the Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property, in compliance with Israeli legislation regulating the property of what it termed “absentees.”
This paper will explore this little-known episode in Palestinian history, and use it as a lens through which to understand what happens to an economy when it is disrupted overnight not just by war and violence, but with the abrupt termination of one regime and its replacement by another. What happens to that economy’s institutions? What happens to its currency? What happens to its banks? And, most importantly, what happens to the economic lives and assets of the people who have to live through these transitions? How do they fight to defend their assets from expropriation, when they no longer have a state, or a regime, that can protect them?
The paper is drawn from material from Israeli and British archives; from the legal documents pertaining to the case; and from the oral testimonies of the families of some of the Palestinian citrus merchants involved in the 1956 lawsuit.
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 government of Great Britain brought the French government before the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, where the parties grappled over 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 and artifacts of imperial political economy in order to domesticate it. 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 commercial and legal culture at work – one animated by a long history of encountering regional and global empires at sea. The documentary practices they engaged in shed light on how they engaged in and venacularized a body of international and imperial law, illustrating how a regulatory regime manifested itself in an oceanic commercial arena that already ran thick with legal idioms.
