From the beginning of the 19th century, Omani merchants and planters and their Indian financiers had been settling in East Africa in growing numbers, as they sought to participate in the increasingly lucrative ivory and slave trades and a burgeoning plantation economy. Faced with a state that was unable to extend its authority beyond the walls of its capital, an informal grouping of commercial and juridical actors fashioned a legal framework for economic life that operated largely outside of state structures. Debt formed a central component of this commercial and legal world: it facilitated access to the capital necessary to fuel economic activity, but also provided intellectual fodder for Muslim thinkers, generating a philosophy on the nature and shape of the commercial obligations that ran through the Western Indian Ocean. This paper combines extant debt acknowledgment deeds from Muscat and Zanzibar with the fatwas of Sa‘id bin Khalfan Al-Khalili, Oman’s premier 19th-century mufti, to chart the juristic construction of debt and legal personhood in the Western Indian Ocean during a period of emerging modern capitalism. It explores how jurists constructed the individual legal subject – a subject they imagined as existing primarily in a set of property relations and commercial obligations. More importantly, it examines how jurists were willing to stretch the temporal boundaries of debt to transcend those of life itself, erecting a framework wherein commercial obligations and the real property they were grounded in would be passed down between generations of debtors and creditors. More broadly, the paper calls for a rethinking of the place of Islamic law in economic life at a time of emerging modern capitalism, arguing that jurists were amply willing to construct a legal artifice to accommodate the demands of a growing commercial arena.

According to the most common periodization of Ottoman and Egyptian histories, the late 1830s and early 1840s mark a significant rupture. The Ottoman Empire, including Egypt, was already part of the capitalist world economy before reaching the middle decades of the century. However, a series of momentous events, most notably the conclusion of the Anglo-Ottoman Commercial Treaty in 1838, left no doubt that the Empire, including Egypt, had become also an “open market.” In Egypt, this development meant that Mehmed Ali’s modern state’s role, as an actor in the world economy would diminish. In its place would emerge a space to be filled by countless private merchants; subjects of the Ottoman Empire and of various European powers. In this paper, I will focus on a central feature of this new commercial realm, which was dominated by private merchants: commercial debt. During the middle decades of the 19th century, money-lending, advance sale and other forms of credit-driven capitalist activities in Egypt came under heightened scrutiny from Mehmed Ali’s (and his successor’s) government. In light of this critical development, the relationship between the newly acquired roles of private merchants and government bureaucrats is yet to be understood. Through studying a wide range of documents including contracts, petitions, consular correspondence and court records, I aim to uncover this vibrant connection. I will do so through addressing the following questions: If the state in Egypt has indeed withdrawn from the commercial sphere starting in the 1840s, how did private merchants enforce mutual debt obligations, which were so central to the functioning of a capitalist economy? To what extent were government bureaucrats knowledgeable of and able to intervene in the operation of private credit-driven activities?

Egypt’s nineteenth century petty traders and moneylenders, embedded in rural circuits of commerce and debt, were the worker bees of capitalism’s imperial expansion. They represented one terminus of the long, largely invisible chain of capital stretching from Egypt’s provinces to the metropoles of Europe and America. During the second half of the nineteenth century, they bolstered their economic position by adopting a new idiom: international law. Unlike capital, the chain of law that they used to connect themselves to the metropole was visible. In fact, visibility was its principal virtue, because it generated socio-legal power for the lenders and traders. The legal records of two lenders—the Maltese Filippo Calleja and the Jewish British subject Marco Levi Carusso—are at the core of the paper. They were emblematic of the new cast of characters which replaced the stereotypical village moneylender in the closing years of the nineteenth century. These new actors were deeply embedded in big city and international capital networks, now involving insurance and speculative real estate development. Critically, these actors deployed their reputation as subjects with access to international law in order to manage their local relationships. The extraterritorial privileges embodied in the Ottoman capitulations had been exposed and curtailed during the nineteenth century panic over foreign “parasites,” but their legal basis had not been overturned. In fact, a new suite of legal institutions (with the 1876 Mixed Tribunals at its head) governed commercial practices that had become formalized, legalized, normalized, and internationalized at all levels of the Egyptian economy. This paper is component in a larger project that seeks to globalize the history of international law by describing a specifically Egyptian genealogy for its subaltern practice. It argues that the nature of law is best understood through widespread practice, rather than origins.

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 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.