Fallahin on Trial in Colonial Egypt: Apprehending the Peasantry through Orality, Writing and Performance (1884-1914) Since the 1980s, studies on law and colonialism have shed light on both the key role played by law in the construction of colonial rule, and the manner in which some members of colonized societies conceived of the law as a resource in their struggles against the colonial authorities and in their attempts to legitimize newly acquired positions of power within their own communities. Most of these studies however focus, first, on how the native elite appealed to colonial law - rather than how subalterns experienced it when caught up into the new judicial system -; and second, on institutions and jurisprudence - rather than legal procedure and courtroom performances -. Drawing on the theoretical framework shaped by Rosalind O'Hanlon's constructive critique of the Subaltern Studies Project and her reflection on the fundamentally dialectical nature of the relationship of power, this paper argues that a historical-anthropological approach to colonial legal archives focusing on the interplay among orality, writing and performance within the judicial procedure itself provides invaluable insight into both the very nature of colonial justice and subalterns' experiences of it. Relying more specifically on the study of the complete legal files of nineteen fallahin from the Minufiya province sentenced to death between 1884 and 1914 - files that amount to around 2,000 pages of documents -, this paper shows how the Mahakim Ahliya became at the turn of the twentieth century both the locus of a collective and much contested process of construction of the colonial grand narrative about peasants and peasants' criminality, and a site of negotiation/contestation over the very management of the allegedly "lawless countryside." In addition and more importantly, this analysis reveals how through their interrogations, courtroom performances, and petitions, the peasants actively participated in this dual process, alternately strengthening and/or undermining it; and how they developed a complex "vernacular legal culture" characterized by an increasing conception of the law in very distinctive moral and political terms.

“Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war on us, we could bring the whole world to our feet... What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years?... England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her save the South. No, you dare not to make war on cotton. No power on the earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is King.” Cotton’s central place in the national economy and its international importance led Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina to make the famous boast above in 1858. When the American Civil War erupted in 1861, many observers anticipated “the cotton famine” in the South would turn into a catastrophe for the British economy. Nevertheless, the American Civil War did not cause a major economic crisis in Great Britain because it prompted the British merchants to turn to other markets. In addition to major markets, such as Egypt, India, and China, the Ottoman Empire was also considered as a potential source of cotton imports. In my paper, I present the considerable efforts made by the British towards extending cotton cultivation in the coastal plains of Western Anatolia during the American Civil War. I use Ottoman, British, and French archival documents, such as petitions, parliament papers, commercial statistics and consular correspondence, as well as travelers’ accounts to discuss socio-economic and environmental impacts of cotton production on Western Anatolian landscape. In my paper, I suggest that ‘King Cotton’ was an active catalyst accelerating the social, economic, physical, and environmental changes in Izmir and its hinterland in the 1860s.

Water, Wells and Social Structure: The Oasis Towns of Mauritania In the arid regions of the Middle East and North Africa, water scarcity has been long been a prominent theme – running through virtually any ethnographic or historical account. This paper will focus on the social impact of water supplies, in the precolonial period and into the early twentieth century, in what might be called the “southern tier” oases of the western Sahara, especially those of the Mauritanian subregions of the Adrar and Tagant. There, limited water supplies have clearly conditioned the location and size of settlements, the extent of agriculture, even the size of retinues and armies and the length of military campaigns. Connections of water and social structure have periodically figured as sub-themes of social-scientific research -- ranging from the notion of “oriental despotism” to theses of civilizational collapse -- and now a new round of exploratory work is underway in geography on the “hydrosocial cycle,” the interactive nexus of water and social processes (including issues of technologies, distribution and control). Apart from a few geographic surveys, however, the literature on Mauritania – and on the Sahara as a whole -- tends to take the form of monographs, with little in the way of explanatory or synthetic work. Drawing from this extensive secondary literature, reinforced by field visits and interviews, this paper will begin to fill in this gap, focusing on specific modes of exploitation of water and their social correlates, viewed in comparative perspective. To date, only Pierre Bonte, in a single paper and in passing, has explicitly noted the contrast between the northern and southern Sahara. Northern tier oases (of Saharan Morocco and Algeria) tend to have spatially concentrated water resources, lending themselves to far-flung, complex, and socially coordinated systems of irrigation. Southern-tier oases are sharply different – featuring dispersed but low-volume supplies and a multiplicity of separate wells, each feeding only a small plot of land, and powered by a bit of mechanical leverage (at best), and a great deal of human labor, often provided by slaves. The social impact of these features has been profound. Mauritanian towns were not only relatively small, but dependent on a mix of occupational strategies, including extensive herding; this tended to correlate with porous borders and extensive nomad influence, on the one hand; on the other, weak community defenses, limited collective authority, and intensive internal factionalism, often spilling over into civil war.

"The Ecological Bedouin: Ibn Khladun and Desert Literature" This paper compares and contrasts the image of the desert dweller as it appears in Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimma with two works of contemporary Arab “desert fiction,” by Abdelrahman Munif, Nihayat (Endings), and Ibrahim al-Koni, Naz-if Al-Hajar (The Bleeding of the Stone). I argue that while Ibn Khaldun and the two novelists all consider the environment as constitutive of the human self, the novelists go further than he does and ask How do the desert inhabitants relate to their habitat? Ibn Khadun depicted the Bedouin as a noble/ an ignoble savage, courageous and free, yet untamable and bereft of culture—a product of the desert with its vastness, harsh climate, and dearth of resources. A close reading of the two novels demonstrates a more complex and humane view of the Bedouin (Tuareqs in the case of al-Koni). At the center of the portraiture, although not exhaustive of it, is what I call the Ecological Bedouin, best illustrated in the relationship with animals. In the two novels, the Bedouin holds an animistic view of animals. He hunts them, but not more than one at a time; nor does he hunt a pregnant beast. The authors bring this image into sharp relief by contrasting his attitude with that of the insatiable hunters from the city. They accomplish this without much romanticism; both authors describe life in the desert as perilous, vacillating between the extremes of droughts and floods, with occasional respite. The contrast with Ibn Khladun could not be greater. Ibn Khaldun pictured the Bedouin as a turbulent figure menacing the city, whereas today it is the city that has conquered the desert, mining it for oil and minerals, and converting it into a tourist site and a waste dump—symbolized in the novels by the rapacious urban hunters. Not only do Mounif and al-Koni upend Ibn Khaldun’s enduring description of the Bedouin, they also rescue him from the distortions present in previous Arab fiction. The paper makes an original argument about the emergence of the new figure, the Ecological Bedouin, his location in the changing relationship between city and desert, and the beginnings of a new Arab environmental ethic. 365 words.