Module description
To what extent can we think of colonialism as a reconfiguration of existing legal and material relations? This seminar combines critical political economy, law, and histories of capitalism to examine how legal relations and forms of trade in the Middle East and Indian Ocean were reconfigured to produce a colonial political economy that required its own legal architecture and conceptual categories. The seminar examines themes such as Shari’a (also known as “Islamic law”), debt and property. It explores how Shari’a, debt and property were redefined through epistemic rearrangements and modern regimes of law. One of the main questions this seminar explores is the extent to which modern formations of law, property and debt are the product of colonial processes and themselves colonising. The seminar also questions “progress” as an appropriate temporal category through which to understand the movement of history.
The notion that the Middle East lacked a coherent legal system and modern economic structures has already been challenged. Despite this, the assumptions of this old historiography persist. Scholars and especially historians have argued for almost half a century that the Middle East had indigenous legal and economic structures that were conducive to capitalism. While important, this kind of argument reinscribes the theoretical imperatives and conceptual investments of capitalism into non-European contexts. In this seminar, we approach the question differently. Instead of asking whether the Middle East and Indian Ocean “had capitalism too,” we take these vast and important regions as sites of serious theoretical rethinking of the entangled histories of law and capitalism.
Assessment details
1 x 1,500 word formative essay, 1 x 3,000 word essay (100%)
Teaching pattern
10 x 2 hour seminars (weekly)