This article studies some major shifts in the relationship between law and Sufism in South Asian Islam between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. It does so by focusing on Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (d. 1762) to examine, first, how these two key facets of Islam interact with each other in his thought and, second, how some influential Muslim intellectuals of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have understood and positioned themselves in relation to this aspect of his thought. Though one would be hard pressed to know this from the sanitized modern image of Wali Allah as a scholar of the Quran and hadith, and of a Sufi piety uncompromisingly anchored in them, his Sufism reveals a wide and, from many a modern Muslim perspective, unwieldly range of ideas and practices. Yet it was precisely in that unwieldy breadth and depth that it was generative of some of his key insights into matters of the law. Even as many people have continued to insist on the imbrication of law and Sufism, a sanitization of Wali Allah’s Sufi image serves to highlight wider processes whereby an earlier era’s generative relationship between the two has come to be increasingly attenuated since the late nineteenth century.

This article focuses on the discussions around female athletes and their emotions in the German and Austrian press of the 1920s. In the course of the sports boom of the interwar years, more and more women participated in public sports competitions and demanded their right to be taken seriously as sportswomen. Their public appearance aroused mixed feelings and heated social debates about how much and what kind of sport was appropriate for women, which were reflected in discussions and narratives around the figure of the “sportsgirl.” Sportsgirls were imbued with a novel emotional style to which ambition and audacity – ways of feeling that were cultivated during competitive sports and that contrasted with traditional bourgeois female feeling rules – were key. Sportsgirls and their emotional style were the subject of many stories, reports, pictures, and articles that were published in the growing sports press of the time – and they were judged and evaluated for the emotional style they embodied. The press was a potent platform and site of the formation of feeling rules; as such, discussions around sportsgirls point to the (embodied) experiences of the athletes and indicate how the emotional style that derived from them was turned into a tool to reshape social conventions and feeling rules for women beyond the sports arena.

This paper discusses competing visions of the decolonization of Ghana’s economy during the first decade of the country’s independence from Britain (1957–1966), and the agency and horizon of choice available to the Ghanaian decision-makers in charge of implementing these visions. It focuses on Ghana’s construction industry, both as an important part of the national economy and as a condition for Ghana’s broader social and economic development in the context of colonial-era path-dependencies and Cold War competition. By taking the vantage point of mid-level administrators and professionals, the paper shows how they negotiated British and Soviet technological offers of construction materials, machinery, and design. In response to Soviet claims about the adaptability of their construction resources to Ghana’s local conditions, the practice of adaptation became for Ghanaian architects and administrators an opportunity to reflect on the needs, means, and objectives of Ghana’s construction industry, and on broader visions of Ghana’s economic and social development. Beyond the specific focus on the construction industry, this paper conceptualizes the centrality of adaptation in enforcing technological hegemony during the period of decolonization, and discusses African agency beyond the registers of extraction and resistance that have dominated scholarship on the global Cold War.

This article examines the theological and hermeneutical foundations and fault lines of Muslim modernism and traditionalism in South Asia. It does so through a close reading of a massively consequential but thus far unstudied debate on the normative sources and interpretive parameters of religion in colonial modernity between the scholars Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898) and Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi (d. 1877), founders of arguably the most prominent bastions of modernism and traditionalism in Muslim South Asia: the Aligarh Muslim University and the Deoband Madrasa, both established in the late nineteenth century.

This article examines two major recent CCTV documentaries on the Third Front and its afterlives. The Big Third Front (2017) and Vicissitudes of the Third Front (2016) construct strong narratives about the Third Front during the Mao era, depicting it as a heroic struggle against nature which was forced upon China by foreign enemies. However, both documentaries encounter difficulties in adhering to the usual presentation of the Deng era as a resoundingly successful transformation. Vicissitudes ambivalently characterizes the Deng era as one of relative decline in contrast to the glorious early years of the Third Front and the flourishing present. The Big Third Front, meanwhile, conflates historical footage of the 1950s–1990s in a way that undermines the usual official division of PRC history into Mao and reform eras. This paper concludes by suggesting that academic focus on the Third Front can serve as a methodological tool for complicating the periodization of PRC history.

This article uses techniques of microhistory to explore how Janbai, the third wife of Sir Tharia Topan, exerted economic, religious, and social influence in Indian Ocean networks. An Ismaili woman from a Gujarati trading family who lived in East Africa, Janbai lies outside of the social worlds that have dominated studies of Muslim modernity in South Asia, which centre on Sunni male professionals from North India. Janbai was illiterate and largely disconnected from textual debates about modernity. In fact, she was just the sort of woman that reformers castigated for their supposed attachment to religious superstitions and customary practices. In contrast, studying Janbai through an alternative frame of ‘material modernity’ reveals the complex biography of a women who neither conformed to the idealized ‘new’ woman, nor simply reproduced inherited practices. Instead, she navigated rapid social mobility, shifting geographies, and new technologies and institutions, particularly colonial law courts, in ways that echoed and departed from how women had long exercised agency. The article argues that scholars, by foregrounding textual archives and discursive analysis, have tended to reproduce the marginalization of women like Janbai. In contrast, looking to sources such as jewellery and photographs, and reading textual archives with greater attention to gendered patterns of consumption and investment, brings Janbai from the margins to the centre of our understanding of modernity. In addition to enriching our understanding of the lives of women, increased attention to materiality and visuality opens up critical new avenues for writing a more variegated history of Muslim modernity.

This short article introduces the Forum on Muslim modernity in South Asia, placing its four articles—by Muhammad Qasim Zaman, SherAli Tareen, Julia Stephens, and Justin Jones—in the context of existing scholarship. I highlight the authors’ contributions to the study of Islamic reform and of women’s agency, in particular, in understandings of Muslim modernity in South Asia. Each of the contributions is on a discrete topic; this introduction therefore endeavours to pull at the threads within each that underscores their interventions in the study of Muslim modernity and that tie them together in this Forum.

The last 15–20 years have seen the emergence of a new trajectory of ‘Muslim feminism’ in India which has grounded Muslim women’s rights discourse both in the direct interpretation of Islamic scriptures and also in principles derived from the Indian Constitution. Examining two prominent Muslim women’s organizations—the All India Muslim Women’s Personal Law Board and the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan—this article examines how this form of Muslim feminism has become a central repository of Islamic modernist thought in India in light of its perceived failure in some other sections of Muslim public life. Based on writings and educational materials produced by these organizations, this article discusses their methods of harnessing the teachings of the Quran, their application of ‘Islamic feminist’ methodology to interpret Islamic family laws, their identification of equivalence between Islamic and constitutional values, and their attempts to engage the state in their efforts to promote the modernization of Muslim Personal Law.

Large and persistent racial disparities in land-based wealth were an important legacy of the Reconstruction era. To assess how these disparities were transmitted intergenerationally, we build a dataset to observe Black households’ landholdings in 1880 alongside a sample of White households. We then link sons from all households to the 1900 census records to observe their economic and human capital outcomes. We show that Black landowners, relative to laborers, transmitted substantial intergenerational advantages to their sons, particularly in literacy and homeownership. However, such advantages were small relative to the racial gaps in measures of economic status.

During the military regime in Brazil (1964–1985), enrollment ratios in primary education grew substantially in the first decade under dictatorship, but stagnated in the mid-1970s. This paper shows that education spending might depend on the levels of centralisation in tax matters. Using panel data regressions and qualitative evidence, we argue that a massive big push industrialisation programme increased the pressure on external accounts, leading the government to intensify an export incentive policy based on tax subsidies that decreased the income of subnational governments. As a result, the capacity of funding mass education was compromised in the second half of the 1970s.

Warren Nutter’s work as director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) Soviet growth project is his best-known contribution to economics and public affairs. Many histories of Sovietology note the oddity of Nutter’s selection as project director, given his apparent lack of prior experience studying the Soviet Union. This paper provides new context for Nutter’s selection to lead the NBER effort. From 1951 to 1952 Nutter was the acting chief of the Economic Capabilities Branch of the CIA’s Office of Research and Reports (ORR), and chairman of the Economic Analysis Subcommittee of the interagency Economic Intelligence Committee. In this capacity he managed at least three major research efforts, including an input-output analysis of the Soviet Union and contributions to two national intelligence estimates. Nutter may have been proposed as director of the NBER project by Robert Amory, the Deputy Director of Intelligence, in 1953. Nutter’s research for the CIA cultivated new analytic capacities for the agency and provided a foundation for his own work on the Soviet Union.

We provide decadal estimates of GDP per capita for the Russian Empire from the 1690s to the 1880s, making it possible for the first time to compare the economic performance of one of the world’s largest economies with other countries. Significant Russian economic growth before the 1760s resulted in catching-up on northwest Europe, but this was followed by a period of negative growth between the 1760s and 1800s and stagnation from the 1800s to the 1880s, leaving late-nineteenth century Russia further behind the West than at the beginning of the eighteenth century.