This chapter examines Gaza’s socio-spatial organization and the demographic features of its population. It presents Gaza’s main urban features during the late Ottoman period, including divisions into neighborhoods, main landmarks and thoroughfares. It then offers an in-depth portrayal of Gazan society, including data on economy and lifestyles, social hierarchies, marriage patterns, migration and health, based on a detailed analysis of the Ottoman census of 1905 and surviving court records (1857–1861), in light of evidence from the literature, maps and images.

In discussing Islamic banking and finance (IBF), I first provide a brief overview of its development in Gulf monarchies, before turning to an investigation of particularities of its form and substance. I address a set of issues related to, on the one hand, the adoption, governance and regulation of IBF and on the other hand, the conformity of its practice with its alleged purposes. My aim is to uncover the actual goals of IBF, that has become prominent in the Gulf (and in the global economy) in recent decades. The analysis shows that IBF is a means for regimes to both appease their restive populations and respond positively to the material interests of key segments of society. Thus, ruling priorities related to enrichment and social management cohere; these are the principal purposes, even though ruling elites cloak their intentions in religiosity and ethical commitments. Like the other institutionalized practices discussed in this book, IBF represents the conjoined instrumentalization of (oil) wealth and Islamic doctrine for the sake of social control, and beyond that, the ongoing political domination and material enrichment of the royal family.

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, temples dedicated to Laldas, who was born to Muslim parents, have mushroomed all over north India. Although he is currently mostly worshipped by the Hindu caste of Baniyas (merchants or traders), Laldas was historically known for having a dual religious identity as a Sufi pīr (Islamic mystic or saint) among Muslims and bābā or sant among Hindus. He preached nirgu bhakti (formless devotion) to the Hindu god Ram, lived a married life, combined ‘Islamic’ and ‘Hindu’ religious doctrines and developed a distinct form of religiosity shared by people across religious denominations. The saint taught his followers to observe five rules: to refrain from killing animals and eating meat (particularly beef); to abstain from alcohol consumption; to avoid partaking of any food in their daughter's home; to not cultivate tobacco and sugar cane in the area; and to avoid stealing. The ultimate objective for devotees from diverse socioreligious backgrounds was to continuously chant the name of Ram.

Laldas and his teachings straddled the boundaries of ‘Islam’ and ‘Hinduism’. But his main followers, Hindu Laldasis of the Baniya background and Muslim Laldasis of the Meo Muslim background, began to identify him more closely with either ‘Islam’ or ‘Hinduism’ in the twentieth century. Born into a Meo Muslim family in the sixteenth century (1540 CE) as Lal Khan Meo, the saint is presently more popular under the designation of Baba Laldas. Following his guru Kabir, Laldas not only advocated worshipping ‘God’ in a nirgu bhakti manner but also lived by the values of ‘Islam’ in his personal life. Like Kabir, Laldas, his religious instructions and the Laldasi panth (religious path or way) founded by his followers traditionally did not discriminate on caste and religious levels. The saint considered institutional religious identities as impediments in the path of bhakti (devotion). His teachings are still followed by people of both religions. But the saint's identity and associated religious practices have recently been transformed, indicating a shift from a shared liminal religious entity to an emerging component of north Indian devotional Hinduism.

This book is an attempt to understand historically and anthropologically a changing form of religious culture around the bhakti figure and the religious order of Laldas that has undergone multiple transformations since its inception in the sixteenth century.

Shifting focus from the Sino-Vietnamese borderlands to the northern Gulf of Tonkin during the decade from the end of the First Indochina War to the escalation of the Vietnam War, this chapter views the history of state building from the seashore. Echoing land reforms and agricultural collectivitization on the borderlands, fishery reforms and collectivization toppled the existing economic and social structure and tightened states’ control over fishery labor and catches. The “joint state invasion” culminated in the bilateral fishing agreement in 1957 and a collaborative survey of natural resources in the Gulf. The fact that the centralization of resource control and flows took place almost simultaneously along the Chinese and Vietnamese coasts left the fisherfolk with little leeway to avoid encountering the state. The characteristics of the reform programs and the geographic, technical, and social realities of the locality nevertheless obstructed the political centers’ endeavors to establish primacy along the coastal frontier. This chapter demonstrates that the tensions between internationalist, nationalist, and transnational local agendas were greater at the maritime border than on the borderlands.The defining policies of a communist revolution encountered more determined resistance from the seafaring people whose livelihood relied on an open and integrated maritime space.

The circulation of data ranked high among the objectives adopted by CGIAR at its founding in 1971. This chapter considers how agricultural experts attempted to realize a desired “full exchange of information” among scientists working at geographically distant sites, in different languages and cultural contexts, with different organisms and research interests from the 1970s to the early 2000s. The chapter focuses on the historical development of “crop descriptors,” today defined as providing an “international format and a universally understood language for plant genetic resources data.” Developers of descriptors aspire to agree on traits and terms that will allow users from diverse institutions and backgrounds to contribute to and extract information from an integrated data infrastructure. The chapter examines crop descriptors as a critical component of CGIAR’s earliest efforts to create “system-wide” research tools and agendas, emphasizing the scientific and political agendas that shaped this top-down systematizing work, finding that it provided an opportunity for CGIAR to instantiate and consolidate its central position in a web of international development initiatives.

Chapter 4 focuses on the meaning and deployment of the novel (and controversial) category of “natives” of a pueblo, widespread throughout the Spanish Atlantic world, to bolster the plaintiffs’ claims to freedom and other rights. The chapter explores both the Spanish and Indigenous traditions that informed the category of nativeness (naturaleza) used in the court briefs and examines their implications for a community of Afro descendant and other racially mixed subjects. The chapter compares the unconventional standing of El Cobre with that of the Indian pueblos of El Caney and Jiguaní in the island’s eastern region to explore the controversial claims to Indian ancestry.

Follows the American consuls as they begin to become cultural brokers linking Americans to remnants of the great Mediterranean empires as America begins to consider an imperialistic turn in the wake of the Monroe Doctrine.

This chapter narrates a history of the history of international law as a species of European historical jurisprudence born of the nineteenth century. It connects this historical jurisprudence with a wider atmosphere of historicism and its intellectual antecedents and descendents, including (but not limited to) so-called ‘progress narratives’. It argues that the history of international law in this specific sense largely vanished after the Second World War, and the history of international law underwent two distinct rebirths: as part of the anti-colonial legal arguments repudiating the colonial structures and presuppositions of international legal thought, and as part of a critique of a renewed historicism and civilisational progressivism between 1989 and the present. But the second revival of the history of international law coincided with emergent histories of empire, international history, histories of international political thought and global history. The result is an exploding field of scholarship with objects and subjects of many kinds connected to the international and the global and their laws, institutions and practices.