Over the last two decades, since scholarly writing on India witnessed an “urban turn,” numerous historians have analyzed the role of the improvement trust in the redevelopment of Indian cities in the twentieth century, most specifically those of Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi. This paper revisits and reassesses some of their key arguments to suggest that rather than studying the “failures” of the individual trusts to foster sanitary built environments, we should pay attention to the contingent workings of the city trusts that were constitutively designed for such failures. Using a comparative analysis of the Bombay and Calcutta improvement trusts, this paper offers a retelling of the history of twentieth-century Indian urbanism through the inauguration of an “improvement regime.” It posits that a structural analysis of the trust’s legal and financial framework opens innovative ways of reading “improvement” as a new, twentieth-century language, technology, and rationality of urban governance. The improvement trust devised the art of spatiotemporal management to secure the city’s built environment—rather than its residents—against future uncertainties. The paper takes us through various episodes in the career of the improvement trust—its introduction of technocratic rule, partnership with private investors, speculation in the urban land market, and finally emergence as the city’s leading rentier—in short, the “new developments” that we associate with neoliberal urbanism today. Rather than mapping these developments as neoliberal inventions, this paper invites readers to view them as the slow and (dis)continuous unraveling of a century-old improvement regime.

Left-populist narratives of hydrocarbon extraction in the postcolonial world, including the twentieth-century Middle East, often construe it as a process whereby multinational fossil capital encloses and commodifies land held in common. Although such narratives may capture the experience of communities along certain oil and gas frontiers, they do not account for the social terrains and political trajectories of extractive land grabs in areas where private property in land already underpins commercial agriculture. How do energy companies engage with an existing market in land, and reorient a commodity frontier around extractive rather than agrarian capitalism? This article explores that question by examining property struggles in southern Iraq in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the multinational Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) sought to acquire land still devoted to cash crop agriculture. Drawing on business records and material from Iraqi archives entirely new to Anglophone scholarship, I show how land conflicts on the Basra oil frontier came to revolve less around the IPC as such than the Iraqi state. The latter’s expanding remit entailed both the revival of older powers of sovereign landlordism and the deployment of novel capacities, as the state sought to mediate conflicting legal claims on land and its value and manage the social consequences of territorial dispossession. Ultimately, this article historicizes the political-legal status of postcolonial landlord states like Iraq in an era of hydrocarbon extraction, locating the origin of their powers as much in the material assemblage of oil infrastructures as in the monopoly over oil rents.

This article examines how the labor and community structures of female skin-divers, the Japanese ama and Korean haenyeo, believed to exemplify the primitive ability to adapt to extreme climates, became staple research subjects for global adaptation-resilience science. In the context of development studies, adaptation-resilience discourse has been seen as reflecting the emergence of neoliberal governmentality. In contrast, this article frames adaptation-resilience as a reactionary technological response that emerges in times of scarcity and crisis. This article demonstrates how the discourse can be traced back to interwar Japanese physiologists, who saw themselves as rescuing Japan from the ills of modernity through a socio-biological development program that drew on the diver’s adaptability as a means to create subjects not only capable of surviving extreme deprivation but willing to do so in the service of the community and the state. These scientists and their research were taken up uncritically in the postwar by international science and development organizations, who found in them a shared vision of a labor-intensive and low ecological impact model of community-rooted development that offered a sustainable and healthier alternative to capitalism, one that could help humanity overcome crises of modern excess such as climate change. However, sustainability meant the valorization of absolute austerity as a development goal, ruling out relief for suffering marginalized populations. This article therefore suggests that resiliency-based development entraps its subjects in a regime of self-exploitation that forces them into a constant state of emergency, paradoxically deepening their vulnerability in the process.

Between the late Middle Ages and the early modern period, large quantities of wax were exported from the Maghrib to Europe. In the Maghrib, both raw wax and wax candles were involved in various social interactions that transcended mere environmental and economic considerations. For some Muslims, wax came to index Christianity, and its significance during the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday was critiqued as a corrupt innovation. At the same time, to prevent the facilitation of Catholic devotion—and because wax was deemed war material—the sale of wax to Christians was forbidden. Nevertheless, wax remained a profitable product sold to Christians in significant quantities. The anxiety surrounding the movement of wax and the attempts to regulate it indicate that for Muslims, wax served as a religious boundary marker. Christians too utilized the substance to reinforce communal boundaries. Catholics in the Maghrib—captives, clergy, and merchants—used wax to establish and express confessional divides, aiming to deter Catholic captives from converting to Islam. Priests distributed blessed candles to captives, who in turn donated wax to the clergy. Moreover, priests gifted candles to Algerian dignitaries, a practice opposed by the papacy. Wax formed invisible, often unintended connections between Muslim theologians and rulers, Catholic and Muslim captives, slaves, wax makers, merchants, and redeemers. These entanglements sparked anxiety, a sense of impurity, and a drive to reinforce religious boundaries. This article explores a fragmented history of these connections and relationships and argues that the failed attempts to regulate this circulation fostered new entanglements.

This article examines the interrelations between the political economies of the Ottoman Empire and the administration of justice for European merchants in Ottoman cities during the seventeenth century. By focusing on the sultan’s court of justice, the Imperial Council (divan-ı hümayun), and the Venetian merchants who appealed to it, this piece illustrates how Ottoman commercial interests and political concerns influenced the production and application of Islamic law (Sharia) in Ottoman courts for European merchants. To promote international trade, Ottoman political and legal authorities introduced new norms and procedures in matters of legal evidence and court jurisdiction in commercial cases between Venetian and Ottoman subjects, and they encouraged settlements in favor of foreign merchants and Ottoman-Venetian trade. These politics of justice, I argue, demonstrate the dynamism of the Ottoman legal system in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period characterized by global commercial development and Ottoman military and political ascendancy in the Mediterranean.

Public rituals of buffalo sacrifice have a prominent place in the political history of eastern India. They were productive activities in agrarian livelihoods, stages for intercommunal politics, unifying spectacles for regional kings, and justifications for colonial military interventions. While their historical scale is much reduced today, in parts of southern Odisha, they remain important political events. Drawing on historical research and long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Odisha’s Kandhamal Hills, this article examines how public rituals of sacrifice form a site of commensuration: a space where interlocal relations of mutuality and difference are temporarily made visible, and where value is defined in the presence of diverse audiences. By focusing on one specific ritual event, I show how these “sacrificial publics” are structured around the tensions of sovereignty (togetherness and transgression) and have long been spaces where different kinds of sovereign power have become legible. Historicizing an enduring sacrificial politics at India’s upland margins, I outline a distinctly anthropological concept of sovereignty—one that reflects the ways human relationships are made commensurable in lasting political formations, sustained through interlocal and intercommunal patterns of recognition.

What made a sovereign, and a messianic one at that? Such questions were repeatedly posed in the sixteenth century, when vigorous new imperialisms compelled the articulation of grand visions of universal rule across Eurasia. In the Islamic world, now bereft of a living Abbasid caliph to serve as a touchstone of sovereignty and ruled by Turkic dynasties seeking to emulate Mongol and Timurid patterns of sacred kingship, the answers to these questions were articulated in ad hoc and heterodox ways. Indeed, there is now increased appreciation of the fact that the history of Muslim sacred kingship in the lead up to the Islamic millennium (ca. 1591–92) was one of occultist experimentation, messianic fervor, and charismatic demonstrations of sacred power, almost as much as it was one of state consolidation and canonization of the law. But where recent studies have shed light on how astral conjunctions, heavenly constellations, and the cosmic letters of the Arabic alphabet constituted the theoretical desiderata of Ottoman sacral kingship, they have tended to eschew royal spectacle and performance in favor of close readings of texts of mystical-occultist political theory. This study offers a close reading of a pyrotechnical performance staged in front of Ottoman sultan Murād III in 1582. Through drawing productive comparisons and connections with a similar, near-contemporaneous pyrotechnical performance staged in early modern Europe for the Holy Roman Emperor, it will argue for courtly pyrotechnics as a means of communicating the “wholly other” nature of the sovereign’s body at times of great cosmic import.

In January 1972, Egypt’s university campuses were shut down by a wave of student protest, after President Anwar Sadat appeared to be abandoning plans for a military response to the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The uprising, culminating in hundreds of arrests, marked the first significant mobilization against Sadat’s new regime and drew widespread public sympathy. Drawing on life history interviews, memoirs, press archives, lawyers’ records, and student publications, this article examines how solidarity with the Palestinian cause shaped the political formation of the Egyptian student movement and catalyzed its emergence. It argues that the students engaged in profoundly affective solidarity practices with Palestine, first in affirmation of longstanding Egyptian nationalist frameworks of opposition to Zionism, and further in contestation of wider political relations under Sadat. Whilst transnational solidarity features prominently in global histories of decolonization, it has rarely been used to interrogate Egyptian popular politics in the 1970s. By foregrounding Egyptians’ evolving affective solidarities with Palestine, this article challenges dominant narratives around the decline of Arab nationalism after 1967 and the rise of Islamism in its place. In doing so, the article reveals the complex dynamics of Egyptian-Palestinian relations over time, within a broader landscape of Arab and global anticolonial struggles.

What explains the contested conditions for migrant worker citizenship under socialism? Migration scholarship often elides socialist contexts, tracing migrant deservingness to the neoliberal rise of labor-based conditionality for legal status across Western states in the late twentieth century. However, a broader historiography suggests that socialist states, despite their institutional differences, conditioned migrant inclusion on labor performance throughout the twentieth century. To explain how this form of civic conditionality operated under socialism, this paper draws on the case of migrant “limit” worker management in Moscow from the early 1960s to 1987. Using archival materials, I show that state-owned enterprises operated as migration intermediaries, establishing and enforcing a labor-based conditionality for local citizenship even as the state pursued additional civic aims. I find that civic campaigns initiated in the early 1960s provided an ideological framework and material base for enterprises to govern migrant workers at their dormitories. Managers and officials at the dormitory redirected resources intended for social activism and cultural tutelage toward ensuring baseline productivity and compliance. Enterprise managers and union officials additionally substituted the material conditions at the dormitory for the assessments of individual migrants’ moral and productive status. This paper extends the literature on migrant deservingness to a socialist context, showing how conditionality for civic inclusion develops beyond the neoliberal shifts in contemporary citizenship.