This issue brings together nine essays across a wide range of geographies and time periods on topics as diverse as the politics of land and real estate, fantasies of resilience, religious crossings, spectacles of sovereignty, histories of Palestinian solidarity, and, finally, migrant labor inclusion and exclusion.

In “The Improvement Regime: Public Trusts, Real Estates, and India’s Urban Futurities,” Anwesha Ghosh emphasizes the emergence of the “improvement trust,” established in Mumbai in 1898 in response to a bubonic plague outbreak, as a traveling fiscal-juridical regime of technocratic urban governance. The article shows how “health” and “improvement” became “pretexts to explore the range of investment opportunities made available by the city’s built environment” transforming the city into a space of real estate speculation. Rather than being neoliberal inventions, Ghosh’s article brings to light a connected and longer history of these intimacies between urban governance and financialization.

Gabriel Young’s essay, “Remaking a Sovereign Landlord: Property and Dispossession Along the Basra Oil Frontier,” tackles similar themes of land and property, but along commodity frontiers of oil extraction in southern Iraq in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Upending certain dominant framing of hydrocarbon extraction in the postcolonial world as processes of enclosure to construct enclaves of extraction, Young reveals the complex historical layering of land and property rights. Instead of a practice of primitive accumulation, where multinational oil companies (in collusion with corrupt elites) engaged in land grabs, Young uncovers a rich archive of contestation between the Iraqi state and various claimants to agrarian land in the region. His analysis brings to the fore the Iraqi state as a sovereign landlord whose power rested as much in the material assemblage of oil infrastructure as in monopoly over oil rents.

“Sustainable Disaster: Fantasies of Resilience, Global Adaptation, Science, and East Asia’s Seawomen” also upends dominant framings—in this case the valorization of “adaptation-resilience” within contemporary sustainable development discourses. Charlotte Ciavarella joins those who have critiqued such framings as shifting responsibility for managing threats and vulnerabilities onto individuals and communities. However, instead of locating this discourse within a Euro-American modality of governance amidst neoliberal austerity, Ciavarella reframes it within other ideological and geographical contexts, namely Japan’s interwar era and what was seen as the problem of “imported social ills caused by the sudden introduction of industry into a largely peasant society.” Ciavarella emphasizes how the East Asian ama and haenyeo (female skin-divers) became a valorized contrast to the “factory girl” that both ignored and, in fact, perpetuated harms to the divers themselves, condemning them to “suffer in glorified extremes.”

The next two essays provide fascinating case studies on religious crossings and interactions between Muslims and Christians within contexts of trade and exchange.

“The Social Life of Wax in the Premodern Maghrib” is a material history of wax and candles illuminating a complex ecosystem of exchange connecting Catholics and Muslims. Daniel Hershenzon highlights the unstable materiality of wax, which he argues was difficult to define in terms of religious identity, even as wax and candles became religious boundary markers and sites of articulating anxieties across religious divides. From debates on the religious permissibility of using wax candles to celebrate the Prophet’s birthday, or as a gift to Algerian dignitaries, to its circulation amongst Catholic captives, the essay traces the multiple meanings of wax across social, cultural, and legal domains.

Tommaso Stefini asks what Islamic justice looked like for Venetian merchants in seventeenth century Ottoman courts in “Ottoman Justice and Political Economy of Empires: Venetian Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Courts.” Located within a transforming global trading world of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the heyday of Ottoman power in the Mediterranean, Stefini analyzes Ottoman politics of justice toward European merchants in this period. Instead of Eurocentric narratives that portrayed the Ottoman empire as uninterested in international trade or as an unchanging legal system, the essay showcases a dynamic and commercially-minded Ottoman system. Capitulations granted to European merchants were, unlike in later eras, not due to external pressures but followed the Ottoman authorities’ own “fiscal and provisionalist goals.” This was equally true of a variety of legal innovations, which the article emphasizes followed an endogenous logic contradicting narratives of an unchanging and timeless Islamic law system.

Questions of sovereignty—as authority, as violence, and as performance—have long found a home in the pages of CSSH. “Buffalo Politics: Sovereignty and Sacrificial Publics in the Highlands of East India” and “The Pyropolitcs of Sacred Kingship: Fireworks and the Performance of Messianic Sovereignty in the Early Modern Mediterranean” join this interrogation of sovereign power through two close readings of sovereign performance. Sam Wilby turns to public rituals of buffalo sacrifice in eastern India and the multiplicity of meanings attached to these public and political events. Emphasizing “sacrificial politics” as a frame for intra- and inter-communal politics, Wilby showcases how spectacles of destruction and the transformation of value are key to social and political life among the Kutia Kondh, an adivasi (indigenous) community in Odisha. Through a focus on the event of Bhia Katina, the ways that sacrifice makes human relationships commensurable in lasting political formations across scale and time are made clear. An investigation of a singular event similarly frames Rao Mohsin Ali Noor’s essay, which offers a reading of a pyrotechnic display—a large replica of a mountain—that was staged at an Ottoman circumcision festival for Prince Mehmed in 1582. Noor’s essay brings to the fore pyropolitics as a mode of engaging early modern messianically inflected kingship and the sense of extreme that, the author argues, is at the heart of sacral sovereignty. Courtly pyrotechnics brought together sacred kinship and the medium of fire in staging this spectacle of sovereignty, a feature shared both by the millennial court of Murād III as well as other courts in early modern Europe. Noor’s article offers a comparative and connected reading of these displays to “uncover a shared culture of apocalyptical expectation, messianic prophecy, and occultist imperialism in the early modern Mediterranean world.”

Reem Abou-El-Fadl’s essay, “Palestine in the 1972 Egyptian Student Uprising: Arab Solidarities of Principle and Affect,” asks what a history of a student movement tells us “about solidarity in geographically proximate, and politically and culturally long connected, spaces” Turning to a series of campus shutdowns of Egyptian universities in 1972, the article examines how solidarity with the Palestinian cause shaped the politics and possibilities of the Egyptian student movement and popular politics in Egypt in the 1970s. Through an analysis of this student movement, the article argues against a longstanding view that located in the shift from Nasser to Sadat an end to pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism and the rise of Islamism in its stead from 1967 onward. Abou-El-Fadl’s article showcases the vitality and connection of Egyptian-Palestinian relations in shared idioms of anticolonial and national struggle that both predated and outlasted the politics of this tumultuous period with long lasting consequences for the region, while also shaping broader South-South solidarity.

The final essay in this issue returns to questions of urban space and futures, this time Late-Soviet Moscow and contested conditions for migrant worker citizenship under Socialism. Jeffrey Bilik’s essay, “Citizenship Under the Plan: Managing Migrant Worker Inclusion in Late-Soviet Moscow,” argues that while the linkage between civic inclusion and labor productivity has been noted as a key feature of neoliberal states since the 1970s, there is a longer history of labor-based civic inclusion, one that traverses Socialist geographies. Bilik’s essay shows how the early Soviet state bound rights to food and shelter in cities to workers and enterprises that employed them. Emphasizing the key role played by intermediaries, such as state enterprises, the article examines how the twin purposes of labor extraction and creating new Soviet subjects were forged in the factories and dormitories of Moscow.