In 1666, French finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert hired Martin di Marcara Avachinz, an Armenian merchant who had lived in Iran and India, as an agent for his newly established Compagnie des Indes orientales. In 1669, shortly after the Armenian had secured a royal edict from the sultan Of Golconda to set up a French trading center in the port of Masulipatam, he was summarily arrested, tortured, and sent to France by his superior François Caron. This article provides a close reading of the legal briefs or factums produced during the sensational trial that followed Marcara’s release from prison in 1675. In tracing a “global microhistory” of his life across continents, it seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of early modern long-distance trade in the Indian Ocean, comparing the network of the CIO and other joint-stock corporations with the “stateless” nature of the trade diaspora of Armenian merchants from the township of New Julfa on the outskirts of the Safavid capital Isfahan. Finally, the article considers the role of factums in early modern France and explores how the “exceptionally normal” story of Marcara’s life provides a useful window onto French perceptions of the Orient and the fear induced by communities such as Armenian and Indian merchants, bankers, and brokers.

The religious and intellectual history of early modern and modern Islam is often reduced to a teleological and Arabo-centric narrative, in which modernity began with Napoleon’s Egyptian Expedition or the Nahḍa, the Arab Renaissance. Within this narrative, the succession of Sufism, Islamic reformism, Islamism, and Salafism is seen as a “genealogy of Islamism.” Using a regressive history approach, and presenting the currents of international historiography on Islam between the fifteenth and the twenty-first century, this article seeks in contrast to illuminate the plurality of possible pathways and the heterogeneous nature of historical moments. Moving backward through time, it attempts to identify ruptures and continuities, and to highlight successive interpretations of medieval authors and concepts (such as salafiyya). In so doing, it endeavors to demonstrate the constructed nature of the received historiographical narrative of late nineteenth-century “Islamic reformism,” as well as that of “Arabic thought in the liberal age.” Historiographical debates on the “neo-Sufism” and Aufklärung of the eighteenth century have led to a better understanding of Islam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, a thirst for renewal (tajdīd) flourished in hadith, Islamic law, and Sufism. Recent research on the process of “confessionalization” over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has highlighted the importance of political factors in developments of Islam during the age of the three Empires (Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman).

This article proposes an analysis of the Book of the Desert (Kitāb al-Bādiya), a nineteenth-century legal treatise composed by Muḥammad al-Māmī (d. 1282/1865), a Muslim scholar from the Tiris desert in present-day Mauritania. Al-Māmī’s text reflects on the adaptation of sharia—the religious law of Islam—to the needs of pastoral populations in the Saharan West. How to embrace a normative system seemingly incompatible with nomadic life, given that it presupposes a state governed by an Islamic ruler (imām) and considers the city the natural environment of legal institutions? Challenging the narratives of center-periphery and the so-called post-classical “decline” that continue to structure the field of Islamic intellectual history, the article explores the different contextual layers of al-Māmī’s reasoning. He was a religious notable deeply involved in power struggles between nomadic groups and a fervent supporter of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century jihad movements in West Africa. But he was also a jurist of the Maliki school, who approached his society from the perspective of Islamic legal thought, and a Bedouin preoccupied with the legal and religious implications of the cultural gulf between his world and that of the towns.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the Hispanic Monarchy imagined new solutions for governing its territories between the south of the Amazon, the Strait of Magellan, and the Andean cordillera. Populated by farmers and shepherds, these huge rural areas remained poorly known to the authorities. Yet among the reforms conducted in America by Charles III—including the adoption of the intendancy system—none tackled the administration of the countryside head-on. This problem is key for two reasons. First, most of the population of the Río de la Plata lived in rural areas. Second, the enormous distances that separated these areas from the urban centers where representatives of the Monarchy resided (Santa Fe, Buenos Aires, or Madrid) posed a challenge that the authorities had to face in order to govern these populations. Shifting from a “top-down” perspective to a ground-level analysis attentive to local dynamics makes it possible to shed new light on how these spaces far removed from the centers of power functioned. Through the microhistorical analysis of a series of institutional transformations affecting the Río de la Plata, this article shows how subjects came to participate in the government of their region, mobilizing their networks to create a community and institutions on a local scale.

From the 1930s to the 1950s, the Mzab region in the north of the Algerian Sahara, then under French rule, was shaken by controversies over the consumption and lawfulness of European goods. Historians typically analyze these debates as a form of cultural resistance to colonization or as a sign of the allegedly difficult adaptation of “Islam” to “modernity.” They single out two types of reaction: that of self-proclaimed “reformist” scholars and that of “conservatives,” caricatured as shoring up a barren tradition. Based on the case of the Mzab and on a wide range of Islamic legal documents, this article opens up a new perspective on the relations between Islam, modernity, and colonialism, demonstrating that other logics were also at work. For the Islamic scholars involved, the most important issue at stake was the purity of their community and its preservation in a context of cultural and political uncertainty. Using the tools of Islamic law, both advocates and detractors of these “innovations” shaped a particular vision of their community and its boundaries. By bringing together colonial and Islamic sources, and drawing on both colonial and Islamic studies, this article challenges a reading of the modern history of Islam based on notions such as modernity and reform, which were essentially instrumental in these debates. It also moves away from a historiography that is blind to the internal complexity of these societies, drawing attention to the multiple rationales at work in colonized North Africa.

This article uses a single, transnational legal case that played out between Italy and Tunisia in the 1870s and 1880s to tell a truly global history of international law—that is, one that goes beyond the boundaries of the West. Samama v. Samama was a fabulously complicated case that dragged on in Italian courts for almost a decade. The crux of the legal arguments concerned the nationality of Nissim Samama, a Jew born in Tunis; Samama’s nationality, in turn, would determine which legal system regulated his estate. The Italian civil code enshrined respect for the national law of a foreigner, but such foreigners were presumed to be Western. A case involving the national law of Tunisia and the status of Jews called the very foundations of the international legal system into question. In putting Samama’s nationality on trial, the case opened up debate over fissures in the emerging theory of international law: How could non-Western states like Tunisia fit into an international legal order? How did Islamic law intersect with international law? What was the status of Jewish nationhood in a world increasingly based on exclusive nationalities? The Samama case offers access to the voices of European international lawyers debating the ambiguities of their field, as well as those of Maghrebis articulating their own vision of international law. The resulting arguments exposed tensions inherent to an international legal system uncomfortably balanced between universalism and Western particularism.

As key players in the transatlantic slave trade, the monarchies of Hueda and Dahomey (in modern-day southern Benin) connected themselves to global commodity flows. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, imported merchandise fueled practices of conspicuous consumption and ritualized largesse, the performance of which was pivotal in consolidating their rulers’ power. Focusing on specific items (tobacco, porcelain) and behavioral practices (smoking, spitting), this article examines how these goods were materially and symbolically integrated into courtly culture and associated with the religious beliefs and ritual practices of Vodun. In order to track recurring aspects of courtly scenography, to compare the signification of bodily practices in different parts of the world, and to identify material links engendered by global trade, it combines microhistorical investigation based on written records with archaeological findings, anthropological observations, and the analysis of visual sources and sculptural artifacts. The essay argues that royal palaces constituted crucial laboratories of aesthetic change and new cultures of elite consumption. In this process, exogenous elements not only enriched the material culture of the palaces, celebrating the monarchs’ global splendor; they were also charged with new meanings that inscribed foreign goods and related practices into specifically regional cultural codes.

This essay proposes to reframe the twentieth-century history of Islam by rethinking the relationship of that history to some dominant categories of twentieth-century sociology, especially the secularization thesis. The global history of Islam since the late nineteenth century has been shaped by an apparent paradox between its two most significant features. The first of these has consisted of persistent calls for Muslim revival, reform, and unity across the world, tending toward a unification or transcendence of the older forms of variation within the tradition. The second, countervailing tendency has been an increasing fragmentation of structures of authority within the tradition, a proliferation of the meanings attributed to it and of the forms of practice taken to embody it, and a renewed acuity of internal sectarian conflict. This is a paradox that only an understanding of Islam as social practice embedded in the forms of secularity characteristic of modern societies—and emphatically not one of Islam as “medievally” religious and uniquely “secularization-resistant”—can apprehend.

This review article seeks to analyze the main contributions of historical research and, to a lesser extent, sociology and anthropology, over the last twenty years in three distinct but closely interwoven domains: the history of eugenics, the history of heredity, and the history of the biological notion of race. After clarifying the relations between these too-often conflated subjects, the article compares the evolution of their respective fields of research, distinguishing between the development of previously addressed themes and the exploration of new perspectives. It considers historiographical reflections on eugenicist policies of forced sterilization, on the close relations established between eugenics and natalism in certain countries such as France, and on the genealogy of the category of race and mechanisms for objectifying racial diversity. The profound renewal of the three domains of research over the period is analyzed via two complementary perspectives: the significant broadening of their geographical horizons and the reproblematization of their scientific objects. Though the focus of earlier work on the European and North-American experience may have suggested that biopolitics, eugenics, and “scientific racism” were the prerogative of Western countries, the recent increase in studies of Latin America, Asia, and, to a lesser extent, the Middle East and Africa, has definitively discredited this reductive vision. In parallel, a better awareness of gender perspectives, the exploration of historical continuities between eugenics and medical genetics, and the reevaluation of the role of biomedicine in debates on human heredity and the notion of race have profoundly renewed the three fields of research studied here.

Three recently published books raise the question of labor in the Roman Empire. The present article aims to investigate the sources privileged by historians, the scale of observation on which their analysis is situated, and the theoretical assumptions that guide them. These reflections show that there are multiple ways of writing labor history, currently divided into different subfields which do not always communicate with one another. Thanks to new readings of ancient literature and epigraphy, and the contribution of papyri and archaeology, the traditional history of work and trades has been widely renewed. An important line of questioning examines the reasons for the high degree of trade specialization in the Roman Empire, as well as the existence of a true division of labor. Archaeology helps us understand the technologies and processes of production, making it possible to establish a typology of the socioprofessional identities, from employers to employees, that existed in the shops and workshops of the Roman world. A quite different approach investigates the organization of labor from a macroeconomic perspective, seeing it as a force mobilized by employers: comparisons between the productivity of slaves and that of free workers have been replaced by analyses of the transaction costs of free hired labor versus servile manpower. Finally, debate continues between historians who consider that the labor market of the Roman Empire was limited by clientelist networks and servile labor, and those who describe a free-market economy where labor had become a commodity.

The early history of printing in Europe is one of great economic and commercial success, but also of significant risks taken by those involved. The supply of paper, essential to the functioning of a press, could cause conflicts and required constantly available capital: the profitability of the book industry depended on the growth of the market. In Venice, anyone could set up as a printer, creating competition that was strongly criticized by printers and booksellers in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. This prompted them to formulate the economic risks they faced in supplica addressed to the Venetian authorities, and to conceptualize the realities of their situation, especially in terms of competition. This word, always used in a pejorative sense, is nevertheless rare in both theoretical and practical documents of the time. However competitive this economic milieu was, it was counterbalanced by the necessity of collaboration, a phenomenon that can be studied through social network analysis. Trust was restored through the constitution of dense collaborative networks, in which competitors became partners. Yet this also enabled some actors to establish strong consortia, leading to the kind of oligopolistic economy typical of industries without state regulation.