In the opening vignette of this finely textured socio-legal history of modern Egypt, the author recounts an exchange he had with a more senior interlocutor at a conference where he had presented his early research. The latter voiced the following question (which sounds more like a gauntlet being thrown): “How come I have never heard of them?” Cheta returns to this scene of bewilderment in the final paragraph of the book after mapping the world of the Egyptian merchant courts and some of its actors in five tightly wrought chapters. The map he draws is on the one hand a guide to the complex terrain of Egypt’s pre-colonial legal landscape as seen from the contemporaneous perspective of the majalis al-tujjar [merchant courts]; on the other hand, it is a corrective to the misguided views of that terrain offered from the lofty perch of colonial modernity.

The author does not dwell on this misguided view or the colonized subject’s psyche; instead, he rolls up his sleeves and takes a deep dive into the records of the merchant courts and other related sources, such as the private papers of the Syrian Christian merchant Butrus Tawil and the fatwa collection of the longest-serving Grand Mufti of Egypt in the nineteenth century, Muhammad al-Abbasi al-Mahdi. The readings of Egypt’s socio-legal history during the khedivial period, particularly the missing middle decades that Ehud Toledano drew our attention to in his 1990 monograph, are rightly dismissed as either the ideological discourses of a later nationalist class of lawyers busily (re)constructing narratives that would offer a “usable past” in their struggle for self-determination or the projection backward of scholars overly reliant on a colonial archive. In short, the archival record of the merchant courts allows him to paint a more accurate picture of the law’s operations and the relation of merchants to modern state formation during an interesting period of political-economic indeterminacy in the wider Ottoman imperial world and before Egypt was in practice, if not de jure, severed from that world by the British Occupation of 1882. Cheta runs counter here to the prevailing wisdom that it was an expansion of the legal apparatus guaranteeing private property in land that was central to modern state formation.

In a sense, resurrecting merchant tribunals from the French Occupation of 1798–1801, Mehmed Ali’s Egypt established new merchant courts in Alexandria (1845) and Cairo (1846), followed by other important trading centers. These courts were active until their closure in 1876, when the better-known “Mixed Courts” took their place. Cheta usefully explains his choice to translate majlis as “court” instead of the usual “council.” In that explanation, one appreciates the hybridity of the institution, which in turn reflected the deeply local and broadly global dimensions of Egypt’s history during the middle decades. Majalis (councils) were typically established to complement and to offer a governmental (siyasi) counterweight to the authority of sharia courts; this relationship between what might be termed administrative law, on the one hand, and Islamic law, on the other, pre-dated the Ottoman Empire. However, the genealogy of the majalis al-tujjar could only be traced as far back as the French Occupation, which would make sense since the legal aspects of commerce were typically managed by a dynamic combination of trade guilds, Islamic law, local and transregional customs, and familial ties—the rhizomatic power of which the French had to undermine in order to centralize authority. Although his account of the majlis informed by Foucault’s concept of governmentality was ostensibly intended to be genealogical, in the narrative, it appears more as an excavation, mainly due to a lack of clarity in the prose (the timeline is not easy to follow). Or perhaps it was because the long eighteenth century was not adequately represented. That context might have given the reader a needed framework to understand the implications of the commercialization of agriculture, which drove significant social and political changes in Egypt and around the globe—including new or modified legal forms and fora. Doing so would have also prepared us to appreciate the ascendance of “market governance” as a first round of state formation, its brief retreat under Mehmed Ali when the state became a monopolist, and its return at mid-century.

Accordingly, chapter one’s objective of tracing the building out of a commercial-legal infrastructure was successful when dealing with it as an event but less so as a much longer-term process of conflict and resolution in a globalized economic sphere that bled into the political, reorganizing life on multiple levels. Having minimized the subordination of Egypt and the wider Ottoman world to European Powers and a nascent global capitalism, for the sake of decentering the colonial/nationalist focus of modern Egypt’s historiography, we might almost miss the fact that the merchant courts were (re-)established because of the Powers’ explicit demand for more legal protections as international trade re-intensified once monopolies were ended and the terms of the commercial agreement of 1838 were implemented. Nonetheless, when it comes to reading the archives of the merchant courts, we see Cheta at his best. He squeezes out both the history of legal concepts and practices as they changed and the history of an institution as it developed, engaged, and was engaged by a diverse set of actors. That richness of detail is found especially in the chapters dealing with individual merchants, specifically Butrus Tawil, Musa al-‘Aqqad and son Hasan, and Tito Figari.

Indeed, Cheta offers a view onto those missing middle decades that is nearly unmatched in detail. As he shows us how merchants, commerce, and its “legalization” fed into and from the reconfiguration of a dynastic state, we are also afforded a view from the ground up of an Egypt that is entangled in a dizzying array of social and legal relations that are at once intensely local at the level of neighborhoods and broadly transregional and global extending into Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the British Isles.

On a final note, the overall theoretical framework of the book and, hence, the argument’s critical purchase would have benefited from an engagement with Samera Esmeir’s Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History, which is precisely about the erasures on which modern Egyptian law was elaborated, making its absence from Cheta’s bibliography that much more curious.Footnote ¹