The spring of 1894 was an important period for Constantinople's Armenian community. Two assassination attempts targeted the Armenian patriarch Khoren Ashekian, and the chairperson of the Armenian Political Assembly Maksudzade Simon Bey, respectively. In both cases, the assailants were partisans of the Hunchakian Party, an Armenian revolutionary organization established in 1887. Analyzing the reasons behind these two attacks, and the imperial context in which they took place, this article challenges aspects of mainstream Armenian and Turkish historiography on the Hamidian period. It argues that a critical look at these two attacks through a socio-economic paradigm rather than an ethno-political one provides a viable analytical framework for deconstructing the notion of the “Armenian millet” as an undifferentiated community. More generally, the article explores the role of violence in shaping intracommunal relationships in the early 1890s.

The Iranian government's decision to nationalize its British-controlled oil industry in 1951 was a landmark case in international law. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the Iranian government clashed over whether international authorities had the right to arbitrate for them in disputes over the terms of the oil concession. Scholarship in Middle East studies has overlooked the role of concession terms in shaping political disputes in the 20th century. Rather than seeing legal studies of the oil industry on one side and power struggles and resources on the other, this article examines international court proceedings at The Hague to argue that Anglo-Iranian oil transformed international law. Novel mechanisms of economic and legal governance, set up to deal with an expanded community of nation-states, worked as techniques of political power that equipped the oil corporation with the power to associate Iran's oil with foreign control while generating new forms of law and contract that undermined resource nationalism.

Based on Carol Smart's observation that rape law reform as lobbied for by the feminist movement during the 1970s and 1980s failed to achieve any meaningful change, this article seeks to examine the nature and implications of rape law reform in the Republic of Ireland from the 1980s to the present day. During the 1980s the conceptualization of rape changed from a proprietorial crime to a violation of individual bodily integrity due to feminist lobbying efforts and the emergence of a victim-centered approach in the criminal justice system. Though this changing conceptualisation has led to significant attitudinal change, particularly surrounding the issues of acquaintance and marital rape, procedural change has failed to secure higher conviction rates. In particular, this article demonstrates that the legal reforms achieved in the 1980s potentially resulted in a 2% decrease in rape conviction rates by 2007. When compared to England/Wales, conviction rates as distinctive from prosecution rates in Ireland remain chronically low. This indicates that any legal reforms must take account of the institutional bias ingrained the Irish criminal justice system against female rape complainants, which has continuing relevance for Irish legislation pertaining to sexual violence such as the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act, 2017. Overall this article suggests that rape is an exceptional crime and needs to be reassessed as such.

Two decades ago I published an article in this journal about Egyptian biographical films. It was the first study published in IJMES about Arab/Middle East film and the first to feature photographic illustrations. The editor sent it to four reviewers, some presumably to check my history, others my cultural scope. Three approved wholeheartedly, but one protested that IJMES should not publish a piece that was not based upon “Arabic sources.” Admittedly, there was little critical literature in Arabic on this topic; my primary theorization came from a recent study of Hollywood “biopics.” But Stephen Humphreys, the forward-thinking editor, recognized that my “Arabic sources” were the films analyzed and disregarded the negative review.

This article examines the emergence of a new corps of legal practitioners in Egypt during the 1860s and early 1870s. The proceedings of hundreds of merchant court cases in mid-19th-century Cairo are replete with references to deputies and agents (wukalā; sing. wakīl) who represented merchant-litigants in a wide range of commercial disputes. Examining how these historical actors understood Egyptian, Ottoman, and French laws, and how they strategically deployed their knowledge in the merchant courts, this article revises the commonly accepted historical account of the founding of the legal profession in Egypt. Specifically, it argues that norms of legal practice hitherto linked to the establishment of the Mixed Courts in 1876 were already being formed and refined within the realm of commercial law as part of a more comprehensive program of legal reforms underway during the middle decades of the 19th century. In uncovering this genealogy of practice, the article reevaluates the extent to which the khedival state shared a legal culture with the Ottoman center, and, simultaneously, created the space for a new form of legal representation that became ubiquitous under British, and, subsequently, postcolonial rule.

This article explores the social impact of North African soldiers’ experiences in French military hospitals during World War I. In particular, it examines improvised “Muslim hospitals” that were opened in order to isolate North Africans from French civilian society. Colonial and military officials believed that North Africans, presumed to be warlike, pathogenic, and promiscuous, could corrupt and be corrupted by the French public. Yet while existing literature tends to highlight the dehumanization of North Africans at the hands of military and medical authorities, this article, drawing from personal correspondence, photographs, and military and medical records, reveals a more ambiguous daily reality. I argue that the individual needs and desires of wounded North Africans and of French nurses, as well as material limitations and contingencies, created spaces for an unprecedented series of humanizing personal encounters. In military-medical “colonies within the metropole,” these soldiers found themselves caught between a newfound sense of affinity with the French public and a starker sense of the boundaries of colonial practice.

The manufacturing sector of the 1920s Irish Free State was substantially more complex in structure than occasional references to a ‘beer and biscuits’ economy suggest. There were nine factories employing 500 workers or more in 1929, while the larger firms in sectors such as bacon curing, flour milling and fertilisers each operated more than a single factory. This article identifies the largest manufacturing firms and establishments of the era, as well as the largest within each industrial sector. Twenty-two firms had workforces of a minimum of around 400. Three of the five largest were foreign subsidiaries, the most significant of which – the Ford Motor Company – employed, at one stage, more than twice as many workers as Guinness. Of the larger indigenous companies, the majority were Protestant-owned, though Catholic-owned firms dominated in certain industrial segments.