The rise of extraterritoriality in the nineteenth-century has been described as a transitional phase that laid the ground for the construction of territorial sovereignty. Yet in Egypt, where a particularly extensive extraterritorial regime emerged in the mid-century, the expansion of European jurisdiction underneath national sovereignty became entrenched with the creation of international mixed courts in the 1870s. This outcome, the article argues, was the product of a complex compromise between European empires, which upheld different conceptions of extraterritoriality, and the government of Egypt. While Britain refashioned its own extraterritorial judicial system as a means of promoting legal reforms in the Ottoman world, France aggressively pursued the expansion of extraterritorial rights as an instrument of informal domination and economic exploitation. The creation of an international type of jurisdiction, less susceptible to French political pressures but applying a French system of law, proved acceptable to all parties, although it severely constrained Egyptian sovereignty from within, even after Britain took over the reins of government in 1882. Extraterritoriality was not merely a transition, but an original feature of the global legal order, arising out of modern imperialism and imperial rivalry and yet conducive to the forging of new instruments of international law and governance.

Moral theories that demand that we do what is morally best leave no room for the supererogatory. One argument against such theories is that they fail to realize the value of autonomy: supererogatory acts allow for the exercise of autonomy because their omissions are not accompanied by any threats of sanctions, unlike obligatory ones. While this argument fails, I use the distinction it draws – between omissions of obligatory and supererogatory acts in terms of appropriate sanctions – to draw a parallel with psychological perfectionism. Through this parallel, I demonstrate that requiring what is morally best is in fact counter-productive. Thus, by its own lights, a theory that wants us to do what is best ought at the very least to tell us to believe that some actions are supererogatory. As the old adage goes, the best is the enemy of the good; I argue here that the supererogatory is the solution.

This article focuses on the mobile peoples who engaged in piracy on the borders beyond the territories negotiated by the imperial Chinese and colonial Spanish and Dutch powers, and by doing so, reframe our perception of early modern imperial and maritime history. In pre-modern times, the control of territory within the administrative borders was incomplete, and small pockets of territories with porous borders were beyond governmental rule. The people and the groups that lived along the coast of the northeastern South China Sea were, at different times, recognized differently and many of their activities were at times sanctioned and at other times outlawed. This article reveals a facet of how the non-stateless peoples lived on the borders beyond, claimed their own order in their own way, and worked and became naturalized or classified inside the strengthening borders in pre-modern societies according to the agenda and discourses of the dominant powers. I argue that the coastal societies had their own “order” that created groups “beyond control” or “being registered gradually.”

The jurists who entered Turkish academia during the 1930s built the foundations of their discipline under a regime that became increasingly authoritarian as war drew closer. Like their peers in Italy and France, therefore, they had to produce coherent doctrines but also support the frequent use of exceptional emergency powers. How did they solve this contradiction? More importantly, what consequences did their solutions have for the use of emergency powers after the war? This article adopts a Deleuzian reading of two strategies with which Turkish jurists met that challenge, approaching their work not simply as theories about law but also as models for the role law should play in the articulation of public authority. Focusing on Ali Fuad Başgil and Sıddık Sami Onar, law professors at Istanbul University, I argue that although both professors supported the regime, only a situational doctrine of the kind Onar produced was capable of ensuring that jurists would have a place in the exercise of “exceptional” state powers after the 1950 transition to democracy.

The following is written with a dual purpose: to respond to Bruce Masters’ review of my recently published monograph, Muslim-Christian Relations in Late-Ottoman Palestine; but more importantly, to suggest that it might be time that Middle East historians reevaluate the manner of our assessment of the value and proper use of “Western” (i.e., nonindigenous) sources in researching and writing about the region's history.

“Information wants to be free.” Although this sentiment dominates the current digital landscape, information about Islamic law and history often remains bound to its physical form and to the price of acquiring it. One should not have to travel to several countries or be associated with the handful of institutions with large collections in these fields to gain access to these sources (which can still be onerous once there). But this is precisely the case for those who aim to do serious, comparative, or otherwise broad-ranging work in Islamic law. For Islamic law, there is a persistent problem of access and ease of use.