The 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion figures prominently in scholarship on modern Britain, colonial Jamaica, and the British Empire, as a milestone of post-emancipation protest, a turning point in British race-thinking, and a focal point for debates on martial law and British justice. This article presents a new interpretation of the rebellion’s legal and political significance. Focused on processes of formal inquiry, I argue that legal analysis reshaped the political “moral” of the event. For the rebellion’s participants and some British observers, Morant Bay challenged the practice of colonial rule. But beginning with the royal commission of inquiry called to investigate the suppression, formal inquiry displaced the systemic critique that had largely motivated the uprising. Focused increasingly on the nature of martial law and culminating in the criminal prosecution of Jamaica’s colonial governor, legal debate and analysis transformed the scandal’s moral center and turned Morant Bay into a new justification for further and more centralized imperial control. In developing these arguments, the article examines law’s capacity to read, write, and exclude competing narratives of empire. In so doing, it contributes to scholarship on scandal and legitimation, and offers a new interpretation of a seminal nineteenth-century debate on the use of martial law.

In 1869–70, the celebrated South Asian Muslim intellectual Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–98) visited Egypt on his way to England. Khan, one of South Asia's most renowned Muslim thinkers, was the founder of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (est. 1875; hereafter MAO College), a higher education institution in the North Indian town of Aligarh modeled after Oxbridge. Responding to intensified efforts by Hindu organizations to elevate the status of Devanagari-script Hindi to that of Urdu in Indian provincial courts, Khan argued throughout his journey that the use of Urdu was even more extensive than that of French in Europe, contrasting it with Hindi, which he “did not find anywhere.” In his view, Urdu was a clear and simple language that facilitated connections between diverse peoples, unlike Hindi.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, British Calcutta stood as one of the most important cities in the world for the editing, printing, and selling of Arabic books. Before the famous Bulaq Press in Cairo was established in 1820, from 1801–19, European Orientalists and Indian munshis (scribes and clerks) and maulvis (Arabic, mawlanas), alongside one Yemeni scholar, had already printed 22 Arabic titles in movable type—many for the first time—at Fort William College in Calcutta (alongside 18 in Persian and 24 in Sanskrit).1 By 1831, a published “List of Oriental Works for Sale at the Government Education Depository, near the Hindu College, Potoldanga, Calcutta,” advertised 27 Arabic, 31 Sanskrit, 36 English, 16 Hindi and Urdu, 30 Persian, and 29 Bengali books.2 Far from a marginal undertaking, Arabic books represented a sizeable proportion of printing in Bengal at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

On a Saturday afternoon in January 2017, Shah Rukh Khan—Hindi cinema's reigning star of the last thirty years—arrived at Bollywood Parks Dubai to promote his latest film release, Raees (2017). To the crowd of adoring Arab and South Asian fans and journalists who had flocked to the theme park to catch a glimpse of the “Badshah of Bollywood” and brand ambassador of Dubai, SRK unveiled the much-anticipated Arabic version of “Zaalima” (Cruel One), the film's breakout hit song. Rendered in Darija by Moroccan pop artists Abdelfettah Grini and Jamila El Badaoui, this version of “Zaalima” proved an awkward copy of the original, its unwieldy Arabic lyrics molded to fit as tightly within the blueprint melody as possible. “Dīrī fiya al-thiqa, al-gharām hā howa” (Put your confidence in me, for love is here) did not have quite the same ring or seamlessness as the Hindi-Urdu “Main sau martaba dīwāna hua” (I fell in love a hundred times over), with the Arabic line painstakingly crafted to echo the “hua” ending of the Hindi-Urdu.

This article explores how colonial law in India interacted with the construction of caste rank (varna) between 1860 and 1930. It specifically tracks contestations over Kayasthas’ legal varna rank in northern and eastern India through various inheritance disputes, threading them together to shed light on how courts sought to anchor their interpretations of Hindu law around the Indian jurisprudential conceptions of varna. It examines the successes and failures of Kayasthas to have favorable legal rulings that would uphold their status as “twice-born”/dvija, demonstrating that colonial law was limited in its ability (and often indifferent) to construct caste ranks. Inconsistent ruling in provincial courts pushed Kayasthas to seek taxonomic recognition as “twice-born” in the colonial census, demonstrating how colonial law and taxonomy intersected in novel ways. This article argues that by taking a novel approach to Indian social history through the prism of law, we can enrich our understanding of how modern notions of caste and social rank were constructed in colonial India.

Between 1812 and 1816 Rossini took Italian stages by storm and performances cycles of his operas soared in an unprecedented way. The present essay investigates the fundamental role played by self-borrowing in this achievement. As it will be preliminarily clarified, at least for Rossini, self-borrowing does not represent a sub-category of borrowing (i.e. from others: he seldom resorted to other composers’ works), but a peculiar characteristic of his compositional habit, a weapon used to spread his signifiers throughout different stages and genres.

This article focuses on a case study: La gazzetta, an opera deeply rooted in the tradition of the opera comica in Neapolitan, whose authoriality normally resided more in performers (in this case, in the well-known actor/singer Carlo Casaccia) than in poets or composers. Special attention will be given to the use of self-borrowings in some key pieces of the opera, including the recently rediscovered Act I quintet. The essay aims to demonstrate that self-borrowings, far from being a mere time-saving device, helped Rossini to overpower Casaccia's distinctive way of expression, depriving him of his authoriality and of his own voice. With La gazzetta, Rossini conquered the last outpost; after 1816, the mastery of Italian stages (and genres) belonged only to him.

This article unravels an important historical conjuncture in the making of modern US citizenship and alienage by drawing on the state's regulation of naturalization as it relates to Asian immigration in the early twentieth century. My primary concern is to examine the socio-legal formations that constructed the thick distinctions between the modern US citizen and alien along the lines of racial difference and racial capital. Specifically, this article argues that Asian immigration to the United States remade the modern US citizen and alien in two significant and interconnected ways. First, it underscores how the adjudication of race in US courts and connected political campaigns re-mapped race in the United States and sharpened the racialization of Asia and Europe in profound ways that ultimately produced immigrants from southern, central, and eastern parts of Asia as the modern US alien. Second, the debate over Asian immigrants’ eligibility to naturalize refashioned legal status as a normative avenue to sustain a regime of racial capital. It cast citizenship as a legal avenue for White men and families to acquire and protect a proprietary interest in citizenship and recast some Asian immigrants as permanent aliens in a period when alienage came to signify disposable immigrant labor. The article concludes by distinguishing how the struggle for US citizenship by Asian immigrants frames the epistemological parameters and political vocabulary of immigration and naturalization reform.

As a region with a long coastline by the Arabian Sea in northwestern India, Gujarat has historically been connected to the maritime rhythms of the Indian Ocean and inter-regional developments in north India and the Deccan. These connections—commercial, but also political, cultural, and intellectual—remain central to the history of Gujarat as an independent sultanate in the fifteenth century and during the time of Mughal control from the late sixteenth century.1 The circulation of Muslim scholars and intellectuals between the urban centers of Gujarat and cities of the Hijaz, Hadramawt, and Egypt, shaped the intellectual enterprise of several prominent scholars in Gujarat (and more broadly South Asia) who wrote in Arabic—from al-Damamini (d. 1424) and ‘Ali Muttaqi (d. 1567) to Shah Wajih al-Din ‘Alawi (d. 1590) and ‘Abd al-Qadir al-‘Aydarus (d.1628). While these scholars’ works have received attention from modern scholars to varying degrees, this essay emphasizes the importance of foregrounding the early modern oceanic context in order to recover the transregional social and scholarly ties central to the lives and oeuvre of these intellectuals. Recovering transregional oceanic connections in turn calls for greater engagement with scholarly writings produced in Arabic, a language that has remained peripheral to South Asian historiography.

In 1917, an Arabic treatise was published by the recently inaugurated Daudi Bohra dāʿī al-muṭlaq (chief cleric), Tahir Sayf al-Din (r. 1915–65). In the work, entitled Dawʾ Nur al-Haqq al-Mubin (The Brilliance of the Light of Transparent Truth), the dāʿī not only underscored his monopoly of religious interpretation in the Daudi Bohra community, but also engaged in a series of jibes against Sunnis and Shiʿis.1 As the book gained a wider readership beyond the confines of the Daudi Bohra community, several cities in Gujarat were beset by public campaigns against the dāʿī and his followers. Handbills in Gujarati and Urdu were disseminated challenging the dāʿī to a disputation and calling for his censure. Arabic, Persian, and Urdu fatwas were also penned castigating the dāʿī for engaging in what his detractors regarded as takfīr (excommunication).

In recent decades, the ascent of the “Persianate world” paradigm has prompted a major revival in the study of Persian sources in and on South Asia, while at the same time building on Marshall Hodgson's capacious original conception of the Persianate as being more than Persian per se by including “more local languages of high culture that … depended upon Persian wholly or in part for their prime literary inspiration.” While this has been an extraordinarily productive cycle of scholarship, it has also coincided and perhaps contributed to the longstanding occlusion of South Asia's Arabic tradition. A single bibliographical citation may serve to illustrate the stark contrast to the Persianate publishing boom: the last English-language book-length survey of “the contribution of India to Arabic” was completed as long ago as 1929.

Many scholars have addressed the 1967 war in their studies, exploring its origins and aftermath, mostly in the context of diplomacy, the military, or regional and Cold War politics. Studies dealing with the war's repercussions on social, intellectual, and cultural life in Egypt are substantial as well. Yet the scholarship dedicated primarily to the study of emotions on the heels of the war remains scarce and disproportionate to the magnitude of the defeat. By juxtaposing films such as al-Ard (The Land, 1970), al-Ikhtiyar (The Choice, 1971), and al-ʿUsfur (The Sparrow, 1974), all directed by Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine, with contemporaneous essays, films, songs, interviews, and the press, I examine the different emotional responses of Chahine and, by extension and association, Egyptian cineasts and critics on the heels of the defeat, tracing their change between June 1967 and October 1973, when Egypt retaliated by launching an attack on Israeli positions in the Sinai Peninsula, and their possible connection to the existing understandings of the defeat at the time.