Using a distant reading methodology, the article examines the thematic compositions of fetva compilations by four Ottoman şeyhülislams in the early modern era. Our analysis of the fetvas from the late 17th and early 18th centuries reveal that the majority of these opinions concerned a small number of issues, including women, family problems, contractual matters, and disputes and litigations. The article also demonstrates that the representation of fetvas with such concerns increased compared to what we find in the opinions of Ebussuud Efendi, a 16th-century şeyhülislam. But interest in religious issues, non-Muslims, and taxation declined over time. Finally, the article proposes computational procedures to identify the complex contextual characteristics of the şeyhülislams’ opinions.

Historians have long since agreed that slavery was central to the social, economic, and political life of the English-speaking North American colonies, and then early United States. Yet the origins of North American slavery have remained far less clear. Holly Brewer's article, “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire,” which appeared in a recent issue of Law and History Review, attempted to clarify one key question within this puzzle. Did judges and legislatures in the colonies create their own institution of slavery? Or did they borrow from English precedent? For Brewer, the answer is clear: seventeenth and eighteenth century English judges, merchants, and others, in tandem with “crown policy,” built the institution of slavery that would be “a foundation for a common law of slavery in all English colonies and for the slave trade.” Slavery, in other words, was legal in England before the Somerset decision. It would thus be legal in the British Empire.1

Several decades ago, Gayatri Spivak asked the pertinent question about whether the subaltern can speak.1 Posed in the distinct context of Western colonial empire, her interrogation remains relevant to this day: Can those confined to the lower rungs of an informally hierarchical, Western-dominated liberal international order be expected to speak, and be heard, in ways that respect their agency? The 2020 war around Nagorno-Karabakh raised this issue in stark relief. In media reports, think tank analyses, seminar and conference panels, and policy pronouncements, clear hierarchies appeared at play.

Ample scholarship from Foucault onward has probed the origins of prisons as a key technology for modern state control, but overemphasizes the revolutionary era as a moment of invention. The prison existed much earlier and, as this research demonstrates, gradually became a favored tool among many widely-utilized alternatives. Other historians have explored early modern strategies such as exile, used most often to punish recalcitrant subjects when other strategies did not work. This evidence points to a general pattern whereby these forms of control coexisted and even overlapped in an array of punitive options. I theorize coercive strategies as existing together within a “punitive matrix,” in which imprisonment operated as one among many methods of state control, alongside others such as galley labor, banishment, and corporal punishment. Beginning with evidence from Saint-Domingue in the first half of the eighteenth century about prisons, building out from Jean Clavier’s Léogane in the 1740s. It then turns to the archival sources themselves to understand how colonial administrators described prisons. Read together, this evidence highlights the limited power of prisons, and imprisonment, to control imperial subjects, while elucidating some of the pathways chosen by those subjects.

In thinking about the prompt for this forum—on the ways in which Armenia and Armenians sit within Middle East studies and the ways in which they are often occluded from the sights of Middle East studies—what comes to mind is the critical necessity for internationalism and solidarity. This might at first seem only tangentially or indirectly relevant to the object of investigation here; after all, we are talking about geography, history, and facts. However, I think that it is relevant to how (as in with what sense, orientation, and from what perspective) we approach the question of scholarly regional belonging. Like any topic of intellectual inquiry, how we imagine and define regions has implications on what we find in those regions: the sites of importance and focus; the connections between different groups, persons, and events; and the scope of investigations. Internationalism and solidarity as frameworks for understanding Armenia and Armenians as a part of the Middle East orient us to the region by way of connections to the various peoples of that region with a political and ideological commitment to the well-being of all peoples there and everywhere. Many of the commentaries in this forum focus on the marginalization of particular minorities in Middle East Studies (Armenians, Copts, and Assyrians in this forum, and we also could think about the marginalization of Kurds and other minoritized populations in the region).1 This in itself is a critical and necessary point of departure. I would like to approach the question from another angle, however. How might we think about this problem from the other side? How does Armenian studies see itself in connection with Middle East studies? Here, although I recognize that Armenian studies is a changing field and is not monolithic, with various differences between the field as it developed in Europe and the United States and that which developed in the Republic of Armenia, there are a few continuities that I would like to problematize and imagine differently. What might the future of Armenian studies be if it were made through politically committed questions, articulations, and collaborations? How might this produce a (different) sense of belonging to Middle East studies?

After the 1877–78 Russo-Ottoman War, the Ottoman Empire saw the rise of ethnic and sectarian clashes in Anatolia, the Balkans, and elsewhere, and the task of explaining that rise remains unfinished. Many have examined the intellectual formations of ethnic and sectarian solidarities after 1878, but the availability of new ideas cannot alone account for their widespread uptake. Why after 1878 did ordinary people respond more to calls upon ethnic and sectarian solidarity? Drawing on sources surrounding the 1879 famine in the Ottoman East, this article steps away from imperial metropoles to examine overlapping environmental, financial, and technological disjunctures. Adopting the methods of political ecology, the article underscores the simultaneous effects of drought, sovereign default, and an influx of modern weapons, each of which imposed uneven hardships along ethno-religious lines. Together, they created a climate of lived confessionalization that highlighted the communal categories upon which emergent movements called.

This is an invited comment on Holly Brewer's LHR article, “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire.”

This paper responds to Holly Brewer's article “Creating a Common Law of Slavery for England and its New World Empire.” Brewer traces a process begun by Charles I, in collaboration with his appointed judges, to legalize the buying and selling of people in England and its Empire. Brewer's work is a much-needed reconstruction of the legal precedents that transformed people into chattel, enabling the business of slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet race does not receive any engagement as a category of analysis. Missing is an account of the historical processes whereby laws about slavery contributed to racial formation. Although the global expansion of the British Empire coincided with a new emphasis on rule of law and equality before the law, bound labor and persistent questions of race, gender, status, age, nation, and boundary called attention to the contradictions embodied in Enlightenment thought and its proclaimed universal values.

This article centers on the materiality of Indigenous legal interactions with the viceroy in the special colonial court, the Juzgado General de Naturales, which was located, at least ostensibly, inside the viceregal palace in Mexico City. The partial destruction of the palace during a riot in 1692—a year that roughly bisected Spanish colonial rule in Mexico— serves as a focal point for exploring the dynamic history of personal encounters and physical space in the viceregal jurisdiction from the court's founding in the late sixteenth century through the eighteenth century. It surveys the architectural features of the palace, traces the viceroys’ disappearance from audiences with Indigenous subjects at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and charts native petitioners’ own growing reliance on proxies and papers rather than appearances in the court. By focusing on physical presence within the Juzgado’s operation, the court reveals itself as a space of absence and abstraction as much as pomp and procedure.

Abstract: Many societies are now having to live with the impacts of climate change and are being confronted with heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and rising sea levels. Without radical action, future generations will inherit an even more degraded planet. This raises the question: How can political institutions be reformed to promote justice for future generations and to leave them an ecologically sustainable world? In this essay, I address a particular version of this question; namely: How can supra–state institutions and transnational political processes be transformed to realize climate justice for future generations? The essay seeks to make two contributions. First, it considers what criteria should guide the evaluation of proposals for reform. It proposes four criteria, and analyzes how they should be interpreted and applied. Second, it considers a raft of different proposals, commenting on their strengths and weaknesses. It presents ten proposals in all, including, among others, establishing a UN high commissioner for future generations, appointing a UN special envoy for future generations, creating a UN agency mandated to protect future generations, instituting representatives for the future in all key UN bodies, ensuring greater youth participation in transnational political decision-making processes, and further developing a global citizens’ assembly. In short, my aim is to outline some of the options available and to defend a normative framework that we can use to evaluate them.

Communities most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, such as reduced access to material resources and increased exposure to adverse weather conditions, are intimately tied to a considerable amount of cultural and biological diversity on our planet. Much of that diversity is bound up in the social practices of Indigenous groups, which is why these practices have great long-term value. Yet, little attention has been given to them by philosophers. Also neglected have been the historical conditions and contemporary realities that constrain these practices and devalue the knowledge of their practitioners. In this essay, we make the case for preserving a diverse range of social practices worldwide, and we argue that this is possible only by strengthening the communities of practitioners who enact them in the contexts in which they are adaptive. By concentrating on Indigenous communities, we show how focusing on practices can transform how Indigenous and other local communities are represented in global climate-change conversations and policy as a matter of justice. More specifically, we argue that practice-centered thinking and local practices provide critical insights for determining the extent to which climate policies protect and enable transformative change.

Scholars of women and girls in African history, focusing on gender and power within religious or colonial (slavery) contexts, have drawn our attention to sexual violence against girls and women. Despite what historians of slavery and imperial violence have noted about their vulnerability and survival strategies in ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’ contexts, questions remain about sexual predation and slavery in earlier periods. In the Mina (Gold) Coast, there is little known about the lived experiences of enslaved and ‘freed’ girls and women in the sixteenth century, and this is especially true for females held captive or in proximity to Portuguese slaving and gold trading bases of operation. Although only three inquisitional trials exist, sources which provide rare African female voices in the Portuguese colonial and evangelical world, their unprecedented baseline evidence for those under Portuguese slaving and religious authority tell us much about sexual violence, slavery, and religious orthodoxy.

Every June, Coptic Solidarity, a lobbying organization, holds an annual conference in Washington, DC, with the aim of raising awareness of the persecution of Coptic and other Middle Eastern Christians. The Copt-run organization reaches out to American politicians, religious leaders, and advocates of human rights and religious freedom. During their 2016 conference, a panel entitled “What is the Future of Egypt's Minorities?” sparked a heated debate. Panelist Fatima Naoot, a secular, liberal Muslim activist from Egypt, was firm in her commentary that Copts are not a minority in Egypt because they are an integral part of its character. “It's impossible to say that there is a Coptic minority in Egypt because Coptic is not simply a religion, but also an ethnic category that forms the basis of Egyptian identity. Therefore, if Copts are citizens [of Egypt], they cannot be part of a minority.” An organizer for Coptic Solidarity emphatically disagreed with Naoot, speaking from the audience during the Q&A period: “We are the indigenous people of Egypt, of course! But we are also a minority in Egypt and we are persecuted, whether we are citizens or not. Because of persecution, we are here [in the US] because our people are a persecuted minority there!” Naoot responded, admitting that there was discrimination but insisting that Copts are not a minority in Egypt because they are integral, as one of the ethno-religious peoples of Egypt, to the abstract idea of the Egyptian nation and therefore to Egyptian citizenship. She concluded with the following clarification: “In Egypt, you are not [a minority], but here in America you are!”