Circulations of Law: Cosmopolitan Elites, Global Repertoires, Local Vernaculars

2014 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 773-795 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iza Hussin

Bernard Cohn once called the imperial point of view the “view from the boat”. There were other boats as well.In 1893, the sovereign state of Johor adopted the OttomanMedjelle (Meḏj̱elle-yi Aḥkām-i˚ḥʿAdliyye, the civil code applied in the Ottoman Empire since 1877), being the only state among the Muslim sultanates of the Malay Peninsula to do so. In 1895, Johor promulgated a Constitution(Undang-Undang Tubuh Kerajaan Johor), being the first state in Southeast Asia to do so. This article takes this moment, of the intersection of two types of law from quite disparate sources, as a point of departure for tracing the pathways by which law made its way from one corner of the globe to another. Taking nineteenth century Johor as our vantage point provides a new optic for mapping law's geography and temporality and for exploring the logics of law's itinerancy and its locality. The travels of law were always material, and often embodied; on ships sailing the Indian Ocean between Johor and Cairo were diplomats, merchants, pilgrims, and lawyers faced with new pressures and new possibilities; in the growing traffic in letters and newspaper reports between London and New York, Tokyo and Constantinople, were debates about empire and culture, power and authenticity; in personal relationships made possible by the technologies of nineteenth century cosmopolitanism, were similarly worldly dramas of deception and demands for justice. In the 2 short years between the adoption of theMedjelleand the Constitution in Johor, the sultan of Johor, Abu Bakar (1833–1895), typified this mobility and interconnection. In his travels across the Indian Ocean to the Near East and Europe; in his appearance in diplomatic communiques in London, Constantinople and Washington D.C.; in his prominence as a figure of exoticism and intrigue in the newspapers and the courts of the English-speaking world, the sultan not only embodied law's movements in a figurative way, he was also himself a key carrier of the law, and one of its signal articulators.

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-24
Author(s):  
Edward A. Alpers

In this article I examine two of Michael Pearson’s most important contributions to our understanding of Indian Ocean history: the concept of the littoral, which he first articulated in his seminal article on “Littoral society: the case for the coast” in The Great Circle 7, no. 1 (1985): 1-8, and his comment in The Indian Ocean (London and New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 9) that “I want it to have a whiff of ozone.” Accordingly, I review Pearson’s publications to see how he has written about these two notions and how they have influenced historical scholarship about the Indian Ocean.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Editors of the JIOWS

The editors are proud to present the first issue of the fourth volume of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies. This issue contains three articles, by James Francis Warren (Murdoch University), Kelsey McFaul (University of California, Santa Cruz), and Marek Pawelczak (University of Warsaw), respectively. Warren’s and McFaul’s articles take different approaches to the growing body of work that discusses pirates in the Indian Ocean World, past and present. Warren’s article is historical, exploring the life and times of Julano Taupan in the nineteenth-century Philippines. He invites us to question the meaning of the word ‘pirate’ and the several ways in which Taupan’s life has been interpreted by different European colonists and by anti-colonial movements from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. McFaul’s article, meanwhile, takes a literary approach to discuss the much more recent phenomenon of Somali Piracy, which reached its apex in the last decade. Its contribution is to analyse the works of authors based in the region, challenging paradigms that have mostly been developed from analysis of works written in the West. Finally, Pawelczak’s article is a legal history of British jurisdiction in mid-late nineteenth-century Zanzibar. It examines one of the facets that underpinned European influence in the western Indian Ocean World before the establishment of colonial rule. In sum, this issue uses two key threads to shed light on the complex relationships between European and other Western powers and the Indian Ocean World.


1993 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 587-605 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Christian Wilson

In the latter half of the nineteenth century no New Testament scholar in the English speaking world was more respected than J. B. Lightfoot. His New Testament commentaries and his magisterial five volume work on the Apostolic Fathers were models of the scholarly thoroughness of British erudition coupled with the humility of Anglican piety. Their influence would reach well into the twentieth century.


2019 ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Smith

The first of two companion chapters, this essay focuses especially on the historical meeting of European and African American movement vocabularies in English-speaking early-nineteenth-century contexts. It focuses particularly upon public music and dance in two creolized cities: Kingston, Jamaica, and New York City. Primary source evidence includes period illustrations (most notably, a ca. 1802 watercolor entitled A Grand Jamaica Ball) and period accounts of entertainments at lower Manhattan’s African Grove Theater; both are analyzed for the evidence they provide regarding the synthesis of creolized movement vocabularies and, by extension, cultural experiences. Methodology is drawn especially from iconography and kinesics.


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