Merchants of Law: Navigating the Commercial-Legal Infrastructure in Late Ottoman Egypt

The longevity of the Ottoman Empire (ca. 1300-1922), and its geographical expanse presents modern historians with a set of methodological challenges. Two of these constitute the foundation of this paper, namely, locating the shift from pre-modern to modern forms of state governance (especially the economy) and understanding the extent to which autonomous provinces were meaningfully a part of the imperial Ottoman realm. Studying Egyptian history offers an effective approach to engaging with these challenges for three reasons. Nineteenth-Century Egypt was the object of the most aggressive modern state-building and centralized government projects in the Ottoman Empire. Simultaneously, it existed as a largely autonomous province within the Ottoman domain and continued to be recognized as an Ottoman province more than three decades into its occupation and rule by the British Empire. Meanwhile, Egypt emerged as a node in global capitalist networks being a major exporter of cotton to Lancashire. Because of the centrality of cotton to Egypt’s modern state-building and capitalist development, historians have focused on landowners as the harbingers of future national politics and economy at the expense of merchants. Based on original archival research in Cairo and London, I argue that merchants played a central role governing Egypt’s commercial realm through presiding over state-enacted courts, and interpreting modern commercial laws that fused Ottoman, Islamic and French elements. Reconstructing the legal map of commercial law and explaining the merchants’ place within it, I rely on court documents and private business letters to demonstrate why merchants chose to engage with or bypass this “commercial-legal infrastructure” when resolving their disputes over commercial debt. In doing so, I highlight the continued persistence of the Ottoman legal regime to a province where imperial political power had waned, the legal constitution of a modern commercial realm, and the contestation between urban and rural-based wealth.