This panel features scholars of two world regions –the Ottoman (and mandate-era) Middle East and South Asia—whose histories have long been brought into productive dialogue. Advancing on that tradition, the panel will explore nineteenth- and early twentieth-century processes of political economic, juridical, and epistemic change, with an eye toward what they meant for the history of capitalism in the Middle East and South Asia. In so doing, the panel will pursue capitalism’s varieties in these regions across the boundaries between the material and the ideological, the institutional and the epistemic, the social and the conceptual and the agrarian and the urban.

Channeling recent or forthcoming monographs, the panel will play host to crisscrossing perspectives, with two of the four presentations focusing on the Ottoman historical experience and two the South Asian; with two whose primary engagement is with political economy and the agrarian and two with the legal underpinnings of the (incipient) capitalist market; with two centering on the production of capitalist modernity’s key discursive and ideological categories—of the peasant and the law—and two centering capitalist production’s key sites—of agricultural commodifies and urban mercantile networks. Other converging themes include the interplay between land, revenue, and property; market governance-cum-colonial governmentality; and the rise of new forms of technocratic expertise. Specific presentations will examine agricultural science as a way of asserting mastery over nature in Lebanon and Syria; a scientized Anglo-common law analytic of ‘classical legal thought’ laying claim to the law as society’s master norm order in British India; merchants, lawyers, and bureaucrats negotiating the boundaries of the commercial realm using Islamic and French legal tools in Ottoman Egypt; and Western political economy staging itself as a universalized ‘science of comparison’ that could not comprehend the diversity of productive relations it nevertheless sought to quantify, discipline, and re-order as inherently backward in the Panjab.

Drawing on her States of Cultivation, Elizabeth William will focus on new forms of agronomic expertise and agricultural technology—and their interplay with administration and finance—to trace imperial transitions from Ottoman to Mandatory European power in the Eastern Mediterranean. Drawing on his Labors of Division, Navyug Gill will explore the pivotal figure of the peasant as a key site through which colonial officials and ascendant Panjabis disrupted previously fluid forms of identity and activity to generate a fixed, caste-based and hereditary hierarchy in the countryside, and thus reconfigured global capitalism. Drawing on his forthcoming “How Commerce Became Legal,” Omar Cheta will consider the neglected role of merchants and legal institutions in the making of Egyptian capitalism and demonstrate the need to expand beyond the limits of past historiography. Finally, drawing on South Asia, the British Empire, and the Rise of Classical Legal Thought Faisal Chaudhry will focus on the making of a new ideal of private law—as underpinned by the categories of property, contract, and status—and its inherently contradictory logic as a means of driving social rationalization towards empire’s purported ends of political and economic modernization.