{"title":"The Wrong Side of the River: a Cantonese Emigrant Community in the Nineteenth-Century Mobility Transition","authors":"Steven B. Miles","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341620","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341620","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This focused study of one emigrant community in southern China explores linkages between internal and overseas migration during the nineteenth century, emphasizing both the diversity of lived experience and the contingent nature of categories that have informed the historiography of overseas Chinese migrants. Building on comparative studies that present an aggregate picture of changing migration patterns during the “mobility transition,” this microhistory shows how both preexisting and novel patterns of internal migration (urbanization, frontier migration, and military migration) shaped new strategies of overseas migration. For this particular emigrant community, new dynamics of migration in the mid-nineteenth century influenced the reputation of its emigrants, bringing about a transition from respectability to notoriety. Whereas earlier patterns of internal migration had linked this community to its neighbor on the opposite bank of the West River, new dynamics of migration in the nineteenth century bolstered the river’s role as a boundary. This community’s liminal place highlights the contingent nature of nineteenth-century tropes and current categories of overseas Chinese migrants.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140711523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Tax Farming, the Provincial Council and the Nature of the Late Ottoman State","authors":"Yavuz Aykan","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341621","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341621","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article focuses on the Council (Divan) of Amid in Diyarbekir Province as a petition-receiving institution throughout the eighteenth century. By drawing on the court records of the city of Harput, one of the sub-districts of Diyarbekir, and the tax farming registers of the larger province, the article discusses the role of the provincial governor in legal procedures. It argues that the Provincial Council had an important function in the operative field of law as it made it possible for the petitioning subjects in Harput to obtain judgments reviewed in the court of Harput in the form of ‘trial de novo’. While situating the emergence of the Council in the political-economic context of the time, the article also argues that the Provincial Council was an early modern institution which, in part, paved the way to the constitution of the nineteenth century provincial administration of the Tanzimat state.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140709629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Gilanis on the Move”: Mapping an Inter-Asian Society of Shiʿi Muslim Naturalists","authors":"H. Bandy","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341622","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000A mobile professional and familial network of Shiʿi Muslim naturalists emerged from Kārkiyā’ī Gilan and served royal courts across much of the Persianate world during the 16th and into the 17th centuries. While its members have been known in different historiographic contexts, they have not been studied together as a unique inter-Asian society that endured according to intrinsic logics cultivated at its point of origin and numerous trans-regional homes. Mapping this network, I argue that they promoted their own kind by whetting the appetites of Persianate courts hungry for specialists to strengthen sovereignty through the universalizing power of ḥikmat, comprised of interrelated theoretical and practical sciences that the Gilanis mastered. Their endurance not only calls into question scales of analysis that amalgamate migrant networks as “Iranians,” “Persianate elites,” or “foreigners,” which overlook such ties, but it demonstrates how shared origins superseded sectarian identity in the maintenance of such networks across time and space.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140709273","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Demonic Descents: Contests in Islamic Tribal Etiology","authors":"Tanvir Ahmed","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341623","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341623","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This essay explores the theme of demonic descent in etiologies assigned to Lurs, Kurds, Afghans, and the Baloch across the past millennium. In it, I parse the imputation of nonhuman beginnings to these peoples while also examining retorts to that same accusation. While agents of premodern empires used the narrative of demonic descent to racialize peoples on the peripheries of sovereignty, demonized peoples replied with sacralizing genealogies that bound them to early nodes in Prophetic and Iranian history. I argue that we must attend to demonizing practices in Islamic historiography not only to write the historical struggles of dispossessed peoples, but to examine our own inheritances as narrators of the Islamic past today.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140710070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Turkstroi: Soviet-Turkish Industrial Cooperation and the Dialectics of Divergence and Convergence in Interwar Statism, 1931–1941","authors":"Michael O’Sullivan","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341617","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Turkstroi was a Soviet trust that, in partnership with Turkey’s state-owned Sümerbank, constructed several industrial enterprises in the Turkish Republic in the 1930s. By situating the trust in the context of Soviet, Turkish, and multilateral economic development, this article argues that the trust was an expression of patterns of both convergence and divergence in Soviet and Turkish interwar statism. As one of the few transnational industrial enterprises to materialize during the first two Soviet Five-Year Plans, Turkstroi was an impressive feat. But the volume of industrial plant and expertise that the trust was able to send to Turkey was largely predetermined by the dynamics of Soviet hard-currency restraints, and the trust’s managerial staff was later annihilated during the Stalinist Purges. Still, Turkstroi necessitated the formulation of a transnational wing to the Soviet planned economy and showcased Soviet technical expertise outside the union. In comparison with their respective trading links with Western industrial powers, Soviet-Turkish industrial collaboration was of limited in scope. Nonetheless, to a degree disproportionate with its actual economic contribution, Turkstroi generated intellectual debate within Turkey about the character of Turkish development, Soviet boasts about the international dimensions of its industrial prowess, and a host of new Turkish state-owned and bilateral (Ankara-Moscow) institutions to ensure the running of the trust’s subsidiary operations.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140270696","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Western India to Eastern Africa—the Rise of the Parsis in the 18th and 19th Centuries","authors":"Kaveh Yazdani","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341618","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341618","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000The present paper examines the socio-economic conditions for the ascendancy of the Zoroastrian community in Western India between the 18th and 19th centuries. This study reinforces the well-established thesis on the role played by the Parsis in the development of capitalism in India. What distinguishes it from other narratives is the periodization of this development and the consideration of Parsi agency in the Western Indian Ocean region and East Africa, especially Mozambique. The cooperation of the Parsis with the European trade companies and private European traders as of the mid-17th century—most notably, their links to the English East India Company, which boosted the Zoroastrian communities of northwestern India—is investigated. I try to show how the Parsis, who had been predominantly peasants, farmers and artisans from the 10th to 17th centuries, increasingly embarked upon trade, moneylending, brokerage and production. Because of their accumulated wealth, their numbers as well as their influence augmented throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140267962","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Reluctance to Reliance: Opium Smuggling in 18th-Century Macao","authors":"Jose A. Canton-Alvarez","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341614","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This paper critically appraises the role of the opium trade in the politics of 18th-century Macao. By examining previously unexplored Portuguese accounts on opium smuggling, this study contributes new insights into the shift in attitudes of the Macanese authorities towards the opium trade in this period, which subsequently aided further European opium smuggling in the Pearl River Delta. Thus, this paper fills an important gap in our understanding of the transformation that took place in the period before opium became a bone of contention between the Qing dynasty and European powers, on the eve of the Opium Wars.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140268430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Slaves Holding Slaves: Mükâtebe Contracts, Velâ and a Probate Inventory in the Seventeenth-Century Crimean Khanate","authors":"Fırat Yaşa","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341616","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article aims to reveal some aspects of relationships between former slaves and their ex-owners in light of seventeenth-century Crimean qadi court records. It elaborates on a number of terms that indicate the social and legal status of slaves in the Crimean Khanate and analyzes a former slave probate inventory. In addition, the paper also examines the phenomenon of the mükâtebe contract in the Crimean Khanate context which allowed slaves to hold slaves; it thus seeks to provide new perspectives on the exercising of the mükâtebe. The paper considers how social fluidity affected the lives of slaves, explores the question of whether manumitted slaves actually attained the same status as the freeborn, and, finally, traces the ways in which dependency relationships evolved between freed former slaves and the slaves held by these latter.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140278930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Issue of Intercultural Communication: An Unknown Letter from the “Sultan of Babylon” to Pope Innocent VIII","authors":"Piotr Tafiłowski","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341608","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341608","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the University of Glasgow Library’s copy of Pius II ’s Epistolae familiares (Nuremberg: Anton Koberger, 16 Sept. 1481), recorded on leaf 1–1v one can find a copy of a letter addressed to Pope Innocent VIII that starts with the heading “Soldanus pontifici Romano pro Restauracione Iunioris filii senioris Turchi”. The letter’s sender, who is referred to in the text as the “Sultan of Babylon”, was the Caliph of Cairo, al-Mutawakkil II (Abdul Aziz ibn Yaʿqub ibn Muhammad). The present text discusses the content of the letter and the issues regarding the question of its authorship. To ensure a comprehensive presentation of the argumentation, the paper not only discusses the content of the letter but also explores the wider context in which it was produced, situating it against the wider history of the Mamluk state and Mamluk diplomacy as well as the late medieval tradition of the exchange of correspondence (both real and fictitious) between the Christian and Muslim worlds. It needs underlining that not only has the content of the letter in question hitherto been substantially unknown to scholars, but the letter is furthermore the first discovered correspondent from an ʿAbbasid Caliph sent to the head of Western Christianity. The paper offers a contribution to research on intercultural communication. The paper comes with three appendices: a transliteration and a translation of the letter and a facsimile of the original record.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135875114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shrines Unyielding: Inter-Asian Networks and the Enduring Power of Sacred Spaces","authors":"Ameem Lutfi","doi":"10.1163/15685209-12341613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341613","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay examines modern states’ strategic destruction and patronage of Muslim shrines to consolidate majoritarian power. Drawing on Rian Thum’s notion of shrines as “durable sacred geography,” it conceptualizes shrines as active historical agents embedded in expansive transnational networks. Their extensive sacred geography enables shrines to persist as generative fulcrums that sustain meaning by bridging heterogeneous times and spaces despite tumultuous change. Challenging prevalent views of shrines as passive symbols, the essay delineates how the flexible reassembly of tradition across far-reaching networks empowers shrines to endure as pivotal arenas of ritual contestation from the medieval era into modernity. Their astounding continuity relies on mobilizing expansive geographies to creatively reconfigure tradition across eras.","PeriodicalId":45906,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135875111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}