{"title":"The Formative and Classical Administration of Islamic Criminal Justice Revisited: A Historiographical Analysis","authors":"Mohammed Allehbi","doi":"10.1111/hic3.70016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.70016","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Islamic legal studies generally classify the administration of criminal justice during the formative and classical periods as a departure from traditional Islamic law. During this time, rulers, military-judicial authorities, and other officials largely oversaw the criminal courts, rather than the judges and jurists, who were considered the paramount actors of Islamic law. A primary challenge confronting any study of this topic is the scarcity of surviving criminal records, coupled with embellished narratives and concerns regarding the historical relevance of the jurisprudential material. Consequently, recent research, in the last few decades, has begun to investigate alternative sources on this administration of criminal justice: Egyptian papyri, administrative manuals and investiture diplomas, <i>nawāzil</i> (legal responses and rulings for new cases), Cairo Geniza, and criminal reports found in historical chronicles. This essay explores this rich historiography, focusing on these novel approaches to these texts, and aims to propose new methodological pathways for future research in this field.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":"23 7-9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144716993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Truth-Telling in Trouble?: The Bringing Them Home Report, the Bringing Them Home Oral History Project, and the Promise of ‘Shared History’","authors":"Sam Dalgarno","doi":"10.1111/hic3.70018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.70018","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In Australia, and elsewhere, the concept of ‘truth-telling’, that is, hearing the ‘truth’ about difficult and divisive pasts from the victims, is promoted as a way to transcend them and to develop a ‘shared’ historical understanding from which the nation can move forward. The 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, directed towards forging a better relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, included truth-telling as one of its three recommended reforms. In July 2025, the Yoorrook Justice Commission, which claimed to be the state of Victoria's, and Australia's, first truth-telling inquiry, handed down its final report, <i>Truth be Told</i>. Drawing First Peoples' experiences into an official record, it hoped to foster 'a shared understanding' among Victorians about their past. Such has been the emphasis on hearing the truth of Aboriginal perspectives that the expression ‘truth-listening’ has entered the lexicon. Despite its popularity, the notion of truth-telling has several difficult realities to face. Not least among them is the fact that there are competing beliefs about what constitutes ‘historical truth’ and there are competing perspectives about the past. In the heated controversy following the release of <i>Bringing Them Home</i>, the 1997 report of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's (HREOC) inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, these difficulties were laid bare. This article considers some of the trouble with truth-telling via a discussion of one site in which this controversy flared, an oral history project born out of <i>Bringing Them Home</i>'s recommendations.</p>","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":"23 7-9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hic3.70018","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144714760","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Functions of Medical Photographs From Colonial Egypt","authors":"Tamara Maatouk","doi":"10.1111/hic3.70012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.70012","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article addresses the photograph as a historical source to explore unmapped territories in the histories of medicine and photography in 19th- and early twentieth-century Egypt. It examines the criteria that govern the selection of photographs in scientific and medical publications. Specifically, it asks: what functions did photographs serve in medical publications? Through a juxtaposition of colonial doctors' selection of photographs with that of Arabic scientific periodicals, this article examines some similarities and distinctions between the local and colonial use of medical photographs. On the one hand, similarities show that medical photography in Egypt developed along broader global practices in photography and modern medicine. On the other hand, distinctions offer new insights into the practice of modern medicine in a colonial context. While colonial doctors used these photographs as images of pathology, not only of a disease but also of a people, some local medical practitioners used them as pictures of health and competence.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":"23 7-9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144492816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Consumption and Economic Life in Modern Latin America","authors":"Ana María Otero-Cleves","doi":"10.1111/hic3.70015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.70015","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Commodities and global trade are central to the history of Latin America. As scholars have pointed out, the cultivation, extraction, and shipping of commodities produced in the Americas have been vital in deepening our knowledge of the scale of its global entanglements. While crucial for understanding the region's political, economic and cultural past, this approach has inadvertently overlooked the equally vital role of consumption. This article aims to cast light on how the studies on the history of consumption—histories of what people bought, owned, ate, wore, and discarded—can provide greater insight into the region's cultural, political, and economic history from the 1820s until the mid-20th century. It prioritizes scholarship that recognizes Latin American consumers as active agents of historical change. The article also aims to show how the history of consumption can bridge various historiographical fields—including environmental history, the history of capitalism, labor history, and the history of race—to offer a richer and more comprehensive knowledge of Latin America's past.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":"23 4-6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-06-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144315164","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Institutionalising African Gender Studies and the Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy at the University of Ghana","authors":"Cyrelene Amoah-Boampong","doi":"10.1111/hic3.70014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.70014","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>The 21st century solidified the quintessential role of gender in the political and academic spheres. The contestations over the idea of gender as a valid analytical concept and the viability of feminist methodologies, approaches and analyses as legitimate scientific inquiry have essentially become a moot point. The discipline of gender studies in sub-Saharan Africa has evolved with active contestations around power, representation, sexuality, masculinity and knowledge production. This study examines the evolution and role of gender studies centres in making gender a legitimate business of the University of Ghana. The institutionalization of the concept of gender within the Ghanaian academe contributes to the theorisation of African women's experiences from multiple angles. It problematises the forces that shape women's differentiated lives, raising the bar on feminist scholarship on the African continent.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":"23 4-6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-05-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144171476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Commodities and Power: Tracking Europe's Relations With Asia in the Classroom","authors":"Adam Clulow","doi":"10.1111/hic3.70013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.70013","url":null,"abstract":"<p>From their high point in the early 2000s, commodity histories seem to be in decline. If the publishing world has retreated, it is also the case that teaching with commodities has never been more rewarding. For the past few years, I have been experimenting with different variants of a class that aims to use recent scholarship on a half dozen commodities not to track their long trajectories across time but rather to help students work through one of the great questions of global history: the changing relationship between Europe and Asia across the period from roughly 1500–1900. Looking at everyday commodities provides a more concrete way to consider this question, revealing how Asian or European consumers who never ventured far from home participated in a global shift with enormous consequences. In this brief historiographical essay, I explore a selection of works examining six different commodities—silver, spices, deerskins, porcelain, tea and opium—that provide a clear sense of shifting relations between Europe and Asia across the early modern period.</p>","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":"23 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hic3.70013","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144140780","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Litigating Jews: New Directions in the Study of Medieval English Jewry, c. 1190–1290","authors":"Emma Cavell","doi":"10.1111/hic3.70011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.70011","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article seeks to map out possibilities for an intensive and wide-ranging study of Jewish litigation and legal agency within the English king's jurisdiction in the period c. 1190–1290. Despite a small number of studies of Jews and the king's law courts in England in recent years—including my own work on Jewish women litigants at the Exchequer of the Jews—this remains a neglected <i>desideratum</i> of medieval Anglo-Jewish history. Considering the potential of the records of all the king's law courts between 1190, from around which time the records begin to survive, and 1290, the year in which the Jews were expelled from England, this essay does two things. First, it reviews the developments, since 2015, in our understanding of Jews at law and in litigation in medieval England, as well as touching briefly upon the main cognate fields. Second, it provides a series of examples to demonstrate (just some of) the exciting new directions in the study of medieval English Jewry promised by the records of the king's law courts.</p>","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":"23 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hic3.70011","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143949816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lawless Love and Legal Headaches: The Case for Court Records as a Source of Legal and Historical Realities in Colonial Histories","authors":"Elizabeth Bowyer","doi":"10.1111/hic3.70010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.70010","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The extensive legal, social, religious, and political discussions surrounding marriage that were present in colonial New Zealand have meant that researchers of Aotearoa New Zealand's past have assumed that colonial couples were invariably married. Furthermore, there has been a prevailing assumption that the courts of law upheld and enforced marriages when couples appeared in court. Recent archival findings are compelling us to reconsider the degree to which colonial inhabitants adhered to conventional marriage practices and how the courts of law applied marriage law doctrinally. This article posits that court records, as a source of social and legal drama, are vital to uncovering not only the existence and extent of non-conforming couples in colonial spaces but also how ‘lawless love’ interplayed with colonial economic and legal practices that expose the pragmatic and flexible nature of the law in colonial settings. This suggests that a doctrinal approach to legal histories, which involves taking the law as it was written and assuming that people lived by it, is not an accurate measure of legal and social realities.</p>","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":"23 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hic3.70010","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143902822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Chupacabras to Capybaras: Animal History and Latin American Horizons","authors":"Stephen B. Neufeld","doi":"10.1111/hic3.70009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.70009","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Animal history has flourished as a field of study and worked its way into Latin American scholarship. This essay traces relatively recent developments in the historiography to update areas of focus scholarship warranting further efforts. A brief overview of the field uses a key 2013 work as its launching point toward understanding animal history. It considers the geography of studies which have slowly turned from exclusively rural to more urban in focus. Specific areas of niche scholarship addressing insects, ecologies, conservation, and companion animals fuel a discussion of current trends. Related to this, new appraisals about the epistemology of nature and the authority of Latin Americans as agents in this formulation continue to challenge old assumptions. This leads to the consideration of subjectivity and indigenous worldviews that add enormously to the nuance of the field. The final part of the essay ponders some new ideas emerging on the topic and those that remain underserved. It concludes that further scholarship should account for postcolonial and post-structural approaches, and work toward highlighting the subject formation of animals in our history.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":"23 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-05-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143896977","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"African Intersectionalities and Decolonisation of African Women's and Gender Studies","authors":"Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso","doi":"10.1111/hic3.70008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.70008","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In the context of extant efforts in the decolonisation of African Studies, transnationalisation of feminist theorising, and the rise of intersectionality as an analytical tool in gender studies, I argue for the adoption of an ‘African intersectionalities’ framework towards achieving the decolonisation of African women's and gender studies. The article engages a critical review of feminist intersectionality theory and its trajectory, executes a decolonial reading to propose an African intersectionality specifically, and explores the emancipatory potentials for harnessing the interconnections of both literatures in the field of African women's and gender studies.</p>","PeriodicalId":46376,"journal":{"name":"History Compass","volume":"23 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/hic3.70008","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143554310","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}