World Legal History Blog

Today’s excellent blog post by Debjani Bhattacharyya is on environmental legal history. Debjani is an Assistant Professor at Drexel University who specializes in Modern South Asian history, urban environmental history, legal history, history of economic thought and subaltern studies.

Welcome to Toronto to those of you at our annual ASLH meeting! Our blogger today is Iza Hussin, Lecturer in Asian Politics and Mohamed Noah Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. Her new book, The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority and the Making of the Muslim State was published by University of Chicago Press earlier this year. Her profile can be found here.

Our second blogger this Fall is Philip Thai, Assistant Professor of modern China in the Department of History at Northeastern University. He can be contacted at p.thai@neu.edu. His post provides a snapshot of coastal smuggling in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) (1949–present).

John M. Collins, Lecturer in History at Eastern Washington University, has recently published a book on the origins of martial law in England, a subject that interests many H-Law subscribers. You may contact him at jcollins2@ewu.edu. He provides a description of his book below.

Our blog post today highlights a discrete volume of fatwas (legal opinions) from the sixteenth century compiled in South Asia. Our blogger is Mahmood Kooria, a doctoral candidate at the Leiden University Institute for History. His dissertation focuses on the circulation of Islamic legal ideas and texts across the Indian Ocean and Eastern Mediterranean worlds. He read his M.A. and M.Phil.

In line with our previous blog post, we keep our focus on judges as we examine their sometimes fraught relationship with goverment authorities in the colonies during the nineteenth century. Ideas emanating from the imperial center took root in various depths and forms in the colonies. Our blogger today, Jack Jin Gary Lee, explores the impact of English philosopher and political economist (amongst other things) John Stuart Mill’s ideas on colonial judges in the British Empire.

This is the first post on the World Legal History Blog that focuses on a historical source. From next week onwards, we will have other legal historians contributing posts on their own sources on any theme, time and place, between 500 and 800 words ideally. If you are interested in blogging on a historical source drawn from your own research, or to launch a discussion on a topic (or two) relevant to the study of World Legal History in general, email me at wlhblawg@gmail.com.

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