Indian Ocean World

Our first blog post of 2017 is by fellow Hurst Summer Institute alumnus and true blue world legal historian Laurie Wood, Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University. (http://historydev.fsu.acsitefactory.com/person/laurie-wood). 

Laurie writes on a part of the Indian Ocean that is often overlooked - the Francophone realm which mainly consists of the French Mascarenes (Mauritius and Réunion). By tracing fraught long-standing relations within diasporic families and later succession trustees, her recent article in Journal of Social History lies at the interrsection of business

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 History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.  He has co-edited a volume with Michael Pearson titled Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region (Oxford University