DOI: 10.1111/hic3.

12612

ARTICLE

Histories of law and economic life in the Islamic

Fahad Ahmad Bishara

University of Virginia
Abstract
Correspondence In this article, I survey the long-standing debate on the
Fahad Ahmad Bishara, Department of History,
place of Islamic law in the history of capitalism. I first mark
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia.
Email: [email protected] out a literature that has thought, either explicitly or implic-
itly, in comparative terms about the capitalist trajectories
of the Islamic world and “the West,” and has grappled with
the place of Islamic law in shaping that trajectory; I then
explore a parallel literature that sidestepped the question
of capitalist development altogether in favor of a more
textually grounded approach to the study of Islamic law
and Muslim economic life. I end with a set of reflections on
how to better situate the study of Islamic law and capital-
ism in a more textured historical context, drawing on a
nuanced literature on colonial legal history. Rather than
studying Islamic law and capitalism within a sealed-off civi-
lizational container, as many had done in the past, I suggest
that a more fruitful approach might involve embracing a
broader world of connections, circulations, and historical
entanglements.

One of the more durable narratives of world economic history has been how the rise of Islam energized inter-
regional trade between Arabia, North Africa, and South and Southeast Asia, under the broad carapace of “the
Islamic world.” In the preface to his foundational work on world history, William McNeill wrote that “the rise of
Islam and the revival of a world system reaching across civilizational and cultural boundaries went hand in hand,
and perhaps should be thought of as two aspects of the same process” (McNeill, 1990: 15). Fernand Braudel ech-
oed the sentiment in Civilization and Capitalism, in which he wrote that Islam, “after its lightning triumphs” forged a
world economy of its own, “overlooking the Indian Ocean from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and controlling
the endless chain of deserts stretching across Asia from Arabia to China” (Braudel, 1979: 25, 484). Historians of the
Islamic world have been eager participants in this dialogue. A common trope is that the Prophet Muhammad, being
a merchant himself, exhibited an openness to trade and profit making that would in later centuries motivate

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commerce within an expanding network of Muslim traders, who themselves would become the conduits through
which the religion spread. Later historians would thicken this foundational narrative, establishing Islam as a binding
force in transregional trade (Alpers, 2013; Chaudhuri, 1985; Hodgson, 1977a, 1977b; Pearson, 2003; Risso, 1995).
In this narrative, historians have placed a good deal of explanatory weight on Islamic law as one of the primary
engines behind this broad world of trade. For some, it was Islamic law's willingness to preserve mercantile autonomy
by constraining the power of rulers and allowing merchants to move from one port to another (McNeill, 1990;
Pomeranz & Topik, 1999: 18). For others, it ran deeper: Islamic law, the reasoning goes, furnished a legal framework
for commerce that was legible across commercial communities, reducing much of the uncertainty associated with
cross-cultural trade and allowing for coherence across commercial systems (Chaudhuri, 1985; Risso, 1995; Hodgson,
1977b; Kuran, 2011: 45-63). Either way, it was Islamic law that distinguished the Muslim world economy (to use
Braudel's schema) from other regional commercial worlds.
Broad declarations such as these have generated a fascination among scholars about the place of Islamic law in
the economic history of the Islamic world and for good reason. The idea of a singular legal system that could regulate
mercantile transactions has attracted the interest of historians for a long time. One needs only a look at the unyield-
ing interest of historians of Europe in the notion of the lex mercatoria (merchants' law), a body of rules and principles
commonly arrived at between merchants across Europe to govern their affairs with one another and an idea that has
been invoked, celebrated, called into question, and revived so many times that one loses track of what the historio-
graphical consensus is (Kadens, 2015; Milgrom, North, & Weingast, 1990).
But beyond the inherent theoretical attraction of a singular legal system that merchants can converge upon lies
the empirical reality of economic life in the Islamic world. Dozens of studies have illustrated just how pervasive
Muslim partnerships and contractual forms were in the Islamic world, among both Muslim traders and other religious
communities (Goitein, 1963; Goldberg, 2012; Stillman, 1973). Moreover, law, in many different forms, furnished the
principal discursive framework within which Muslim scholars spoke about “the economy.” Unlike Europe or the
Americas, Muslims did not develop an intellectual tradition of political economy that was somehow separate from
broader discussions of law.1 Across centuries of intellectual output, then, questions of production and commerce
were invariably joined together with discussions of law itself (for useful examples of these, see also El-Ashkar &
Wilson, 2006).
In the pages that follow, I survey the long-standing debate on the place of Islamic law in the history of capitalism.
I first mark out a literature that has thought, either explicitly or implicitly, in comparative terms about the capitalist
trajectories of the Islamic world and “the West,” and has grappled with the place of Islamic law in shaping that trajec-
tory; I then explore a parallel literature that sidestepped the question of capitalist development altogether in favor of
a more textually grounded approach to the study of Islamic law and Muslim economic life. Together, these form the
bulk of the debate on Islamic law and capitalism—save for the burgeoning literature on Islamic finance, which does
grapple with important questions surrounding Islamic law and capitalism, but which I cannot adequately cover here. I
end with a set of reflections on how to better situate the study of Islamic law and capitalism in a more textured his-
torical context, drawing on a nuanced literature on colonial legal history. Rather than studying Islamic law and capi-
talism within a sealed-off civilizational container, as many had done in the past, I suggest that a more fruitful
approach might involve opening up that container to a broader world of connections, circulations, and historical
entanglements.

1 | ISLAMIC LAW AND COMPARATIVE CAPITALISMS

The debate on the place of Islamic law in Muslim economic history has generated widely divergent positions and
approaches and very little consensus. At least part of that has stemmed from disagreement as to what the terms of
the debate are: How does one mark socioeconomic change over time, and are the categories that are used to peri-
odize global economic history—namely, the onset and spread of capitalism—useful to engage with? Even among
BISHARA 3 of 10

historians of Euro-American capitalism, the issue is far from resolved: Depending on their intellectual proclivities,
scholars understand “capitalism” as a phenomenon that has been ever present in human history; one that is identifi-
able from the late medieval period onwards, with the rise of the merchant-bankers of Venice; one that can be dated
to the rise of the joint-stock company; or one that is necessarily limited to the epoch following the industrial revolu-
tion. The yardsticks are different, too: Capitalism is either marked by a transformation in relations of production
(principally, an increased division of labor), a change in the scale and scope of circulation, the commodification of var-
ious goods, or a simple process of capital accumulation—each of which brings its own set of periodizations (see also
Braudel, 1992; Levy, 2017; Wolf, 1982).
For historians of the Islamic world, this poses sometimes uncomfortable questions of comparative economic his-
tory: of when (if ever) the Islamic world can be said to have truly crossed the threshold into the capitalist era and
why that transformation took place when it did. However, despite these analytical confusions, scholars have largely
converged on at least a few broad guiding questions. Foremost among these has been the role played by Islamic law
in shaping commerce and/or capital accumulation across space and time. The concerns within this strand of the liter-
ature have ranged from questions of commercial organization and banking to intergenerational wealth transfers.
Underlying the bulk of the literature, however, was a comparative framework, explicit or implicit, that sought to
explain why the Islamic world failed to make the same organizational and industrial advances that the West did—the
sorts of comparisons that was for a long time the stock-in-trade of the discipline of world history itself.
The debate is an old one. Before Islamic law became the subject of serious study in the academy, the prev-
ailing view was that it was inimical to the demands of modern capitalism. This largely grew out of the Webe-
rian notion that the emergence of modern capitalism fundamentally required rationality and calculability in legal
processes—something that he thought the Islamic legal system lacked because of the alleged inflexibility of the
sharia and the subjective instability of the qadis' legal decisions (Turner, 1974: 108-111). The upsurge of
research on Islamic law and Islamic legal history that marked the 1950s and 1960s, however, did away with
Weber's misconceptions and carved a new path forward for thinking about the relationship of Islamic law to
the realm of commerce.
Among the first to broach the subject was the historian Maxime Rodinson, whose Islam and Capitalism sought
to understand where the Muslim world belonged “in the general typology of systems of production and distribution
of goods” and whether the answer would help social scientists better understand “the relations between the eco-
nomic facts and the other aspects of the total culture of a given society, in particular the ideological aspects, and
most particularly religion” (Rodinson, 1966/2007: viii-ix). His search for an Islam-influenced economic sphere, how-
ever, turned up “largely inconclusive, at least on the plane of fundamental structures.” Islam's commitment to com-
merce had little to do with ideology and more to do with the conditions prevailing in Arabia at the time, and Islamic
precepts did not create radically new social or economic structures. Overall, he argued, “the precepts of Islam have
not seriously hindered the capitalist orientation taken by the Muslim world during the last hundred years”
(Rodinson, 1966/2007: 186).
Perhaps the most notorious among the debates within the “comparative capitalism” camp has been the
question of whether the Muslim prohibition on riba (identified as either usury or interest) had played any part
in hindering capital accumulation or institutional development in the Islamic world; it remains as a regular fea-
ture of the scholarship on Islamic finance and banking today. For Rodinson and many of his contemporaries,
the notion that the Muslim ban on riba had somehow hindered capitalist development was misplaced: There
was little, if anything, to suggest that it was rigidly enforced, and far more to suggest that Muslims and others
had devised simple legal ruses to circumvent the ban, rendering it ineffective. Another scholar, writing around
roughly the same time, arrived at a similar conclusion. In his study of court records from 17th century Ottoman
Anatolia, the historian Ronald C. Jennings argued that despite the Muslim legal ban on interest in commercial
transactions, “giving out money or credit to earn interest was accepted by the local Ottoman sharia courts” and
was a common practice among merchants, heads of households, and even clerics. He went on to declare that
“there is no alternative but to conclude that the consensus of the Muslim community judged such practice
4 of 10 BISHARA

acceptable before and approved by God” (Jennings, 1973: 182-5). For Jennings, then, Islamic law played little
role in regulating the commercial sphere, particularly credit markets.
For at least one group of scholars, though, the riba issue constituted just one part of a broader complex of insti-
tutional constraints that Islamic law placed on capitalist development in the Islamic world. Inspired by the New Insti-
tutional Economics that economist Douglass North popularized in the 1980s and 1990s through works on world
economic history, these scholars explore the institutional (in New Institutional Economics terms, “institutional”)
underpinnings of Muslim economic successes and failures throughout Islamic history (North, 1982; North, 1990;
North & Thomas, 1973). The work of Timur Kuran on Islamic law and economic development in the Middle East over
the longue durée has become the flagbearer of the movement, which has found echoes in writings by Ghislaine
Lydon, Jared Rubin, and Ron Harris, among others (Harris, 2009; Kuran, 2005, 2011; Lydon, 2009b; Rubin, 2017).
Like Rodinson, these scholars sought to explore the reasons behind the Middle East's failure to make the same
economic advances that the West did. Most locate the causes of divergence in the Islamic world's perceived institu-
tional shortcomings. In Timur Kuran's writings, Muslim commercial society buckled under the dead weight of its own
institutions: What had once been an efficient set of institutions designed to promote trade and growth were
handicapped by what he calls a “dynamic inefficiency”—an inability to respond to a changing commercial world
(Kuran, 2011). Similarly, Lydon's work on the practices of trans-Saharan traders suggests that while their commercial
strategies had been successful for centuries, they were quickly displaced by European technology (Lydon, 2009a:
387-388). Elsewhere, she makes a more explicitly comparative argument, stating that “the lack of faith in paper in
Islamic legal systems … may have posed considerable economic constraints on the development of many early mod-
ern Muslim societies” (Lydon, 2009b: 649). The ambiguous place of paper, she argues, “serves to explain why Islamic
institutions prevented the growth of ‘paper companies’ such as joint-stock companies, as well as the development of
complex and large-scale enterprise in commerce, industry, and for obvious reasons, in the key sector of banking.”
The shift from oral testimony to paper proof, she emphasizes, marked a turning point in the institutional history of
Western Europe (Lydon, 2009b: 658).
Another more mutedly comparative capitalist approach might be found in the fledgling literature on Muslim eco-
nomic thought. Led principally by economists based in South Asia (largely Pakistan), this literature has attempted to
bring the Islamic world more closely into the history of political economy, drawing largely on Muslim legal materials
and occasionally on early texts in Muslim political philosophy. The stated objective among scholars writing in this
subfield has been to fill the “great gap” between the Greek and Latin scholastic literatures of economic analysis—an
oversight that they attribute principally to Joseph Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis, but which can be found
in even more recent surveys of the history of economic thought (Ghazanfar, 2003; Schumpeter, 1954; Spiegel,
1991). In practice, however, the principal goal has been to locate Muslim equivalents—and more accurately,
antecedents—to theoretical propositions in classical political economy.
Although the debate about “Muslim economic thought” has generated interesting insights and highlighted a
potentially generative thread in the Muslim legal literature, it has tended to read this literature out of context,
plucking discussions of economic phenomena out of the broader discursive universe in which it was embedded. Its
tendency to locate in Islamic thinkers the “origins” of various economic ideas—or, alternatively, to read Muslim
thought as a cheap derivative of the Greek tradition—has rendered it unattractive to most historians (Essid, 1995;
Spengler, 1964). That, coupled with the lack of enthusiasm for studies on medieval economic thought more gener-
ally, has kept the research program from gaining significant scholarly traction. The intellectual histories that might
have brought together the study of Islamic law and capitalism, then, have yet to fully materialize.
That comparison, whether explicit or implicit, has formed a visible thread in the literature on Islamic law, and
capitalism is perhaps unsurprising. Comparison has constituted a major component of the historian's toolkit for
decades, and with the rise of global history, it has made a significant comeback. There are pitfalls to the approach, of
course: This vein of work often involves assumptions about the sources, trajectories, and outcomes of the economic
development of the Western world—and especially the trading corporation as the standard-bearer of economic
development—that themselves have been called into question (Guinnane, Harris, Lamoreaux, & Rosenthal, 2007;
BISHARA 5 of 10

Ireland, 1996). Still, by comparing the trajectory of the Islamic world against more established narratives, historians
have forced themselves to ask big—if sometimes unpopular—questions and thus more assertively situate their work
within broader discussions surrounding capitalist development in world history.

2 | I S L A M I C L A W A N D E C O N O M I C LI F E

Of course, not all historians working on Islamic law and capitalism felt the need to draw comparisons to the West.
Alongside the literature that Rodinson and others spawned emerged a parallel discussion that sought to explore the
archives of Islamic law with the textual scrutiny of a philologist rather than the sweeping perspective of the world
historian. Following William Sewell, we might call these explorations of law in “economic life”—“the history of human
participation in the production, exchange and consumption of goods” (Sewell, 2010: 146). Although the scholars
themselves have not made the distinction, it is an important one: By writing on economic life rather than capitalism
as such, these historians are able to think more capaciously about commercial praxis in the Islamic world while still
addressing the question of substantive change over time. This has helped them avoid many of the analytic traps that
had come with the struggle to understand the economic history of the Islamic world against the backdrop of the rise
of the West.
Among those who led the way in this tradition is Abraham Udovitch, who penned a highly influential series of
articles in the late 1960s on Islamic law and commercial life, culminating in his pathbreaking monograph, Partnership
and Profit in Medieval Islam (1970). In Partnership and Profit, as well as the articles leading up to it, Udovitch drew on
a corpus of Muslim legal treatises from between the 8th and 12th centuries to elucidate how jurists conceived of
and constructed commercial relations. On the whole, he argued, Muslim legal thinking did little to shape the commer-
cial sphere. Rather, he argued, Muslim jurists left ample room for merchants to administer justice according to their
own laws and customs—that there existed a medieval Islamic lex mercatoria that regulated the commercial sphere.
Combining legal treatises and contracts from the Cairo Geniza, Udovitch concluded that “the customs and practices
of commerce formed and fashioned the legal institutions of commenda and partnership,” adding that “the jurisdiction
of custom was not relegated or confined merely to marginal details, but was given free reign over the most important
and substantive components of these institutions” (Udovitch, 1970: 254). Although he was later joined by others, it
was Udovitch who set out the contours of Islamic law in the marketplace and asked questions about how Islamic law
shaped economic life, though always stopping short of a grand narrative in which it either promoted or inhibited
growth.
Udovitch, it should be pointed out, never shied away from comparative thinking. Many of these works
were inspired by questions being asked by European early modernists like Fernand Braudel and sought to draw
parallels or connections to narratives in European economic history (Udovitch, 1962, 1979). However, what dis-
tinguishes much of this body of work from the more sweeping comparative variant is its keen attention to the
question of precisely where one locates “Islamic law” as a historical phenomenon. For Udovitch, who pioneered
this variant of the literature, Islamic law was largely to be found in medieval manuals of Islamic jurisprudence
(fiqh)—though even he grappled with the question of how closely these theoretical texts mapped onto the real-
ity of economic life (Udovitch, 1970, 249-262; Udovitch, 1985). By taking Muslim legal texts seriously, reading
them for both their pronouncements and their silences, he unpacked how Muslim jurists viewed the commercial
sphere and its regulation. Drawing on insights from the contemporaneous work of anthropologist Clifford
Geertz, he argued that “if properly read, the law governing exchange as expounded in the shariah can properly
be considered as a constitution of the marketplace.” To do so, one had to “read beneath the surface meaning”
of Islamic legal doctrine and “uncover its ‘local knowledge,’ its assumptions about social and economic life which
alone give its operations meaning and vitality” (Udovitch, 1985, 150-151). Here, law grew out of an interplay
between jurisprudence and custom, crafted with an eye to bolstering the sociability of the marketplace while
grounding it in the social context in which exchange took place.
6 of 10 BISHARA

Later scholars would take his insights a step further, drawing on the dense archive of early-modern and modern
materials and producing a more textured discussion of genre in Islamic law grounded in fiqh texts but also commen-

taries, legal responses (fatawa), qadi court registers, and everyday legal documents. Work by Brinkley Messick on
20th century Yemen forced historians to grapple more closely with how these sorts of legal materials joined together
to form a coherent and self-referencing corpus of Islamic law and to take more seriously questions of genre in legal
history (Messick, 2019, 2003, 2001, 1995, 1993). Similarly, work by David Powers and Zouhair Ghazzal, on the
early-modern Maghreb and 19th century Damascus, respectively, dug deeper into specific genre forms and wrestled
with the ways in which they simultaneously open up a window onto and distort the past (Ghazzal, 2007; Powers,
2002). Others have explored the circulation of everyday legal artifacts around broad spaces such as the Sahara and

the Western Indian Ocean, tracing the fatawa, court cases, and legal entanglements that they left in their wake
(Bishara, 2017; Lydon, 2009a). Recent work on Mughal history, too, has drawn on property deeds to rethink the
meanings the property held in Indian society (Hasan, 2018).
Within these studies, the breadth of subjects that these scholars take on is dizzying: They draw on ethnographic
material and a range of different records to examine how property and personhood is manifested in contractual writ-
ing; how families litigate over estates within an Islamicate legal system; how different juridical actors understood and
fought over private property; and how relationships between different texts and forms of writing constituted the
polity—to name but a few. Although economic activity only forms one dimension of these, what becomes clear
within this literature is that the sharia, insofar as we can talk about it in the singular, becomes a total discourse in
which all sorts of institutions (including economic ones) find expression, and while Muslim jurisprudence anchors
transactions, it does not determine them. Thus, like Udovitch, these scholars not only privilege the place of “local
knowledge” in shaping economic transactions, but also highlight the centrality of doctrine in constructing the legal
terrain more broadly.
For all of the richness and detail in their approach, though, these historians have shied away from addressing the
broader debates on capitalism in world history, or even the place of the Islamic world in economic history more
broadly. Save for some of Udovitch's writings, these have largely been the product of a scholarly world that had not
only been enlivened, but also constrained, by area studies. As a result, the picture that emerges is often rich in its
local detail and sophisticated in its theoretical engagement, but unclear in its implications for the grand narratives of
world history.

3 | R E F L E C T I O N S O N L A W A N D E C O N O M I C L I F E I N TH E I S L A M I C
WORLD

At least some of the limits we have placed on the debate surrounding Islamic law and capitalism come from our con-
ception of law itself. With few exceptions, what emerges in the bulk of the literature on the histories of Muslim com-
mercial law and practice—and on the history of Islamic law more broadly—is a rigid hierarchy of sources in which
discussions of the commercial world as found in manuals of jurisprudence (seen as the “law in the books”) end up
framing what scholars see in the court records and other legal materials (“the law in practice”). When it is not strictly
textualist, it is text-heavy, reinforcing a legal–cultural essentialism and drawing impermeable boundaries around the
texts themselves and the societies within which they circulated. If historians of Muslim commerce have managed to
paint a picture of Islamic law and capitalism that goes beyond questions of regulation and enforcement and instead
thinks more deeply about the law itself, many still write within a civilizational container that is somehow sealed off
from others, even as it carries the sediment of what came before it.
By contrast, work in the subfield of legal history writ large has shown how the field of “law” itself must be
opened up to competing legal imaginaries and orders. That is, rather than think of the law as a sealed-off entity or
discourse, it might be more useful to imagine law as “an arena of conflict within which alternative social visions con-
tended, bargained, and survived” (Hartog, 1985: 16). And rather than think of those conflicts as being confined to a
BISHARA 7 of 10

closed civilizational container, one might fruitfully open it up and embrace its entanglements to other legal systems
and histories—a form of historical writing that embraces connection and circulation rather than stasis. In this concep-
tion, “law” might be thought of principally as the language—a lexicon—through which actors are able to articulate
and construct alternative visions of order. What “law” or legality is thus depends heavily on who asks about it and
who is talking about it and is mediated by how they talk about it and the institutional context in which they talk
about it.
To get there, historians might replace the picture of a perduring sharia with one that is more contingent and
multivocal—one that sees Islamic law as a process shaped by a range of different actors, in which the centripetal
forces of law's language and claims to authority still exert themselves but ultimately do not determine outcomes. In
short, it is to replace our notion of Islamic law with multiple visions of legality which are in constant conversation
with one another and which draw on one another for legitimacy. When Udovitch wrote on how Muslim jurists
referred “to custom, to proximate people and proximate information as criteria for the validity of economic behavior
combin[ing] to form a thick, crowded web of ‘local knowledge’ surrounding the operations of exchange in the medie-
val Islamic Near East,” (Udovitch, 1985: 162) he was not describing two separate realms of theory and practice
between which there existed a gap. Rather, he was highlighting a liminal legal realm in which jurisprudence left mat-
ters to a domain of custom, which in turn relied on its place within jurisprudence for legitimacy and which frequently
drew on the rich lexicon of rights and obligations articulated in Islamic jurisprudence. To privilege one as the original
and the other as mere shadow is to take jurisprudence's claim to legal authority at face value rather than see all as
mutually dependent forms of legality making. Put differently, what I am arguing for here is more of a sense of plural-
ism in our reading of what Islamic law might be, particularly when it comes to economic life: its implicit acceptance
of customs founded on multiple visions of legal authority and its plasticity in the face of new contractual forms. To
borrow from legal historian Christopher Tomlins, “law” (expressed through a range of different genres and artifacts)
thus did not only furnished the means and the language for the actual construction of Muslim commercial realities,
but also provided a context in which Muslim jurists encountered, reconstructed, and eventually displaced or con-
ceded ground to competing legalities (Tomlins, 2001: 11).
Work that takes this more supple approach to the legal history of the Islamic world is already underway. A grow-
ing community of historians whose principal interests have been embedding the story of law against the backdrop of
a changing world of empire has helped texture our understanding of how law did its work. Although “capitalism” as
such has not been on the forefront of their research agendas, their work has indelibly reshaped how we understand
the history of economic life. Historians working in this tradition have done tremendous work in advancing scholarly
understandings of changing imperial and local land tenure systems (Barakat, 2015; Mikhail, 2011: 38-81; Mundy &
Smith, 2007), market governance (Cheta, 2014; Stilt, 2012), piracy (White, 2017), and shifting jurisdictional bound-
aries in the era of nascent European colonialism (Hanley, 2017; Marglin, 2016). Others have shed light on the ways
in which everyday economic actors engaged with the legal arena: Early work by Jon Mandaville pointed to the ten-
sions surrounding the ways in which Ottoman subjects made use of cash waqfs and the debates between jurists that
these generated (Mandaville, 1979), while more recent writings have highlighted how merchants and other economic
actors drew on the law in their attempts to accumulate, preserve, and contest wealth (Artunç, 2015; Doumani, 2017;
Ghazaleh, 2010; Hanna, 1998). For these historians, “law” emerges not only as a technology of imperial governance,
but also (and more importantly) an arena in which a range of different actors can make claims to the changing con-
tours of economic life in the Islamic world. More importantly, in this body of work, Islamic jurisprudence is not a
priori inimical to certain forms of contracting, and Islamic commercial law (inasmuch as it existed substantively) is nei-
ther restraining nor limited.
And for those working in colonial legal history, the multivocality of law has long been at the core of the
intellectual endeavor. Legal historians of South Asia, for example, have pointed out how Muslims in British India
drew on a variety of discourses and mobilized a range of different strategies to make claims to the realm of
law, both Islamic and customary (De, 2009; Kozlowski, 1985; Stephens, 2014; Stephens, 2019). Work on British
and Dutch Southeast Asia, too, has shed light on how Muslim actors postured, translated, and otherwise
8 of 10 BISHARA

entangled themselves in multiple legal systems as they litigated over wealth and property (Gilsenan, 2011;
Yahaya, 2020). This work has highlighted the tensions surrounding jurisdiction and substantive legal matters that
characterized the history of European colonialism in Asia, while also illuminating the competing legal imaginaries
that animated the lives of elites and everyday litigants alike. More importantly, they highlight the necessity of
softening the edges of “Islamic law” to include a changing juridical world of other legal systems and institutions,
all of which formed as much a part of the Muslim experience as the Islamic legal tradition itself did. Although
historians writing in this tradition have shied away from making far-reaching claims about world economic his-
tory, they do explicitly take on some key issues in the debate on Islamic law and capitalism—namely, the
encounter between a world of property relations governed by the sharia and a changing legal landscape of
colonial capitalism, in which Asia formed a central arena.
Where, then, does this leave us in terms of the grand narratives of world history that I described at the beginning
of this piece? First, we ought to recognize that writing a “global” history of Islamic law and capitalism necessitates
that we open up the civilizational container that is “Islam” and explore its encounters and connections with other
commercial systems and institutions. It also means more clearly setting the history of Muslim commerce against the
backdrop of the changing geopolitical landscape and political entanglements in the Islamic world. Although we have
a much more nuanced understanding of the political history of the Islamic world today than we did when the world
historians first wrote their broad narratives in the 1960s and 1970s, work on Islamic law and economic life has
tended to cluster around the medieval period on the one hand and the 19th and 20th centuries on the other; the rise
and transformation of the early-modern gunpowder empires and of Muslim trade within it still forms a major lacuna
in our knowledge. The good news is that there is plenty of work to be done—and the better news is that as the field
of legal history itself expands out of its Euro-American confines, work on law and economic life in the Islamic world
will find an increasingly eager audience in the academy.

ORCID
Fahad Ahmad Bishara https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9965-2540

ENDNOTE
1
Even in Europe, discussions of political economy continued to recognize that law formed a critical part of the administra-
tion of commerce and production; treatises on political economy up to and including John Stuart Mill's Principals of Political
Economy continued to take on matters of law as foundational to discussions of economic life.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Fahad Ahmad Bishara specializes in the economic and legal history of the Indian Ocean and Islamic world. His
book, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 (Cambridge University Press,
2017) is a legal history of economic life in the Western Indian Ocean, told through the story of the Arab and
Indian settlement and commercialization of East Africa during the 19th century. It was the recipient of the
J. Willard Hurst Prize (awarded by the Law and Society Association), the Jerry Bentley prize (awarded by the
World History Association), and the Peter Gonville Stein book award (given by the American Society for Legal
History). He is currently working on a connected history of the Indian Ocean, written from the deck of a dhow.
Drawing on a deep archive of business papers from around the region, the book explores questions of global
capitalism, international law, empire, mobility, and scale in historical writing.

How to cite this article: Bishara FA. Histories of law and economic life in the Islamic world. History Compass.
2020;18:e12612. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12612