CSSH publishes many excellent essays on Ottoman topics. As one colleague joked, “If the Ottomans still have sovereignty anywhere, it’s over CSSH.” We’ve long suspected that there is something about the Ottomans, early and late, that creates a special affinity between their empire and comparativist scholarship. Is it the overlap of so many religious and ethnoracial communities? The dynasty’s movement through so many distinct historical eras and sociopolitical forms? Its strategic location between major Muslim and Christian polities? Is it the contrastive role Ottomans (and Ottomanists) have played in defining “modernity”?
Rather than picking among these options – or inventing others – we would like to try an experiment. Call it an exercise in Ottoman heuristics. It involves a team of CSSH authors who focus their attentions on Ottoman domains or on spaces and times adjacent to those domains.
The players:
Koh Choon Hwee (64-3) and Nora Barakat (Forthcoming) write from within the empire.
Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular (59-4) focuses on Ottoman-Habsburg overlap zones in Europe.
Mustafa Tuna (53-3) reports from Russian imperial domains to the north.
Fahad Bishara (60-2) considers Omani and Indian Ocean polities to the east.
Anoush Suni (65-1) works in the Ottoman aftermath, among Armenians, Turks, and Kurds.
We asked these scholars to do “concept work.” The concept in question is embedded in the title of Julia Elyachar’s book, On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo (Duke, 2025). Who are “the semicivilized”? When and where are they? As Elyachar explains, “the semicivilized” was a category of international law applied (mostly in the 19th century) to the Ottoman empire, and to Persianate, Japanese, and Chinese polities as well. These were highly complex societies. They had centuries of treaties with Western powers. But they were seen (in the West) as backward and unfit to rule over modern peoples. They were not colonized outright, and were often propped up and treated as allies, but Europeans who lived in “semicivilized” jurisdictions were not fully subject to their laws. This state of exception, in the Ottoman case, was originally a privilege bestowed on European merchants by the Sultans. In the form of “capitulations,” these exemptions grew increasingly one-sided and gave multiple advantages to non-Ottoman actors in Ottoman domains.
Elyachar claims that the concept of “the semicivilized,” although of importance to legal historians, has figured minimally in the development of sociocultural theory in the West. Several key assumptions related to finance, sovereignty, law, and territoriality have, as a result, been cut off from their developmental genealogies, even though they continue to shape European engagement with peoples and places once deemed “semicivilized.” As bold as this claim might seem, there is reason to believe it. We ran a search of CSSH from its first issue to its latest content: the word “semicivilized” appears exactly once, in a footnote citing Elyachar’s book! It might be that what the Ottomans represent, for CSSH and for the comparative analysis of imperial formations, is the steady resurfacing of historically suppressed relationships and thematics.
What you are about to read is not a series of book reviews. None of our six authors lays out the full range of Elyachar’s arguments. Instead, it is a set of analytical variations on “the semicivilized” as an interpretive idea. It is a collective placing (or hedging) of bets on Elyachar’s wager. It is a heuristic exercise, comparative and intentionally connective.
It is also a politically crucial intervention. As Elyachar argues, the architecture of “the semicivilized” has never fully collapsed. The agendas behind it are still active; they are as brutal and oppressive as ever. The line between the civilized and the semicivilized was manipulated legally because it enabled the subordination and dehumanization of entire regions and populations. This process continues. In Palestine. In Iraq. In Kurdistan. In Lebanon. In Syria. And now in Iran. What our authors show, in every case, are the defining links between the semicivilized condition and structures of dispossession, minoritization, dismantling, and desacralization. They also show strong patterns of persistence, counter movement, alternative archives and histories, and other possibilities (moral and political) for common life.
We have asked Elyachar to respond, which she will do in a second installment. For now, work your way through these six essays. Each opens up a complex world that has been obscured and can now be seen differently. The point is not to use “the semicivilized” as a discerning lens, but to figure out what and how it makes us see. This is best done by tilting the lens, by peering into it from different angles. And, when we are ready, by breaking it.
Read on.
On Semi-odious Debts to the Semi-colony
Koh Choon Hwee
There is a legal concept known as odious debt which holds that the people of a country should not be held responsible for debts incurred by a despotic leader. This concept has enjoyed more rhetorical popularity than actual operational success –– except perhaps in the case of Iraq.
Twenty years ago, the new regime in Iraq faced external debt obligations of about $130 billion incurred by Saddam Hussein. Iraq eventually managed to get a write-down of 80% of its debt at the Paris Club. Odd Lots, the Bloomberg podcast with a cult following, featured an episode on this write-down titled, “How Iraq Pulled Off One of the Biggest Sovereign Debt Restructurings of All Time.”
Some have discussed whether Venezuela or Haiti should have their debts written off on the same basis. But the odious debt argument is mostly an academic and legal concept. Apart from rhetorical power, legal experts mostly agree that it lacks teeth.
After all, several factors distinguished the Iraqi case. First, the US had very limited exposure to the debts. Further, the Bush administration was invested in establishing a stable, democratic Iraq in the Middle East as part of its foreign policy strategy at the time; writing off Iraq’s debts could attract investment and pave the way for economic growth. Finally, only the world hegemon, the US, could have swayed the group of major creditor countries that constituted the Paris Club.
Iraq’s sovereign debt restructuring thus had little to do with the odiousness of Iraqi debt, but everything to do with US interests and realpolitik.
There is a Marxist concept of the “semi-colony” that is attributed to Lenin. It was later developed by Chinese Marxists, including Mao Zedong. In Lenin’s definition, the semicolonial state is a transitional form. He gave three examples: “Persia, China, and Turkey.” He added, “the first of these countries is already almost completely a colony, the second and third are becoming such” (Lenin 1916, chapter 6).
Historians and literary scholars have long explored the “unique social formation” incubated in the semi-colony (Shih 2001, 31-32; Osterhammel 1986, 276, cited in Shih 2001). It is a space “where characteristics of colonialism and independence simultaneously exist and compete with one another,” a condition that “almost always involves several imperial powers fighting over fragmentary settlements and imperialist presences” (Sarlati 2025, 343).
There is a concept called the “semicivilized” with an elusive definition. It is both a historical category and a (now defunct) category of international law, but it is largely absent in anthropology, political economy, social theory, and studies of colonialism (Elyachar 2025, 7, 11-12).
The discovery of this concept’s absence and its re-introduction to comparative social and historical analysis is the declared motivation for Elyachar’s book On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo (2025). It is also the occasion for this gathering of commentaries.
Elyachar argues for the potency of the “semicivilized” as a category. She says it can get us to rethink “a whole set of concepts in social sciences and critical theory such as sovereignty, territory, colonialism, and postcolonialism.” She tells us it will introduce, as a second-order consequence, “concepts such as personal law, dividual sovereignty, and extraterritoriality” to make better sense of not just the Ottoman experience but that of other semi-colonies(?) similar to it (2025, 6-7).
There are other second-order benefits, she adds. Uncovering emic Ottoman logics of “sovereignty, territory, and international law” (2025, 10) will force us to rethink the history of political economy. Elyachar suggests the “global flows of mobility of people, goods and money” will look different when reconceived as operating on an Ottoman logic of territory, rather than a “Western” logic.
By decoupling the notion of empire from territory, and thinking instead of “arrangements linking body, ground, and sovereignty” in Ottoman and other contexts, she says we will be able to recognize “political belonging” as being linked to “finance, which was a mode of rule.” This is because, according to Elyachar, the relations between imperial ruler and imperial subject were “in large part … relations of tax and tribute.” This imperial relation of “tax and tribute”, she says, is “a very different ecosystem of finance and politics than what is often taken for granted in discussions about colonialism and postcolonialism” (2025, 23). Perhaps her message here is that scholars of colonialism and postcolonialism should read more premodern history; conversely, premodern historians should read more works on colonialism and postcolonialism to see how these fields have (re-)imagined historical empires.
There is an Ottomanist and legal historian at the University of New Hampshire called Will Smiley who, without invoking the semi-colony or the semicivilized, has articulated a novel account of how the Ottomans tried to retain meaningful sovereignty in the face of increasingly brazen European interventions. They did so by using distinct conceptions of sovereignty in Islamic law and international law to speak to different audiences, domestic and European, at the same time.
According to Smiley, the initial, default position of Islamic law, since the sixteenth century at least, was that enslavement was an acceptable legal response to individual non-Muslims who rebelled. This legal response was understood as a core part of the sultan’s sovereignty under Islamic law.
Subsequently, enslavement of whole subject-communities identified as “rebels” became acceptable under Islamic law during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This shift was a response to the fact that non-Muslim Ottoman subjects were volunteering to fight for the Russian and Habsburg armies at the time. It became increasingly difficult to distinguish between these enemy volunteers and obedient subjects in frontier battlegrounds.
Finally, between 1790 and 1830, enslavement began to be deployed domestically with Islamic legal sanction as a “counterinsurgency strategy” with little connection to foreign threats (Smiley 2022, 246). This policy elicited vehement European protests on behalf of Ottoman non-Muslim communities. To ward off European meddling in its domestic affairs, the Porte invoked “the idea of sovereignty under contemporary notions of international law.”
Smiley recognizes this response as a legal masterstroke that simultaneously communicated two different meanings in two different legal traditions: “The Porte thus had its cake and ate it too … [the Greeks] were outside the sultan’s sovereignty for the purposes of Islamic law, but still within his sovereignty for the purposes of international law” (2022, 251-2).
There were two dominant legal forms of peer-to-peer loans in the Ottoman empire called dayn and qarḍ, but there is no agreed upon definition of either term in the scholarship. Existing studies of credit relations in Kayseri, Bursa, Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, and Hama have all offered different definitions of these two terms –– implying that peer-to-peer finance likely followed different rules in different provinces.
If customary laws governing loans diverged, so did local currencies. Currencies dominant in Aleppo were not the same ones used elsewhere. In fact, several Aleppine currencies remain a mystery to historians today. What, for instance, was the “dinar”? The Ottomans never minted any coin called the “dinar.” And yet it accounts for roughly 60% of all cash loans and credit sales in Aleppo circa 1600 CE.
There is a term, rahn (Tr. rehin), that some historians today translate as “pledge” and others as “mortgage.” These English-language terms derive from European historiography and Roman law. In the Roman legal tradition, there were different forms of mortgages that corresponded to different ways of decoupling and combining ownership rights, possession rights, and use rights of the collateral, as well as different ways of allocating these rights between creditor and debtor.
Whatever rahn meant for the Ottomans, it was a form of security attached to a loan. In the hundreds of cases I have read, and the dozens I have transliterated and translated, it is never entirely clear if it was mere possession of the pledged object that was transferred from the debtor (and pledgor) to the creditor or if use rights and ownership rights (even if temporary) were being transferred as well.
What is the point of these juxtapositions? The ideas I have laid out are related, but how?
In an article that begins with paleolithic bead necklaces and ends with metal coinage and paper bank notes, Dan Smail and Andrew Shryock suggest that all these media of exchange are linked by “a single, sprawling genealogy,” by “historical ties,” and “operative similarities” (2013, 734). Spotting these patterns requires moving across historical time periods. Some links are hard to detect; comparison makes us alert to them.
In this vein, I would suggest that the nexus of odious debt and international law as it exists today shares a set of operative similarities with eighteenth-century colonial debts and with nineteenth-century semi-colonial public debts (e.g., Hanser 2019, Tunçer 2015). The fraudulent nature of odious debt lies in the decoupling of the party that incurs the debt and the party that is expected to repay the debt; its odiousness emerges even more starkly when the former is a despotic ruler and the latter are the despotically ruled. Yet legal experts have pointed out that odious debt is ultimately “an emotional argument” because everyone has different definitions of what an odious, or virtuous, regime looks like.
Consider (using examples from Hancer’s 2019 essay): when private British investors extended credit to Indian rulers and Chinese merchants in the eighteenth century, was that credit already “odious”? When Indian rulers and Chinese merchants subsequently defaulted on those loans, did the debt then become “odious”? Or, perhaps, things became “odious” when those British investors managed to enlist the Royal Navy to coerce their Indian and Chinese debtors into paying up. The choice of a baseline, of an Archimedean point, is crucial in defining the odious debt – and perhaps in defining the civilized. Are we looking towards the future from 1600 CE, or looking backwards from 2026 CE? What is the reference point? Looking backwards in time, those earlier manifestations of cross-cultural finance might appear semi-odious in comparison with Iraq (a former Ottoman province) in the 2000s. What happens when this “sprawling genealogy” of operative similarities is drawn to include patterns of debt transaction in premodern commercial cities like Aleppo, where Ottoman subjects and protected foreign (non-Muslim) subjects were bound together by legal forms and currencies that we (moderns) do not fully understand?
As Elyachar notes, finance is a form of rule, and sovereignty – still tied up in complex forms of tax and tribute – is a moral project. I am curious about her choice of Archimedean points; for that I will have to read the rest of her book and see what the retrieval of the category of the semicivilized can add to the study of the Ottomans.
I thank Julia Elyachar and the editors of CSSH for this opportunity to speculate. Thanks, too, to Yogita Goyal and Will Smiley for thinking aloud with me.
References
Hanser, Jessica. 2019. “From Cross-Cultural Credit to Colonial Debt: British Expansion in Madras and Canton, 1750–1800.” American Historical Review 124 (1): 87–107.
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. 1963. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. In Lenin’s Selected Works, vol. 1, pp. 667-766. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Accessed online (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/)
Osterhammel, Jürgen. 1986. “Semi-Colonialism and Informal Empire in Twentieth Century China: Towards a Framework of Analysis.” In Imperialism and after: Continuities and Discontinuities. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds. Boston: Allen & Unwin.
Sarlati, Niloofar. 2025. “Sweet and Salty: A Taste of Semi-Translating Colonial Modernity in Iran.” In The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature Laura Brueck and Praseeda Gopinath, eds. New York: Routledge.
Shih, Shu-mei. 2001. The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Smail, Daniel Lord, and Andrew Shryock. 2013. “History and the ‘Pre.’” The American Historical Review 118 (3): 709–37.
Smiley, Will. 2022. “Rebellion, Sovereignty, and Islamic Law in the Ottoman Age of Revolutions.” Law and History Review 40 (2): 229–59.
Tunçer, Ali Coşkun. 2015. Sovereign Debt and International Financial Control: The Middle East and the Balkans, 1870-1914. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Europe’s Semicivilized
Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular
Reading Julia Elyachar’s On the Semicivilized led me to think about contemporaneous parallels on the westernmost end of the Ottoman domains, in Habsburg Bosnia and Herzegovina. This region was positioned at the intersection of shifting mechanisms of international law, imperial competition, and intensified mobilities at the turn of the twentieth century. Elyachar offers a way of analyzing the post-Ottoman domains and their “barbarian” stamp that goes beyond the usual civilizational binaries and makes it possible to reimagine their post-civilizational prospects.
Bosnia’s nineteenth century, like that of the rest of the Balkans, unfolded into what the Europeans called the Eastern Question. The question of “Turkey in Europe.” Created by the European empires, this question was to be resolved by the same at the Berlin Congress in 1878. By posing the Eastern Question as one of liberation from the Ottoman “yoke” and “progress of the West toward the East,” the European states were using civilizational discourse to define the Ottoman Empire as an object of evolving international law. The Ottoman representatives at the Congress witnessed Bosnia given to Austria-Hungary to administer because Ottoman authorities were presumed incapable of effective administration, even as the Sultan’s sovereignty in the province was acknowledged – “a hallmark of the semicivilized,” as Elyachar notes. The novelty of this inter-imperial mandate created numerous gray areas that the actors involved could exploit. Both empires negotiated and advanced their own understanding of the vague stipulations of the Berlin Treaty. Their shared subjects, capitalizing on the ambiguities of this in-between space, worked to secure their position within the two empires, and in Europe.
Bosnia and Herzegovina became pivotal for the southward expansion of Habsburg spheres of influence. Occupation and administration of Bosnia bolstered Habsburg standing as an imperial power, internally and in Europe. Notably, the Habsburgs were, like the Ottomans, concerned with preserving the hegemony of a large, multireligious empire at a time when principles of sovereignty and legitimacy were increasingly being constructed on the basis of ethno-linguistically homogeneous nation-states (Mikhail and Philliou 2012: 738). Ottoman Hamidian policy focused on cultivating Muslim allegiances in the region in an attempt to preserve its influence and caliphal jurisdiction over Muslims under non-Muslim rule.
Bosnia and Herzegovina did not become part of Austria or Hungary. Instead, it was directly controlled by the Habsburg Joint Ministry of Finance, a status suggestive of the principal purpose of the occupation. Habsburg Bosnian administration carried over Ottoman institutions, administrative practices, and laws, thus maintaining Ottoman imperial continuities. For example, the sources of law in the province included those of the Habsburg Land Administration; Ottoman and Islamic laws; family law of the Catholic, Orthodox Christian, and Jewish faiths; and Slavic customary law modified by Croatian, Hungarian, Venetian, and Ottoman laws. Ottoman shari’a courts were likewise transformed to fit the new legal jurisdictional landscape of the province. Such arrangements survived both empires into the successor states.
One of the main consequences of Habsburg occupation of this Ottoman province was that its Muslim populations were not decimated, expelled, and dispossessed as had become the norm for creating homogenous nation-states in the Balkans. Hoping to work with the Muslim population in separating the province from the Ottoman Empire, and wary of aggressive ethnonationalisms, the Monarchy organized its Bosnian subjects according to religion, not language, a policy inconsistent with practice in other provinces. It facilitated the creation of religious institutional hierarchies that helped detach the Orthodox Christian and Islamic institutions from Istanbul and bind them to the Monarchy. At the height of Ottoman Pan-Islamic efforts, the Habsburgs investigated how other empires—Russia in Central Asia, France in North Africa, and Great Britain in India—dealt with their Muslim populations and incorporated Islamic institutions into their colonial systems. In effect, Bosnian Muslims became a Habsburg millet of sorts, but only after they ceased to be a part of the Ottoman polity. The ultimate trial of their inclusion came when Habsburg Muslims were denied Habsburg benefits of extraterritoriality in the Ottoman domains and were deemed subject to Ottoman shari’a courts even as Habsburg subjects.
Bosnian Muslims tapped into existing family, trade, and educational networks and sociopolitical infrastructures to preserve their precarious interests, sometimes maintaining a presence in both empires. Transforming their connections to Istanbul and Cairo, Bosnians also created new ties to Vienna, Pest, and Prague. Muslim intellectuals and activists integrated into the vast transimperial infrastructures of what have been variously called “Pan-Islam(s),” “interislamic networks,” and the “Muslim cosmopolis.” They did so through the communication channels and in the print languages available to educated Muslims: Arabic, Turkish, and Persian (Ahmed 2017; Alavi 2015).
Balkan territories immediately switched from Oriental to European (albeit Eastern) once they were lost to the Ottoman Empire, a shift that involved international recognition as well as scholarly disciplinary divisions. Still, when it came to Bosnian Muslims, even as Slavs they continued to carry the affliction of semicivilized status, in Elyachar’s conceptualization of sovereignty with local exceptions. This status was slippery enough to be reconstituted in the post-imperial nation-states. Muslim presence in the southeastern periphery of Europe continues to be viewed as problematic, even dangerous. As Piro Rexhepi observed in White Enclosures, their integration is desirable for security purposes, but is impossible racially (2023).
As a heuristic device, the imperial semicivilized can be followed into subsequent state formations and into the present. It is only in this way that one can make sense of the Euroamerican Dayton Accords that ended the Serbian aggression on Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s – an arrangement that withholds the right to a civil society and a democratic sovereign state and instead introduced a sectarian political system that awarded genocide perpetrators with territory and political power. Its implementation is overseen by a High Representative appointed from the ranks of European diplomats with unrestrained, supralegal powers. Bosnia and the Balkans broadly, as the region of the semicivilized, is treated as an antechamber to Europe – the object of violent, highly technologized externalization of border to prevent migrants from reaching the European Union. In a time of environmental catastrophe, the same logic is applied to achieving the European Union’s zero emissions goals – by externalizing environmental costs and extractive exploitation of Bosnia’s strategic mineral resources while circumventing EU and international environmental laws and standards. Poisoning the land and water is a cost of neoliberal restructuring, one imposed with no input from its citizens, that would supposedly bring the lagging semicivilized territory to civilization, to modernity, and finally, included in the European Union. In response, the prospect of nonsovereignty has prompted environmental movements as decolonial peacebuilding (Karabegović 2025).
Looking at seemingly distinct regions of the world at the end of the long nineteenth century, we see a picture of overarching patterns and parallel continuities that have endured into the present. Branding the Ottoman Empire semicivilized – whether in Europe, Western Asia or North Africa – left a lasting mark on how post-Ottoman regions and peoples are categorized, and on how such conceptualizations affect the ability of subjects and citizens to transform inherited social infrastructures and (re)build the progressively shifting commons.
References
Ahmed, Faiz. 2017. Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires. Harvard University Press.
Alavi, Sima. 2015. Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire. Harvard University Press.
Karabegović, Dženeta. 2025. “Environmental Movements as Decolonial Peacebuilding in Bosnia-Herzegovina” Dealing with the Past, October 1. https://dwp-balkan.org/environmental-movements-as-decolonial-peacebuilding-in-bosnia-herzegovina/
Mikhail, Alan and Christine Philliou. 2012. “The Ottoman Empire and the Imperial Turn.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54 (4): 721-745.
Rexhepi, Piro. 2023. White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality along the Balkan Route. Duke University Press.
No Bastion of Safety for the Moderns
Mustafa Tuna
The way we deploy words can sometimes be more consequential than the meanings they carry. “Semicivilized” is one such word. The meaning it conveys is vague, since “civilized” barely passes muster as an objective evaluation. Yet it served a convenient purpose for the European powers in justifying the creation of states of coloniality across Ottoman territories (and in other parts of the world), even as they recognized the Ottoman Empire’s sovereignty and abstained from physically colonizing it. Using “semicivilized” as a legal concept helped Europeans pursue their own interests, all the while maintaining a pretense of moral uprightness and self-coherence. Julia Elyachar shows how this practice transformed (semi)colonized societies in ways still legible today in the flow of life (or its abrupt endings) and in local contestations of power.
The European powers’ ability to use stratifying categories to shape so precisely the movements and transactions of individuals around the world was a function of the growth and geographical expansion of modern state capacities. The colonizing powers and their post-colonial inheritors dictated their own modes of governance, ultimately because they could. In the process, individuals and communities lost the skills and communicative infrastructures that had once enabled them to live beyond the reach of state tentacles. As centralizing authorities built roads and canals, regulated commercial exchange, and designed and surveilled spaces of communal activity, people became more dependent on the ever-providing and all-seeing state.
Yet states did not always have such aggrandized capacities. In the 1550s, when Muscovites invaded the Volga-Ural region – territories that would later become part of the Russian empire – many of the area’s Muslim Tatars voted with their feet and fled eastward. There was no state infrastructure to effectively control their movement. In the mid-eighteenth century, during a vicious campaign to Christianize the region’s population, all that the state functionaries and Orthodox missionaries could do in the remaining Tatar villages was to show up, impose a baptism ceremony, demolish the village mosque, and leave. Some of those villagers became Christian in time; they are called the “Kräshen (Baptized) Tatars” today. But when Nicholas II yielded to popular pressure during the Revolution of 1905 and declared “freedom of conscience,” about fifty thousand Baptized Tatars petitioned to be recognized as Muslims. They insisted that they had never become Christian. The tsarist state’s sovereignty spread thin. Only those who moved close to its nodes of power got caught in its administrative net. Evasion remained a widely available option, in some cases until the advent of Soviet modernity. In 1879, a Siberian Tatar youth, Ğabdurreşîd İbrâhîm, hid in a ship at the Odesa port and left Russia without a passport to study in the Ottoman Empire. When he returned a few years later, he would purchase a deceased Hajj traveler’s passport in Istanbul and enter Russia with it. Journeys like these could be difficult, but they were hardly uncommon. Passports had no photographs, only brief descriptions, nor could machines recognize faces at the bottlenecks of high-tech border crossings.
Before modern states imposed temporal and spatial standardization, assigned ID numbers to their schooled citizens, and turned each person into one among a legible multitude, communicative infrastructures functioned in “higher time.” They connected people not merely here and now, but across generations and ages, thereby allowing the formation of lasting discursive traditions. Such traditions evolved as lifeworlds transformed, but they did so slowly; changes were often imperceptible to the tradition’s practitioners. The resulting sense of permanence united people in the same communicative commons – in “domains,” as I call them elsewhere (Tuna 2015) – with long-deceased ancestors and progeny yet to come. These communities boasted enough internal coherence and moral certainty to defy the imposition of external categories. Imperial Russian agents in charge of the empire’s Muslim subjects might well have considered themselves “civilized” folk observing, studying, and administering a “lower” (primitive) population, but when seen from the commons of Tatar, Bashkir, Noghay, and myriad other communities, it was the Russian agents who lacked authentic links to privileged discursive traditions and, therefore, lacked proper status. Such communities were bastions of safety for their participants; belonging to them was a badge of honor.
Today, those bastions, from village communities to a loosely connected yet geographically broader “Muslim domain,” are mostly destroyed. Premodern land-based polities, such as the Romanov and Ottoman empires, that could sustain meta-temporal commons are gone as well. The culprit in their demise is not the modern state alone. The modern state’s violence was essential, as destruction calls for violence. Yet premodern empires also destroyed communities, and the new communities that sprang up in the aftermath were still embedded in lasting meta-temporal commons. Today, by contrast, it is pervasive modernity with its industrial-scale economies, constant innovation, and urban concentration that fills the vacuum. When local channels of communication and alternative commons persist, they do so in “profane time,” here and now. They are constantly reconfigured by the passage of new regulations, the paving of new roads, the dividing up of neighborhoods, or the advent of the next technological breakthrough that transforms the ground on which we stand. One takes part in the modern communicative commons, but can one inherit and belong to it?
Moving through the bowels of urban spaces, individuals today live in a constant state of “becoming.” On the one hand, this appears to be a blessing. We are not bound, as the moderns would say, by rigid traditions that cast individuals in predefined molds, depriving them of reasoned volition and rendering them, in the absence of reason, volatile and dangerous. On the other hand, we are deprived of the satisfactions that come from belonging to durable, coherent traditions. We keep refashioning our lives, but seldom is this work the expression of our supposedly autonomous selves. Instead, it requires fitting into the generic molds that modern life delivers in scores. The greater struggle, meanwhile, involves making connections, human and historical, that might amount to some form of meaningful commons. Once made, these commons quickly come undone. Like Sisyphus rolling his rock up the hill, we patch and repair what is left of our collective life, only to find it tumbling down again. The unpredictability of endless change as the norm is anything but safe. If this is what “civilization” has delivered on the “path of progress,” then perhaps what we need is to look back – more seriously – not to revel in nostalgia, but to explore wasted possibilities.
References
Tuna, Mustafa. 2015. Imperial Russia’s Muslims: Islam, Empire and European Modernity, 1788-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
On the Small
Fahad Ahmad Bishara
Reading Elyachar’s work, I found myself immediately drawn to the big themes it boldly takes on: extraterritoriality, international law, sovereignty, and global finance. Indeed, what is perhaps most compelling is her braiding together of global capitalism and international law; its clarification of what we all knew but never quite said – that global capitalism was always dependent on and mediated through law, and that it was, from its outset, embedded in a regime of extraterritoriality. And though Elyachar grounds her work in the Ottoman Empire – and more specifically, in Cairo – the themes she lays out are just as visible in the Indian Ocean world, and during roughly the same timeframe. Let me spend the next two paragraphs laying this out as succinctly as I can, if only to establish a bit of background.
At the end of the eighteenth century, a polity emerged in southeastern Arabia that quickly spread itself over broad swaths of territory in what is today Oman – but then also in Gwadar, Bandar ʿAbbas, and long stretches of coastal East Africa. This Omani empire was, by its very nature, mobile: its sultans regularly shuttled between different port cities, and what jurisdiction they could claim ebbed and flowed with the shifting allegiances of different clans and tribes in far-flung places. Sovereignty was shared; different actors could claim to do the work of empire at different moments, but people often occupied multiple forms of subjecthood, identifying one way or another depending on the circumstances or opportunities. A migrant from Ibra, Oman who ended up as an ivory trader in Tabora, in inland Tanganyika (and there were hundreds of them), might claim to be the subject of the Sultan of Muscat and Zanzibar to enrobe himself in the political aura of the coast or might disavow any allegiance to his erstwhile sovereign so that he might pursue his own political ambitions, as so many did. His kinsmen and fellow Arab traders and in East Africa might have also known of his allegiance to the imam of the Omani interior – a rival potentate in southeastern Arabia, whose followers nonetheless threaded themselves across multiple political projects. And a dhow captain that plied the routes from Arabia to India and East Africa might invoke multiple forms of protection along the way – Omani, Indian, Ottoman, and even European if the situation called for it.
This loose oceanic knit of empire came under closer scrutiny by the middle of the nineteenth century, as new investment frontiers in East Africa drew in greater numbers of Indian financiers, who sought to channel ivory, cloves, and other commodities across different marketplaces and to buyers in India, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. As Gujarati merchants spread the pages of their ledger books across the Indian Ocean, the webs of debt and credit that bound Muscat to Zanzibar and the interior of East Africa now stretched to Kachchh and Bombay. This would not have been an issue were it not for an intervening variable: the slave trade, which was deeply knotted up in this world of commodities and trade finance – much as it was in the unfurling of the British Empire and concomitant expansion of British capital (the British Government had only banned slave trading by its own subjects decades before, in 1807). And though Gujaratis were nominally subjects of the Rao of Kachchh (though practically under the jurisdiction of the Sultan of Muscat and Zanzibar) the British Government’s declaration of paramountcy in India and its establishment of nominal suzerainty over its Native Princes opened up new pathways for British claims over these financiers, at least some of whom actively enrobed themselves in British protection as they sought after money owed to them – often by Arab traders in the interior. That the sultan was presumed to be ineffective (or duplicitous in his commitment) in rooting out the slave trade set the tone for the British Government’s jurisdictional thrust into East Africa. And so we end up with a broadly similar story: Ottomans, Omanis; Cairo, Zanzibar; mutatis, mutandis.
But this may be too broad a canvas. We can tell this story from smaller vantage points too. To borrow from Geertz, we might consider how to think about big categories (like international law) in contexts that help us take the capital letters off them. This is in fact at the core of what Elyachar is trying to do: to re-narrate the territorially-bound histories of law and finance from the perspective of a more mobile (and jurisdictionally variegated) world – but also from the perspective of loose sheets of paper stuffed away in an apartment building in Cairo or found in her grandfather’s dusty leather suitcase in New York. As historians have long established by now, we can use the micro perspective to take on macro (and even global) level processes.
When we think about these big regimes from small places, we end up with a different sense of how they come into being. The story of law and finance in the Western Indian Ocean did not only – or even primarily – take shape in the diplomatic halls of New Delhi and London or even the palaces of Muscat and Zanzibar. It also emerged from more unassuming places: in logbooks on the decks of ships, and in inked sheets of financial paper that exchanged hands along the channels of trade and movement that linked producers, brokers, and merchants across the Indian Ocean world. In the Indian Ocean world, pieces of paper acted as the embodied archives of a world of law: they carried with them multitudes of legal concepts and ideas of rights and obligations, and their carriage across the water generated the transregional frameworks for circulation and exchange that sustained the arena for centuries. Law (writ small and portable) worked as a technology of mobility and coordination; it created the conditions of possibility through which goods and people could move from one place to another, and the frameworks through which marketplaces could come into being. The promissory notes that Arab traders carried with them inland from the coast connected the interior of East Africa to firms in Western India through webs of credit and the movement of ivory and slaves, but also generated the pathways through which legal ideas of debt and obligation moved across these spaces. And the dhows that plied routes between East Africa, India, and Arabia often functioned as mobile law offices, their captains paralegals who knew the form, function, and place of every sheet of paper in this world of ink and seawater. Indeed, it was this already-always mobile world that Hugo Grotius acknowledged as a limiting variable in Portugal’s claim to possess the ocean.
And yet, there were always moments in which this world of law could appear illegible and untranslatable. The legal technologies that financed the trade in goods and people could finance the trade in people as goods; markets for commodities could just as easily include markets for the enslaved. The same pieces of paper that allowed the movement of passengers could just as easily be thought, in moments of confusion, to hide the movements of the enslaved. And it was during those moments that law (writ small) generated conversations about Law (writ large). I explored one such moment in a CSSH piece years ago. Around the turn of the century, dhows from the Omani port of Sur were suspected of transporting slaves from East Africa to the Gulf, but whenever they were stopped by British naval vessels their captains would produce French flags and navigation passes that would protect them from search or seizure. Those papers, along with many others that were routinely inspected by British “slave-catchers” in the Indian Ocean, formed part of the Suri dhow captains’ navigational repertoire, easing their movement around a changing imperial seascape. But those same papers ended up generating a legal dispute between Great Britain and France that ended up in the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, and included legal personnel from the United States, Austria, and the Netherlands – and laid down precedents that would later feed into discussions on how to regulate flags of convenience.
The point, ultimately, isn’t that international law and global regimes of finance look fundamentally different when we read them from the logbook or the Gujarati merchant’s ledger book. They don’t; ultimately, these are artifacts of the same historical moments, produced at different scales. But those scales aren’t necessarily nested: the pieces of the puzzle don’t neatly join together to fit into a larger picture. What happened in London didn’t only stay in London, but it also didn’t mean much for what took place off the coast of Lamu; events in those locales operated on different planes altogether, even as observations from the coast of East Africa fed into conversations in the former by way of official reporting, journalistic storytelling, and artistic rendering. Put differently, the micro scale does not always furnish a clear window through which we can observe macro-scale processes.
But there were moments in which these scales crashed into one another, and when they did, they generated conversations about law, credit, territoriality, extraterritoriality, and empire that left their imprint on larger worlds. To leapfrog back to the Arab trader in Tabora: his trade in ivory (and sometimes slaves) linked him to financiers in Zanzibar with partners in Muscat and India. When he took on a loan and generated the paper trail from the coast to the interior, he could not have imagined himself feeding into processes that would ultimately generate conversations on the Sultan of Zanzibar’s jurisdiction in the interior, sovereignty, and law – and ultimately, the Scramble for Africa. All of that was at least two or three puzzle pieces too far away. Yet we can see exactly how conversations on European colonialism emerged from precisely those moments: when two projects unfolding on two parallel planes intersected, generating processes that remade lives and refashioned pathways from Sharqiyah to Stanley Falls. A single promissory note might not allow us to see that entire world, but it does invite us to reimagine the multiple routes along which imperial designs took root, and the conceptual worlds they mistranslated along the way. As we encounter these pieces of paper, we can begin to reimagine international law and global capitalism (with and without capital letters) and see more vividly the connected worlds from which they both emerge.
“Sketches of Van”: Archives, Music, Memory
Anoush Tamar Suni
A Maroon leather suitcase in the corner of a dusty attic, holding papers clipped together and tied with a string. Julia Elyachar opens the introduction to her book, On the Semicivilized, by reflecting on a cache of her grandfather’s documents, which she found after his death. The son of an Ottoman sarraf and grandson of the Chief Rabbi of Palestine, Elyachar’s grandfather grew up traveling around the cities of the Arab world and Ottoman Empire—Beirut, Damascus, Cairo, and Istanbul—for schooling and trade. He worked for the British Mandate government of Palestine as an engineer overseeing construction of a road between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. In 1930, after conflict with the Mandate authorities when he refused to fire his Palestinian Arab employees in favor of European Jewish settlers, he moved his family to New York. A century later, Elyachar, an anthropologist, travels within these same spaces, writing about infrastructure, territory, sovereignty, archives, and the porous, unclear, and at times absent boundaries between states and empires. Her grandfather’s life and legacy resonate on many levels with Elyachar’s work, in ways both apparent and obscure.
As a scholar at work in post-Ottoman spaces, with family connections that run deep into my own studies, I had an immediate, personal response to Elyachar’s revelations. I write about peoples and places that cannot be understood apart from the historical processes that created what Elyachar calls the “semicivilized” condition. In my own work on the complex interactions of Kurds, Turks, and Armenians, today and in the Ottoman imperial past, I see connections between her excavations and my own family history.
I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in a house full of stuff. It was part library, part museum, part music studio. My mother—a piano teacher by day—was the keeper of the family memories and the family archives. She was always sorting through old papers, to which, when I was young, I paid scant attention. I knew she was working on the archive of my father’s grandfather, Grikor Mirzaian Suni, a composer and ethnomusicologist. I had heard him called a “revolutionary musician,” but what I did not realize until recently was that he was also a bona fide revolutionary. He was born in the Russian Empire, in Karabakh—a region now contested between Armenia and Azerbaijan—and studied at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory under the tutelage of Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. During his student years, he was politically active and later was a member of clandestine Armenian revolutionary movements that organized resistance in both the Russian and Ottoman empires. There is even a report that he participated in the demonstrations in 1905 in St. Petersburg now known as Bloody Sunday.
Grikor Suni was constantly on the move, fleeing across imperial borders whenever the political tides turned against him. In 1908, his home in Tiflis was raided by tsarist authorities who wanted to arrest him for revolutionary activities. He escaped and, disguised in Laz clothing, sailed with a Laz fisherman on a small fishing boat over the Black Sea to the lands of the Ottoman Empire. He stayed there, in Trabzon and then Erzurum until the eve of the First World War. In Erzurum he composed a march for the city, which pleased the local officials. When the First World War broke out, an official woke Grikor Suni and his family in the middle of the night and warned them to flee back to the Russian side of the border, since they were Russian subjects. It was by virtue of that music—the Erzurum March—that Suni and his family were able to escape the genocide in the Ottoman lands and weather the war years in Tiflis in the Russian Empire. When the Bolsheviks arrived, as his family was boarding a ship in Batumi bound for Istanbul, he was arrested but spared imprisonment because the local police chief happened to be his childhood classmate from Karabakh. In Istanbul, he taught music in Armenian schools until Kemalist forces approached the city. Uprooted once more, he took his large family to the United States.
I grew up with these legends of harrowing escapes and narrow misses. In my peripheral vision, I was aware that a family archive existed, but I had no sense of its size or import. My understanding was simply that Grikor Suni was a musician and that the archive contained musical scores and his arrangements of folk songs. My mother’s goal, as guardian of the archive, was to resurrect my great grandfather’s music, which had been suppressed during the Soviet years in Armenia because of his outspoken criticism of the Stalinist purges in the 1930s.
When my mother died suddenly in 2012, the papers and boxes she curated were shut into a closet and blocked with an enormously heavy metal filing cabinet, as if sealing a crypt. That same year I began my PhD studies at UCLA in anthropology, with an intention to study the material remnants of the Armenian community in southeastern Turkey. Though music was not the focus of my research, it was music that led me to Turkey. I grew up playing classical violin, and I picked up the oud during a summer Arabic language course in Yemen. Studying the oud took me to Armenia, Jordan, and finally, Turkey, where I was inspired to learn about the history of the destroyed Armenian community of Anatolia. At the outset, I did not know where I would conduct fieldwork. I tried several possible field sites—Mardin, Diyarbakir, Elazig, Kars, and finally, Van, which is one of the places in Turkey where the Armenian material legacy is most prominently visible.
When I traveled to Van, the place instantly resonated with me, and I could hear my mother’s voice in my ears. She was born in the United States and never visited Van until the year before her death. However, for as long as I can remember, whenever another Armenian would ask where she was from, she would answer unequivocally, “I am from Van!” Her maternal grandparents, Levon and Prapion Kazanjian, were born in Van and emigrated to the United States in 1905. They always proudly recalled their place of origin, even naming their five children in its honor—Van, Vanouhi, Vartan, Vahe, Vartouhi.
Halfway into my fieldwork, in 2015, I returned to the U.S. for the funeral of my paternal grandmother. Looking for an extra suitcase for the trip back to Turkey, I began rummaging through my mother’s closet. There among her keepsakes I came across a plastic storage box that I had never encountered before. On it was written, in blue Sharpie, in my mother’s unmistakable handwriting, Kazanjian Family History. I opened it with quivering fingers, and there on top was a stack of diaries, written by her grandfather between the 1890s and 1930s. The first few pages of one diary contained a summary of the family history. It outlined how the family had originated in the Nakhichevan region, but during the reign of Shah Abbas, in the early 1600s when the entirety of the Armenian population of the area was resettled in Isfahan, some Armenians had instead headed west to settle in Van. The diary listed the neighborhood where my great-grandfather was born. Though the city of Van was destroyed during the First World War, and later rebuilt, I was able to triangulate between historical and contemporary maps to locate the neighborhood where my family’s home had been.
It was amazing to realize how, despite all the places my studies had taken me—France, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, Armenia, Istanbul—some kind of intergenerational gravitational pull had led me to Van. My family history was not top-of-mind while I was doing my research, which focused on contemporary state violence against the Kurdish community in relation to the Armenian Genocide and the material remnants of that history. My long-term fieldwork coincided with an unexpected escalation in the protracted war between the Turkish army and the PKK—the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. With my quotidian life circumscribed by roadblocks, curfews, nightly fire fights, and roadside bombings, my thoughts seldom went back to my family’s archive in Michigan.
While conducting postdoctoral research at UCLA, I was approached by the director of the Armenian Music Program, Professor Melissa Bilal, herself an Armenian from Istanbul, where my great-grandfather had conducted choruses just after the First World War. She suggested that we put together a musical program highlighting his work and legacy and entreated me to reopen the family archive. On a visit to Michigan in 2024, I enlisted the help of my father and sister and together we finally pulled away the heavy filing cabinet from the front of the closet and opened the door. Inside, we found piles of dusty boxes last touched by my mother. As we sifted through the folders inside, we found original handwritten and printed musical scores, concert programs, newspaper clippings, and photographs. We also found traces of my great-grandfather’s political activities. A stack of note cards written in impeccable Armenian script—mostly in black ink, but with some words in red, as if to highlight them—was labeled “Grikor Suni’s Marxism Lecture Notes.” Suni had been a member of a progressive Armenian political movement in America; these were notes for the educational lectures he gave to the community.
We also found notebooks in which he recorded folk songs and made ethnographic notes. It dawned on me that he had been in the eastern Ottoman Empire between 1910 and 1914. First based in Trabzon, and later teaching at an Armenian school in Erzurum, he spent three to four months each summer visiting the major Armenian cities, including Van, collecting Armenian folk songs and legends. Inspired by his time in Van, he wrote an orchestral suite entitled “Sketches of Van.” Over one hundred years ago, my great-grandfather was conducting ethnographic and ethnomusicological research in Armenian communities that were destroyed in the 1915 genocide. A century later, I was there conducting ethnographic research, looking for the traces of the communities that he had so methodically recorded, and trying to recover and recreate that lost world.
Unfortunately, most of Grikor Suni’s papers were lost during the First World War. He entrusted them to an American missionary, Robert Stapleton, when he fled from Erzurum to Tbilisi at the start of the war, but they disappeared in the conflagration of violence and genocide that soon followed. We still wonder if that treasure will turn up one day. Among my great-grandfather’s surviving papers are letters of introduction from an Ottoman Armenian bishop, addressed to village priests and residents, asking that they assist “the well-known musician, Mr. Grikor Suni” in his work of collecting folk songs in their villages. A century later, my letters of introduction came via email, text message, or phone calls from mentors and friends to their acquaintances in Van, asking Kurdish families to host me and help me navigate a land at once familiar and unfamiliar.
Despite the great distance, both geographic and temporal, between our present lives and the lives of our ancestors, it seems to be no accident where our intellectual journeys lead us. Past and present resonate in “moments of conjuncture and flux” (Elyachar 2025: 15). Yet something remains inaccessible in those moments—echoes of lost communities and kin we can never fully know, but to whom we are vitally connected, and who shape us in ways unseen. Digging through dusty archives and landscapes of ruins, I try to put the missing pieces back in the puzzle.
Land, Sovereignty, Commons
Nora Elizabeth Barakat
In 1892, Khalil Husayn from the village of Yasur filed a claim in the Court of First Instance in the Ottoman district of Gaza. Seven years earlier, he had borrowed 30 Ottoman lira from Yusuf Moyal, who court clerks identified as a Jewish merchant from Jaffa, a Spanish subject, and a consular agent of Iran. At that time, Husayn had used two pieces of land in Yasur that he farmed as collateral for the loan. Husayn said he had paid back the 30 lira on time, but that Moyal refused to vacate the land. Moyal appeared in the Gaza court to refute Husayn’s claims, denying that he paid back his debt and brandishing title deeds for the foreclosed land that he had obtained from the registration office in Gaza after buying it. Khalil Husayn protested, asking “what can I say about these deeds, when he swears he received the money I owed him?” Moyal denied swearing and complained that his valuable time “as one of the rich men in Palestine” was being wasted in court. Based on the verified title deeds, the court ruled in Moyal’s favor.1
Related cases both before and after this one offer more information about the village of Yasur.2 Yasur’s land was part of a waqf, and the people of the village had divided its farming in shares historically. For most of Palestine’s four-century Ottoman history, land with this legal status would have been difficult to sell and near-impossible to use as collateral. To enable Khalil Husayn and a number of other men from Yasur to securitize the land they farmed and order that this land be put up for auction when they could not repay their debts to Moyal, the court relied on recent laws: the Ottoman Civil Code and a law from the early 1870s that said that waqf land as “immoveable property” could be used as collateral for debt.3 With implementation of this and related laws in civil courts across the empire, shares in village land became much easier to convert into cash or debt security.
I describe this case, which has haunted me since I read it months ago, to begin to articulate what Julia Elyachar’s On the Semicivilized has helped me to think through and ask. Elyachar focuses part of her inquiry on the history of mixed courts and extraterritorial privilege, and the twentieth-century national economy efforts that grew out of rejecting those privileges in postcolonial Egypt. In the Ottoman Empire outside Egypt, “commercial courts” took on many of the characteristics Elyachar describes with regard to mixed courts. These included both Ottoman and foreign consular representation on court panels when litigants claimed foreign nationality, reliance on commercial codes that were based in French law, and a constant concern with regulating and implementing the increasingly despised Capitulations.4
Yusuf Moyal had lived in Jaffa for a few decades before the cases described above, but the court identified him as a Spanish national.5 Even so, Khalil Husayn took his case not to a commercial court, but to the civil section of the Court of First Instance, which handled district-level disputes involving land. The venue dictated which imperial laws judges would refer to when determining their rulings: the French-inspired Commercial Code, or the Land Code and Civil Code (Mecelle), which jurists constructed as an authentic extension of both Hanafi jurisprudence and well-defended Ottoman sovereignty.6 In the civil court, the dispossession of subject-nationals like Khalil Husayn would be enacted on Ottoman terms in accordance with the Land Code and Civil Code, a bitter paradox central to the semicivilized condition.
Elyachar has given me language for a political-legal-economic status I have been trying to articulate for over a decade, along with a generation of historians attempting to understand the Ottoman position in the age of empire. She renders the experience of post-Ottoman regions colonized after World War I – placed in the waiting room of a history that has been blown up along with life in Gaza – both specific and theorizable.
In one of many generative analytical moves, Elyachar considers the legal mechanism of istibdal (exchange), which would have been the main way to sell waqf land like that of Yasur prior to the 1870s. Through istibdal, a waqf administrator and a judge exchanged waqf assets, including land, for assets deemed better for the foundation.7 Elyachar compares istibdal to the Egyptian sovereign wealth fund’s recent appropriation and assetification of public property amassed during Nasser’s national economy era, rendering that property the object of investment for corporations in the Gulf and US. Her move to value, to how property is redefined so that its once-dispersed value can be consolidated in capitalist hands, brings me back to Yasur and the loss of its commons.
Elyachar’s chapters on the commons and the human channels of communication in those spaces invite a different way of thinking, and different kinds of questions, about Yasur’s past. Without the embodied tools of ethnography, I try to imagine moving through the spaces Khalil Husayn and his family would have inhabited. What were their communicative channels? What phatic labor was involved in sustaining a share-based agricultural system over generations, and in drawing and re-drawing its exclusive human boundaries? How would these channels be different in a village of a few hundred rather than a city of 18 million, where, in the next generation, Khalil Husayn’s son would almost always know whose cigarette he was lighting or who he sat next to on the bus?
In 2017, Razan AlSalah created a short film, “Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old, and So Was the Nakba,” in which her grandmother returned to Haifa through Google Maps Streetview.8 The film captures the un-embodied longing of experiencing a place impossible to visit through a glitchy, halting and ever-loading interface. Yasur too was colonized in 1948; not even the name remains. What became of its channels, its infrastructures, and its commons? Did they live on in different forms in Gaza’s camps, enduring waves of destruction culminating in genocide? Would some traces survive on the land, only accessible via global positioning systems built for military surveillance of those who cannot return? Do such channels reside in the humans whose bodies learn them like trained dancers, or in the landscapes their feet traverse? Put differently, what remains of the commons without land?
Notes
1 Gaza Court of First Instance (GCFI) unnumbered volume, Page 134, Record 17E, 24 December 1892.
2 GCFI pp. 30-31, Records 3-6B, March 26 1889; p. 45, Record 25B, 25 November 1889.
3 “Regulation on the Sale of Immoveable Property for Debt” Düstur: I. Tertib (Matbaa-yi Amire, 1289), 1:237–38.
4 Ekrem Buğra Ekinci, Osmanlı Mahkemeleri : Tanzimat ve Sonrası (Arı Sanat, 2004), 110; Aviv Derri, “Imperial Creditors, ‘Doubtful’ Nationalities and Financial Obligations in Late Ottoman Syria: Rethinking Ottoman Subjecthood and Consular Protection,” International History Review 43, no. 5 (2020): 1–20.
5 There is a sizeable literature on the Moyal family. See e.g. Yuval Ben-Bassat, “Reconsidering the Role of a Maghrebi Family in the Yishuv in Late Ottoman Palestine: The Case of the Moyal Family,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 19, no. 4 (2020): 490–508.
6 Ahmet Cevdet Paşa and Yusuf Halaçoğlu, Maʻrûzât, Tarih Dizisi 1 (Çağrı Yayınları, 1980).
7 Nada Moumtaz, God’s Property: Islam, Charity and the Modern State (University of California Press, 2021).
8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Szilc_lOD6Q. Last accessed February 28, 2026. I thank Usha Iyer for showing me this film.
Koh Choon Hwee is assistant professor of Ottoman history at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). Her first book, The Sublime Post: How the Ottoman Imperial Post Became a Public Service (Yale University Press, 2024), won MESA’s 2025 Albert Hourani Book Prize. Her CSSH article, “The Mystery of the Missing Horses,” won the Jack Goody Article Prize 2023. Koh is currently doing research on loans and credit in Ottoman Aleppo in the period between 1600 and 1800 CE.
Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular is an associate professor in the Department of History at Rutgers University-Newark, where she teaches Middle East and Islamic Studies. Her research is on the history of the Ottoman Empire and Southeastern Europe with a focus on migrations, Muslim modernities, empires, and their legacies. She is the author of The Afterlife of Ottoman Europe: Muslims in Habsburg Bosnia Herzegovina (Stanford, 2023).
Mustafa Tuna is an associate professor at the Departments of Slavic and Eurasian Studies and History at Duke University. He is the author of Imperial Russia’s Muslims: Islam, Empire, and European Modernity, 1788-1917 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Knowing God in the Secular Age: Existence, Knowledge, and Striving for Excellence in the Thought of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi (1878-1960) (SUNY Press, forthcoming). He is currently working on Concrete Modernity in Kazan: Urbanization and Social Change in Central Anatolia since the 1960s, a study of the rapid transformation of a cluster of cob-house villages outside Turkey’s capital, Ankara, into a bustling town of sixty thousand residents.
Fahad Ahmad Bishara is Associate Professor, Indian Ocean History, and Rouhollah Ramazani Associate Professor of Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies, in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), which won the J. Willard Hurst Prize (Law and Society Association), the Jerry Bentley prize (World History Association), and the Peter Gonville Stein book award (American Society for Legal History). His second book, Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History, is forthcoming from University of California. Bishara is currently interested in scale and narration (in global, transregional, and micro history) and the questions they raise for how we write about abstract concepts of law and capitalism.
Anoush Tamar Suni is a research fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute at University of Michigan. She is completing her first book, Memory in Ruins: Politics of History and the Afterlives of Genocide in Anatolia, which traces the interconnected histories of Muslim Kurdish and Christian Armenian communities, focusing on state violence, local memory, and material landscapes. Her second project—Imagining the Underground: Violence, Value, and Enchanted Treasure—explores the hunt for mythical Armenian gold against backdrops of genocide and displacement. Her articles have appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Anthropological Quarterly, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies.
Nora Elizabeth Barakat is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. Her research focuses on people, commodities, and landscapes in the regions between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her first book, Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2023), examines how tent-dwelling inhabitants of the Syrian interior contributed to and contested attempts to transform the desert fringe into a grain-exporting breadbasket in the second half of the nineteenth century. Barakat is currently working on twentieth-century legacies of late Ottoman economy-making, particularly the codification of civil law.
