Law and Legality in the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey [Paperback]

The editors of this volume have gathered leading scholars on the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey to chronologically examine the sweep and variety of sociolegal projects being carried in the region. These efforts intersect issues of property, gender, legal literacy, the demarcation of village boundaries, the codification of Islamic law, economic liberalism, crime and punishment, and refugee rights across the empire and the Aegean region of the Turkish Republic.

Kent F. Schull is Associate Professor of Ottoman and Modern Middle East History at Binghamton University, SUNY. He is author of Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity and coeditor (with Christine Isom-Verhaaren) of Living in the Ottoman Realm: Empire and Identity, Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries.

M. SafaSara?olu is Associate Professor of History at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.

Robert Zens is Associate Professor of History at LeMoyne College. Schull and Zens are coeditors of the Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies.

In all, this collection of essays, while not for the lay reader, is a welcome scholarly contribution to the study of law and legal affairs in the Ottoman Empire, with an emphasis on legal reforms, the politics of managing empire-citizen relationships, and institutional legal responses to challenges from Western powers. As such, this volume opens a new perspective for historians to develop and explore further.

1 The Editors: Introduction
2 Timothy Fitzgerald: Reaching the Flocks: Literacy and the Mass Reception of Ottoman Law in the Sixteenth-Century Arab World
3 Hadi Hosainy: Ottoman Legal Practice and Non-Judicial Actors in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul
4 Michael Nizri: Defining Village Boundaries at the Time of the Introduction of the Malikane System: The Struggle of the Ottoman State for Reaffirming Ownership of the Land
5 M. Safa Sara?olu: Economic Interventionism, Islamic Law and Provincial Government in thl#