Preliminary Programme

In this paper, I would talk about seals, ciphers, graphic symbols in marginal notations in legal documents, in order to examine various ways in which the protagonists situated and styled themselves in 17th to early 19th century South Asia. In order to do so, I will use several collections of documents, predominantly written in Persian, but with crucial interleaving of other languages, that were collected and preserved in households and institutions possessing significant wealth. Within each collection, documents range from imperial/royal orders (farmans) down to humble receipts for payments received. I will offer a description of the manner in which a range of graphic elements, such as seals and hand-drawn symbols, sometimes stylised words (ciphers), were used in these documents to represent the protagonists and their mutual relationships. In doing so, I will attempt to address but also move beyond the notion of lineage, caste, community and region as stable sources of selfhood and point instead to the way in which interpersonal/inter-status relations, arraigned around specific goals, shaped legal identities in episodic encounters. (Show less)

The Russian empire was greatly impacted by its southern and eastern steppe frontiers, which were populated by numerous nomadic polities, sedentary tribes and Cossack groups. As social and political organization of these diverse populations was loose and decentralized, the Russian empire faced the need to create various social, administrative and political institutions in order to ensure stable social relations and administration. While the historians use the term “colonial policies” to describe these processes, they recognize that the contiguous type of the Russian empire blurred boundaries between the metropole and colonies and pushed the empire to recognize integrated people as its subject with certain rights. [Khodarkovsky 2002; Kivelson 2006; Sunderland 2004]. In contrast to the steppe frontiers, a polity known as the Hetmanate is considered in the historiography as a standard sedentary polity with stable social relations.
My argument, however, is that the origins of the Hetmanate from the Cossack rebellion of the middle of the seventeenth century led to the emergence of a hybrid kind of hierarchies and power relations. Social relations in the Hetmanate were unstable and complex and therefore presented the imperial center with not a simple task to cope. Until Catherine the Great envisioned and put into practice an idea of homogeneous administration, the imperial authorities did not measure conditions in peripheral territories against the “norm” they could find in the core territories. Thus, the primary vector of policies towards the Hetmanate in the eighteenth century was an energetic engagement with local social composition rather than its active reshaping. By the means of censuses, legislation and mobility control, the Russian empire intentionally enhanced and shaped distinct local social hierarchies within the Hetmanate in order to ensure stability and smooth extraction of resources. In my research I rely on the notion of an “empire of difference”, which is applied in the historiography to describe varying modes of governance within different empires. Rich archival sources, such as petitions, laws, administrative reports and court materials, allow me to tackle both local and central perspectives. (Show less)

In my paper I will discuss the theoretical background within which I’m studying law as a classification device in the Portuguese Empire. I will begin with some considerations on the role of law and legal classification of people in colonial situations, from the Modern to Contemporary Ages. Then, I will try to give answers to a core question, which is “Why did colonial law invested so much in the classification of people?”. Finally, I will make some connections between this theoretical framework and my research on the legal condition of persons classified as Indígenas as well as on its impact on identities and on the daily lives of populations of African origin in Contemporary Portuguese Empire. My sources will be colonial legal doctrine and laws, courts jurisprudence and also historiographical literature that will allow a comparative approach to legal categories that were enacted at different times and geographies of the Portuguese Empire. (Show less)

In 1647, the Adil Shahi Sultanate, based in the Marathi- and Kannada-speaking portions of the western Deccan plateau, promulgated an order (farman) imposing a new tax on the prosperous Lingayat trading community. This tax may have reflected a more general reorientation in the regime’s attitude towards its Hindu subjects, yet it was also an especially onerous expression of its capacity to regulate commercial relations. In this paper, I will explore the legal means for extracting monies and goods, compelling labour, and resolving disputes over commercial property in seventeenth-century western India, focusing in particular on traders and artisans resident in the Adil Shahi district of Sholapur. Imperial orders issued to centrally appointed officials illuminate how the state’s demand for specialized goods and services limited the mobility of skilled artisans. At the same time, documents from the collection of a prominent lineage of Lingayat traders demonstrate that intra-family proprietary disputes largely fell outside the reach of the imperial court, requiring instead the interventions of assemblies of village- and district-based notables. Certain procedural aspects of such cases adjudicated at the local level suggest how caste and community identities were made concrete through the legal process. (Show less)