Graduate Student, History
Thesis Title: A Sea of Debt: Law, Empire and Commercial Society in the Western Indian Ocean, c. 1850-1940
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Engseng Ho
Edward Balleisen Timur Kuran |
About
My research explores a distinctive Indian Ocean contractual culture, one drawing upon an Islamic legal genealogy but with radically refashioned conceptions of property rights, encountered an evolving Anglo-Indian legal regime that gave pre-eminence to written deeds and formal titles – legal vehicles that Arab and African merchants recognized, but approached with greater flexibility. In this encounter, merchants did not passively accept the changes to the legal landscape of commerce; rather, they actively shaped it, mobilizing existing commercial and legal instruments in imaginative ways in order to assert their property rights within the new framework. My thesis reconstructs an international legal tug-of-war between British-protected creditors, who pushed for the strict applicability of Anglo-Indian law to the commercial communities of the Western Indian Ocean, and their Arab and African debtors, who did their utmost to confound the changing legal regime.
