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What did the practice of law look like on the high seas? This has been a matter of some discussion among legal historians, with the bulk of the evidence coming from encounters between European ships in the Atlantic and Asia. This article takes a different tack, taking as its starting point a series of contracts copied into the logbook of the early-twentieth century Arab dhow captain (nakhoda) 'Abdulmajeed Al-Failakawi. Although some of these appear to have been contracts that the nakhoda entered into or witnessed, most were contractual templates that presented formulas for a variety of written obligations between members of the Indian Ocean maritime community. In reading these formulas alongside contracts left behind by Al-Failakawi and other Indian Ocean nakhodas, I reflect on how law circulated by members of an itinerant society of mariners that sought to forge the contours of a commercial world on their ships and across the waters, and weave it through an imperial seascape. I explore how workaday forms of law and legal epistemologies circulated around the maritime marketplaces of the Indian Ocean world, at the margins of a colonial and imperial political economy, through actors who read across different genres of literature, and who moved between the multiple roles of captain, navigator, supercargo, and scribe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This obituary pays tribute to Michael Naylor Pearson, a historian who made significant contributions to the study of the Indian Ocean. Pearson's work emphasized the concept of littoral society, which highlighted the shared experiences and connections among communities settled along the shores of the Indian Ocean. His writings also explored the circulations that shaped society, challenging traditional geographical boundaries. Pearson's work paved the way for a new understanding of global connection and influenced fields such as environmental history. His contributions were highly regarded and his impact on the field of Indian Ocean history was significant. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the contours of debt and labor in the early twentieth-century Persian Gulf pearl dive. It examines the barwa , a declaration exchanged by nakhoda s (dhow captains) about the amounts that divers owed and the terms by which they might be hired out. By looking both through and at the barwa, we find a window into the Indian Ocean maritime bazaar, and into the artifacts through which mobile and itinerant laborers were bound to the dhow and its captain. Maritime actors used these papers to navigate the boundary between person and property, and between free and unfree, all within a changing commercial and legal world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collection of essays in this volume examines forms of business documentation in the late Persianate world and the Indian Ocean, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Looking upon business in its broadest sense, the themes range from property disputes within families to inter-polity and inter-imperial deals, all of which is captured within the notion of the bazaar. Presenting documents and documentary forms written in Persian, but also the associated languages of Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi and Rajasthani, the articles collectively enrich the idea of the Persianate, delineating its specific dispensations within regional contexts, and also its boundaries and limitations. This is also a contribution to the study of Persographia, in this case Persianate rather than just Persian writing. The articles study specific language combinations, lexical elements and usages that came to be deployed in different areas and the legal cultures they provide evidence for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This concluding reflection on the forum, "The Everyday Materials of Colonial Legal History," seeks to emphasize the contributing essays engagement with historical methodologies that take seriously objects, signs, and the theatrical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, 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 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 capitalism 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 civilizational 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article invites readers to rethink the work that routes can do in world history by braiding together the spatial and historical imaginaries of an itinerant community: the dhow captains (nakhodas) of Kuwait. Through a close reading of two genres of nakhoda writings, logbooks and nautical manuals, it explores the deliberate process by which they constructed their movement across the sea. It suggests that for dhows, travel across the Indian Ocean was a voyage through world history itself—a route along a recent and distant past, entangled with an imperial present. Through these materials historians can move towards a sense of space and time that foregrounds the imaginative processes that produce the Indian Ocean as an historical arena on the part of those who spent their lives traversing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a single moment—a court case that took place in Zanzibar in 1910—and uses it to explore the legal imaginaries that circulated around the Western Indian Ocean at the height of British imperialism. It stitches together the actions of litigants, the utterances of qadis, and the proclamations of jurists, reading them alongside the silences in the legal material itself to bring to life a world of law, mobility, and imagination. More broadly, it suggests that through the exploration of parallel but never fully intersecting legal encounters in South Arabia and East Africa that emerged from a single moment, historians might use micro-level discourses and actions to make claims about macro-level phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]