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Courts and Constitutions in South Asia and the Global South: A View from the Middle East

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2023

Faiz Ahmed*
Affiliation:
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

Abstract

Not long ago, the study of comparative law in U.S. law schools was dominated by North American and European constitutional systems. Thanks to the contributions of a new generation of legal historians, including those canvassed in this special issue, the landscape is changing. In this special issue, scholars of courts and constitutions in twentieth century Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, India, and Nepal have come together to share novel sources, perspectives, and analyses of significant constitutional experiments in the Global South, specifically twentieth century South Asia. This afterword reflects on these important scholarly contributions by highlighting common threads and divergences in the case studies presented in this volume—from the perspective of a legal historian of the late Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East. Ultimately, the author concludes that the articles in this special issue persuasively stamp modern South Asian legal history “on the map” not only for specialists of this large and populous region, but for students and scholars of comparative constitutionalism and global legal history more broadly.

Type
Invited Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Society for Legal History

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References

1 Oketh-Ogondo, H.W.O., Constitutions without Constitutionalism: An African Political Paradox (New York: ACLS, 1988)Google Scholar. Brown, Nathan J., Constitutions in a Nonconstitutional World: Arab Basic Laws and the Prospects for Accountable Government (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001)Google Scholar. For a parallel study in Central Asia, see Toktogazieva, Saniia, “Constitution Without Constitutionalism? Challenges to Republicanism in Kyrgyz Republic,” Constitutional Review 5 (2019): 275–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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10 This literature is too voluminous to cite here; for only a few notable examples, see Bernard Cohn, “Law and the Colonial State in India,” in History and Power in the Study of Law: New Directions in Legal Anthropology, ed. June Starr and Jane Collier (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Sanjay Nigam, “Disciplining and Policing the ‘Criminals by Birth,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 27 (1990), 131–64; Radhika Singha, “‘Providential Circumstances: The Thuggee Campaign of the 1830s and Legal Innovation,” Modern Asian Studies 27 (1993): 83–146; Janaki Nair, Women and the Law in Colonial India (New Delhi: National Law School of India University, 1996); Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Scott Kugle, “Framed, Blamed and Renamed: the Reshaping of Islamic Law in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 35 (2001): 257–313; Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); and Nicholas Dirks, Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

11 Yahaya, “Juridical Pan-Islam,” 256.

12 This is also a rapidly growing area of scholarship in Ottoman, Middle Eastern, and Islamic legal history. See, for example, Hüseyin Yılmaz, “Containing Sultanic Authority: Constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire before Westernization,” The Journal of Ottoman Studies 45 (2015): 231–64; Mina Khalil, “Early Modern Constitutionalism in Egypt and Iran,” UCLA Journal of Islamic and Near Eastern Law 15 (2016): 33–54; Said Arjomand and Nathan Brown, eds., The Rule of Law, Islam, and Constitutional Politics in Egypt and Iran (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013); and Elizabeth Thompson, Justice Interrupted: The Struggle for Constitutional Government in the Middle East (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).

13 Nathan Irvin Huggins, “The Deforming Mirror of Truth,” in Black Odyssey: The African- American Ordeal in Slavery (New York: Vintage, 1990), xi–lxx; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995); and Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).