Credit Oases: Capitalism, Islamic Law and the Ottoman Legacy from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, 1870-1970

FAIN: FEL-267998-20

Nora Elizabeth Barakat
NYUAD (Abu Dhabi 94305-2004 United Arab Emirates)

Research and writing leading to a book on the development of credit and mortgage markets in the Middle East in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Credit Oases explores Ottoman economy-making in the Middle Eurasian region between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. In the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman government responded to expanding regional credit networks that fueled commodity production from wheat in Syria to dates in the Persian Gulf with an arsenal of codified law. These laws outlined a universal legal infrastructure governing credit and mortgage contracts and transforming both into revenue sources for the government across a territorially-defined jurisdiction. However, non-official realms of debt contracting and expansive British and French legal regimes threatened the Ottoman government’s claims to defining and legitimating credit and mortgage contracts. The resulting contested framework remained the basis for civil law under British, French and postcolonial regimes across the Middle Eurasian region, until new Gulf oil economies precipitated major transformations in the credit landscape in the 1970s.

Associated Products

Histories of Capitalism Zoomfest: Pedagogies and Definitions (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Histories of Capitalism Zoomfest: Pedagogies and Definitions
Author: Nora Elizabeth Barakat
Abstract: Event abstract: The study of political economy and capitalism in the Islamic world is attracting renewed attention among the region’s specialists. Whereas groundbreaking work in this field in the 1970s was largely inspired by quantitative and/or Marxist approaches, recent work seeks to incorporate the cultural and global turns, including a large body of work on social transformation in the Middle East since “early modernity.” Yet the heterodoxy of the “new history of capitalism” has raised questions as to what defines this turn as a research agenda. This event brings historians of diverse concentrations together, including scholars of China and the Indian Ocean. The conversations are divided into four sessions. Each session highlights a salient theme that has preoccupied historians - typically working outside the field of Middle Eastern Studies - associated with the new history of capitalism and cognate fields. Panel abstract: This is a definitions-meets-pedagogy panel that asks participants to share how they might teach big questions about capitalism and the history of capitalism in the Middle East to undergraduate students and/or to a public audience. While there is a substantial literature surrounding these big questions, we are more curious about how we may translate these into concrete terms in our teaching.
Date: 11/5/21
Conference Name: Histories of Capitalism Zoomfest

Text Creation from Arabic Historical Sources (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Text Creation from Arabic Historical Sources
Author: Nora Elizabeth Barakat
Abstract: This talk covered the OpenGulf research group's work to create machine-readable text using printed and handwritten historical sources. The talk focused on Ibrahim al-Haydari's treatise on Basra, Baghdad and the Arabian Peninsula, available in a printed edition, and the handwritten letters of Muhammad al-Ajjaji, a prominent Gulf-based merchant, held at a private archive in Dubai. The talk discussed the creation of handwritten text recognition (HTR) models using the Transkribus program on both printed and handwritten texts produced in the Persian Gulf.
Date: 11/20/21
Conference Name: Digital Humanities and Islamic Studies Workshop

Approaching Ottoman-Era Court Records as Sources for Economic Data (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Approaching Ottoman-Era Court Records as Sources for Economic Data
Author: Nora Elizabeth Barakat
Abstract: This presentation discussed the landscape of Ottoman-era court records, detailed their potential for producing economic data, and discussed the prospects for handwritten text recognition models that would create annotatable text files for data creation. This presentation was part of a broader discussion between historians and Islamic studies scholars at Stanford and Oxford about the potential for future collaboration in the field of economic history.
Date: 1/27/22
Conference Name: Oxford Center for Islamic Studies - Stanford Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies Economic History Collaborative Workshop

Building an Ottoman National Economy: Land, Religious Identity and Capital Expansion in the Syrian Interior (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Building an Ottoman National Economy: Land, Religious Identity and Capital Expansion in the Syrian Interior
Author: Nora Elizabeth Barakat
Abstract: This talk discussed the creation of an Ottoman national economy especially in the realm of property relations in Syria. Codified law that stipulated the dispossession of populations deemed unproductive was an important element of national economy production in the late Ottoman context, and the Syrian interior was no exception. However, capitalist expansion was limited in the case of Ottoman property relations by concerns over foreign land ownership and maintaining imperial sovereignty. The talk also discussed the ways local actors were able to avoid or actively resist dispossession both in and out of court by taking advantage of the tension between capitalist expansion and imperial sovereignty, producing uneven patterns of land registration and tenure across Syria.
Date: 2/11/22
Conference Name: Dispossession and its Legacies

Mapping Gulf Spaces: Postcolonial Approaches to Textual Heritage (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Mapping Gulf Spaces: Postcolonial Approaches to Textual Heritage
Author: David Joseph Wrisley
Author: Nora Elizabeth Barakat
Author: Mohammad Khalil
Author: Rhea Kale
Abstract: This event surveys the OpenGulf project's efforts to prepare, analyze and visualize digitized sources on the historical geography of the Arabian Peninsula and wider Gulf region. British colonial texts in English and tools designed to analyze them have dominated the digital landscape. We discuss new ways to approach, deconstruct and represent these sources, as well as horizons for increasing access to and knowledge of texts in Arabic and other languages.
Date: 4/12/22
Conference Name: Forum for Interdisciplinary Gulf Heritage Studies

Building an Ottoman National Economy: Migration, Capital and Sovereignty in the Syrian Interior (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Building an Ottoman National Economy: Migration, Capital and Sovereignty in the Syrian Interior
Author: Nora Elizabeth Barakat
Abstract: Late Ottoman officials saw the Syrian interior as a vital part of a "national economy" after the fiscal and territorial crises of the 1870s. This talk introduces interrelated debates over immigration, capital investment, and territorial sovereignty within this framework. It offers a new historical explanation for the disparate experiences of Anatolia and the Arab provinces before and during World War I, especially with regard to dispossession, displacement and genocide.
Date: 5/18/22
Conference Name: Stanford History Department "Historical Conversations" Series

OpenGulf (Web Resource)
Title: OpenGulf
Author: David Joseph Wrisley
Author: Nora Elizabeth Barakat
Abstract: OpenGulf is a transdisciplinary research group focusing on historical documentation about the Gulf. OpenGulf was launched in the Arts and Humanities Division of NYU Abu Dhabi. The projects publish open historical datasets, corpora and digital exhibits with the aim of opening Gulf Studies to digital historical exploration, analysis and interpretation in the service of open research and pedagogy.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: http://opengulf.github.io

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