Regulating Commerce: Law and Economic Life in the Late Ottoman Empire

Abstract

Regulating Commerce narrates how a distinct Ottoman jurisdiction for adjudicating commercial life emerged in the nineteenth century, and how this legal system worked in practice. The nineteenth century was a period of intense legal and economic change in the Ottoman Empire during the period known as the Tanzimat. This dissertation investigates the intersection of these two fields by studying a new legal institution: the Ottoman commercial court (Tr. ticāret maḥkemesi, Ar. maḥkamat al-tijāra). One of the major, yet underexplored, transformations of nineteenth century Ottoman commercial life was how sharīʿa courts lost their jurisdiction over commercial litigation. The process began at the start of the nineteenth century and by the 1860s there were over a hundred specialized commercial courts in operation across the empire. These were, in turn, incorporated as a distinct part of the state’s new Niẓāmiyya legal infrastructure. Like other parts of this emerging system, commercial law relied on new courts, new codes and new procedures. Unlike other courts, it was staffed by a mixture of bureaucrats and merchants who took up state appointments to regulate local commercial life. This development has conventionally been associated with European influence. This dissertation, however, situates commercial regulation within the larger project of nineteenth century Ottoman bureaucratic reorganization as the state responded to new and expanding commercial practices. It introduces the rare and virtually unexplored registers of a working provincial commercial court in Damascus, between 1885 and 1900, to investigate how this legal system fit into a local economic context and to reconstruct how it operated. Closely reading these registers in conjunction with law codes, Ottoman state documents, legal commentaries, treatises on Islamic law, late Ottoman law journals, biographical dictionaries, architectural histories, travel narratives and provincial yearbooks, this study highlights the neglected role that merchants, bureaucrats, scribes, notaries and a wide variety of litigants played in defining the practical legal boundaries of late Ottoman economic life. At the same time, the project demonstrates how legal practice – in particular the role of documentary evidence and the emergence of professional legal intermediaries in the court room – can be used to highlight significant continuities and changes with the Ottoman sharīʿa court tradition that have been missed by conventional narratives. In doing so, the project tells the story of late Ottoman legal reform in a new way, through the actors who substantively engaged with commercial law.