A systematic analysis of legal practice in a sharia court in the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire endured long periods of warfare, facing intense financial pressures and new international mercantile and monetary trends. The Empire also experienced major political-administrative restructuring and socioeconomic transformations. In the context of this tumultuous change, The Economics of Ottoman Justice examines Ottoman legal practices and the sharia court's operations to reflect on the judicial system and provincial relationships. Metin Coşgel and Boğaç Ergene provide a systematic depiction of socio-legal interactions, identifying how different social, economic, gender and religious groups used the court, how they settled their disputes, and which factors contributed to their success at trial. Using an economic approach, Coşgel and Ergene offer rare insights into the role of power differences in judicial interactions, and into the reproduction of communal hierarchies in court, and demonstrate how court use patterns changed over time.

The Ottoman Empire (1299-1923) existed at the crossroads of the East and the West. Neither the history of Western Asia, nor that of Eastern Europe, can be fully understood without knowledge of the history of the Ottoman Empire. The question is often raised of whether or not economic thinking can exist in a non-capitalistic society. In the Ottoman Empire, like in all other pre-capitalistic cultures, the economic sphere was an integral part of social life, and elements of Ottoman economic thought can frequently be found in amongst political, social and religious ideas. Ottoman economic thinking cannot, therefore, be analyzed in isolation; analysis of economic thinking can reveal aspects of the entire world view of the Ottomans. Based on extensive archival work, this landmark volume examines Ottoman economic thinking in the classical period using three concepts: humorism, circle of justice and household economy. Basing the research upon the writings of the Ottoman elite and bureaucrats, this book explores Ottoman economic thinking starting from its own dynamics, avoiding the temptation to seek modern economic theories and approaches in the Ottoman milieu.

This book argues that the periodic ceremonial intrusion into the everyday lives of people across the Ottoman Empire, which the annual royal birthday and accession-day celebrations constituted, had multiple, far-reaching and largely unexplored consequences. On the one hand, it brought ordinary subjects into symbolic contact with the monarch and forged lasting vertical ties of loyalty to him, irrespective of language, location, creed or class. On the other hand, the rounds of royal celebration played a key role in the creation of new types of horizontal ties and ethnic group consciousness that crystallized into national movements and, after the empire's demise, national monarchies.

Explores the emergence, florescence, decay, and rejuvenation of the Sunni saint cult and shrine-complex of Shaykh al-Islam Ahmad-i Jam over nine-hundred years.

Possessors and Possessed analyzes how and why museums—characteristically Western institutions—emerged in the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Shaw argues that, rather than directly emulating post-Enlightenment museums of Western Europe, Ottoman elites produced categories of collection and modes of display appropriate to framing a new identity for the empire in the modern era. In contrast to late-nineteenth-century Euro-American museums, which utilized organizational schema based on positivist notions of progress to organize exhibits of fine arts, Ottoman museums featured military spoils and antiquities long before they turned to the "Islamic" collections with which they might have been more readily associated. The development of these various modes of collection reflected shifting moments in Ottoman identity production. Shaw shows how Ottoman museums were able to use collection and exhibition as devices with which to weave counter-colonial narratives of identity for the Ottoman Empire. Impressive for both the scope and the depth of its research, Possessors and Possessed lays the groundwork for future inquiries into the development of museums outside of the Euro-American milieu.

Under the rule of the current economic order, social injustice is ever-increasing. Issues such as poverty, inhumane working conditions, inadequate wages, social insecurity and an unhealthy labor market continue to persist. Many states are also unable to produce policies capable of resolving these problems. The characteristics of the capitalist system currently render it unable to provide social justice. In fact, on the contrary, the system reinforces these injustices and prevents economic and social welfare from reaching the masses. Many Muslim scholars have analyzed and, indeed, criticized this system for years. This book argues that an alternative and more equitable theoretical and practical economical order can been developed within the framework of Islamic principles. On the other hand, the experiences of societies under the rule of Muslim governments do not always seem to hold great promise for an alternative understanding of social justice. In addition, the behaviors of Muslim individuals within their economic lives are mostly shaped by the necessities of daily economic conditions rather than by the tenets of Islam that stand with social justice. Until 1990s, studies of Islamic economics made connections between finance and the notion of social justice, but work conducted more recently has neglected this issue. It is therefore evident that the topic of social justice needs to be revisited in a more in-depth manner. Filling an important gap in existing literature, the book uniquely connects social justice and Islamic finance and economics on this topic. Theory, practice and key issues are presented simultaneously throughout this book, which is based on the writings of a number of eminent scholars.