As part of our upcoming celebration of the many publications by members of our department in 2016 and 2016 this Friday (4 PM, at Alumni House, 61 Summit Street, Burlington, VT 05401), we are featuring several of the books that will be celebrated.
This featured title is by Professor Boğaç Ergene.
The Economics of Ottoman Justice: Settlement and Trial in the Sharia Courts (Cambridge University Press, 2016), is an assessment of Ottoman legal practices, which identifies gender-, religious-, and class-specific patterns of court use and demonstrates how the early modern court reproduced socioeconomic hierarchies in its operations. The manuscript, based on a systematic analysis of thousands of contracts, settlements, and litigations, also explores how the legal functions of one provincial court changed in tandem with major fiscal, economic, and administrative transformations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Methodologically, the book makes significant contributions to Ottoman legal studies by systematically engaging the insights from recent developments in the Law and Economics literature and by employing sophisticated quantitative (as well as qualitative) techniques designed specifically for research on Ottoman legal practice. The Law and Economics scholarship help the authors to offer theoretically-based hypotheses regarding how different segments of the Ottoman population behaved in the court and how they performed against other groups in disputes. The authors test these hypotheses by using sophisticated quantitative techniques designed specifically for their sources. Quantitative research has been rare in the field of Islamic-Ottoman legal studies, confined to a handful of recent journal articles. The investigation offered in the book not only poses empirical challenges to some of the established, yet mostly anecdotal, observations of previous researchers, but it introduces new questions about court behavior and performance of various client groups, questions that require state of the art quantitative techniques for systematic analysis.
Please join us on Friday afternoon at Alumni House! Refreshments will be served.
