This volume presents research on craft workers within and outside the guild structure from the modern and contemporary Mediterranean world. Several of the essays are based on research relating to the late sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire while other studies deal with traditional style crafts in twentieth-century Turkey and Egypt such as tanning or the manual production of copper vessels where Ottoman craft traditions were still of significance.

Constituting Modernity originated from a critique of a liberal understanding of property relation as one between a person and a 'thing'. States are perceived to be fundamental obstacles on the way to an individual's appropriation of the ""thing."" State intervention is often considered to be a reason for a presumed absence of private property in non-European contexts. The research presented here contests these assumptions from different perspectives, both in a European and non-European context. As multi-disciplinary as it is wide-ranging, the work ranges from the practices of the 19th...

This work focuses on the relationship between the law and the concept of the person in modern Arab societies. It directly addresses the questions of continuities, transformations and ruptures of such notions. Law performs a central function in revealing social and historical dynamics and in being itself a tool of its implementation. The introduction of Western-style legal systems partially led to a transposition of characteristics of centrality, individualism and secularism. Standing Trial is the first truly interdisciplinary study of its subject, combining legal, historical and...

The economic history of Islamic societies in the Mediterranean before 1800 has lagged behind political, diplomatic, and social history of the area. The articles cover three topics: land, trades, and money. They examine the complexity of the history of property, including private property, and its links to individuals and communities by exploring the work of ordinary craftsmen and tradesmen, and the challenges that they confronted by providing a perspective of the individual in the context of his or her community. This view of economic realities, suggests new ways to understand economic...