The nineteenth century is considered the “century of property.” In this century, the rise of capitalism, colonial and imperial expansion, and normalization of the idea(l) of private property overlapped to produce new forms of owning and holding, particularly so in the colonized areas. This reading-intensive seminar will examine in comparative context imperial and colonial racialized reconfigurations of property in four regions: French North Africa, British India, Russian Turkestan, and (post-)Ottoman European provinces. In each of these regions, empires and states encountered forms of property ownership shaped by custom, Islamic law, centuries of local legal regulation, and local relationships to nature and landscape. We will ask what new technologies of property management and what legal and scholarly means the new states employed to regulate property forms they encountered. How did these changes affect the local lifeworlds? How did the formations of racial knowledge go hand-in-hand with the production of economic inequality through the transformation of property regimes?
- Lehrende/r: Jelena Radovanovic