A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Asian Connections)

In this innovative legal history of economic life in the Western Indian Ocean, Bishara examines the transformations of Islamic law and Islamicate commercial practices during the emergence of modern capitalism in the region. In this time of expanding commercial activity, a mélange of Arab, Indian, Swahili and Baloch merchants, planters, jurists, judges, soldiers and seamen forged the frontiers of a shared world. The interlinked worlds of trade and politics that these actors created, the shared commercial grammars and institutions that they developed and the spatial and socio-economic mobilities they engaged in endured until at least the middle of the twentieth century. This major study examines the Indian Ocean from Oman to India and East Africa over an extended period of time, drawing together the histories of commerce, law and empire in a sophisticated, original and richly textured history of capitalism in the Islamic world.

• Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947 (Studies in Legal History)
• A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900
• Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International Law, 1800-1850
• The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India
• Empire of Cotton: A Global History
• Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350
• Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750
• Margins of the Market (California World History Library)
• Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
• Imperial Connections