Transactions and Documentation in the Persianate World

This workshop invites scholars to investigate traditions of legal documentation related to trade and other transactions related to property in a vast but under-studied commercial sphere – the Persianate world. This was an enormous, multi-ethnic and durable cosmopolis that stretched from Bengal to Bosnia, and variably included within itself major Islamic empires as well as more regionalised states. It also provided the cultural framework within which merchant networks had to function, whether these be family and community-based, such as those of the Armenians, Gujaratis and Multanis, or chartered corporations such as the European trading companies. This workshop offers an opportunity for a close reading and comparison of legal instruments employed by these and other entities within the Persianate world. It invites study of legal instruments used to record a full range of transactions including the commercial but stretching beyond it to the pious and familial, so as to capture the various social contexts in which material transactions required documentation.

In particular, we invite scholars to reflect upon:

• The nature of the economies within the Persianate sphere, with reflections on the ‘bazaar’ as well as globalisation
• The boundaries and relations between law and economy, with special attention to institutions such as notaries and tribunals
• The substantiation of law in specific cultural and linguistic terms, through specific documentary devices
• The linguistic, formulaic and semantic variation of legal and technical terms across sub-regions within the Persianate sphere, and the implications of such variations.