Dr James Baldwin

Dr James Baldwin - Lecturer in Empires of the Early Modern Muslim World

I work on the legal, social and political history of the Ottoman Empire, with a particular focus on Egypt. I teach survey courses on the early modern Ottoman Empire and the making of the modern Middle East, a further subject on the history of Islamic law, and contribute to the core postgraduate course of the Centre for Islamic and West Asian Studies, among other courses. Before coming to Royal Holloway I taught at the University of Warwick and held postdoctoral fellowships at Queen Mary, University of London, Koç University and Harvard Law School.

My first book, Islamic Law and Empire in Ottoman Cairo, studied the practice of law in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Cairo. Using the records of shari’a courts, the governor’s council and the petitioning system, the book explored how the legal power of judges, jurists and political officials interacted, and how law connected Cairene society with the imperial capital Istanbul. I have also published articles on petitioning in Ottoman Egypt, prostitution in Ottoman law, the legal aftermath of a military coup in seventeenth-century Cairo, and factional violence among Ottoman Egypt’s elites.

My current research looks at the broader impact of law on Ottoman politics and society. I’m working on a second monograph examining the roles of the courts and of political violence in mediating the struggles among elite households over land and political offices in eighteenth-century Egypt. I’m also working on articles on topics including women who put their husbands in the debtors’ prison, legal documents recovered by archaeologists from domestic buildings, and the portrayal of judges and courts in Ottoman-Arabic literature. Lastly, I’m completing a study funded by a small grant from the Humboldt Foundation on the seventeenth-century Ottoman practice of transporting archival records to the front during wartime, and the Europeans who plundered and collected these documents.

I’m also involved in several collaborative and outreach activities. I edit and translate original Ottoman legal records for SHARIAsource, a digital project run by Intisar Rabb at Harvard Law School. I’m on the steering committee for the ERC project The Making of Ottoman Law: The Agency and Interaction of Diverse Groups in Lawmaking, 1450-1650, run by Abdurrahman Atçıl at Sabancı University. I regularly give lectures at Historical Association branches on the Ottoman background to the modern Middle East, and run sessions in schools in Egham and south London on the Ottomans and on the role of Islamic law in British Muslim society.

More information about my research is available via PURE. 

Email - james.baldwin@rhul.ac.uk