This dissertation explores the issue of fugitive peasants by focusing primarily on the Volga-Urals region of Russia and situating it within the broader imperial population policy between 1649 and 1796. In the Law Code of 1649, Russia definitively bound peasants of all ranks to t…
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Prevailing approaches in the comparative historical study of peasant mobilization assume the relationship between peasants and state institutions to be inherently antagonistic. By contrast, this dissertation argues that locally embedded legal cultures are crucial in mediating an…
Through a study of irrigation and water usage, this dissertation examines the function and eventual demise of a system of Ottoman imperial natural resource management and balance over the course of the long eighteenth century (1650 to 1820). Using both Arabic and Ottoman Turkish…
Ethiopia is an old agrarian society endowed with a skilled and hard-working peasantry that carries a rich fund of agricultural knowledge. Yet Ethiopian peasants have been the main victims of the cyclical droughts and famines. Recurring famines helped to bring about the 1974 revo…
This dissertation explores the experiences of Egyptian peasants from the Delta province of Minufiyya who were tried for murder by newly created "native" or "national" courts between 1884 and 1914. Through the study of 2,000 pages of criminal files, I deconstruct how the colonial…
This dissertation attempts to displace contemporary approaches to the anthropological study of Islam and in so doing offers a historically more grounded conceptual alternative to the existing literature on Islam and women. This is achieved by focusing on the discourses and pract…
After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a popular Western attitude characterized the inevitable changes within the post-Soviet constituent republics as leading toward transition from Communism to Capitalism. The transition to the latter would take place over the course of …
This dissertation focuses on slaves and peasants as self-consciousness actors in northwestern Sierra Leone between 1896 to 1956. During this period, which covers almost the entire duration of British colonial rule in the region, these subaltern groups used covert and violent act…
The recent rediscovery of institutions in the study of international development has drawn considerable attention to macro arrangements, but sparked much less interest in mid-range, sectoral institutions and how they are reshaped under dynamic domestic and nondomestic constraint…