Former Member of Staff: Dr James E. Baldwin
Research Interests
I work on the legal, social and political history of the Ottoman Empire, with a particular focus on the province of Egypt. I am currently completing a monograph on dispute resolution in Ottoman Cairo. Through an examination of several formal and informal dispute resolution forums and practices, including the shari‘a courts, the Ottoman governor’s Diwan, the petitioning system, and informal arbitration undertaken by military officials and community elders, the book investigates the relationship between Islamic law and political power, and examines how law connected Cairo to the imperial capital Istanbul.
I am also working on a second project examining the roles of litigation and political violence in the struggles among elite households over land, revenues and administrative office in eighteenth-century Egypt.
My teaching interests include Islamic legal history, the history of the Ottoman Empire and its relations with other world regions, and the nineteenth-century Ottoman and Egyptian reforms and the emergence of the modern Middle East.
Academic Career
- 2014-2016: Assistant Professor of Islamic History, University of Warwick
- 2013-2014: Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, University of Warwick
- 2011-2013: Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, Queen Mary, University of London
- 2011: Senior Fellow, Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Koç University, Istanbul
- 2010: Visiting Research Fellow, Islamic Legal Studies Program, Harvard University
- 2003-2010: PhD, Joint Program of the Dept. of History and the Dept. of Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies, New York University
Teaching
Modules I teach:
- HI280 The Ottoman Empire and Europe, 1453-1922 (undergraduate second-year option module)
- HI33S Justice, Power and Religion in the Islamic World: Shari'a Law Across History (undergraduate final-year Advanced Option module)
Modules I contribute to:
- HI127 The Medieval World (undergraduate first-year module)
- HI173 Empire and Aftermath (undergraduate first-year module)
- HI203 The European World, 1500-1750 (undergraduate second-year core module)
- HI965 Global History: Themes, Issues and Approaches (MA module)
- Theory, Skills and Methods (MA core module)
Publications
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
- "Prostitution, Islamic Law and Ottoman Societies." Journal of the Economic & Social History of the Orient 55 (2012), pp. 117-52.
- "Petitioning the Sultan in Ottoman Egypt," Bulletin of the School of Oriental & African Studies 75 (2012), pp. 499-524.
- "The Deposition of Defterdār Aḥmed Pasha and the Rule of Law in Seventeenth-Century Egypt," Osmanlı Araştırmaları 46 (2015), 131-61.
- "Elite Conflict and the Urban Environment: Eighteenth-Century Cairo," in Violence and the City in the Modern Middle East, ed. Nelida Fuccaro (Stanford University Press, 2016), 43-60.
- "The Pasha’s Diwan: Litigation and Politics in late 17th /early 18th -century Cairo." In New Approaches to Modern Egyptian Legal History, ed. Khaled Fahmy & Amr Shalakany. Forthcoming (2015) from American University in Cairo Press; Arabic translation forthcoming from Dar al-Shorouk, Cairo.
Other Writing