Book Talk | ‘How Commerce Became Legal: Merchants and Market Governance in Nineteenth-Century Egypt’
Eggers Hall, 341
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When Egypt’s markets opened to private capital in the 1840s, profound legal experimentation followed. The resulting commercial sphere reflected the political contestations among Egypt’s governors, European consuls, Ottoman rulers and a growing number of local and foreign entrepreneurs.
How Commerce Became Legal explores the legal and business practices that resulted from this fusion of legal concepts and governed commerce in Egypt. Focusing on the decades between Cairo’s autonomy within the Ottoman Empire in the 1840s and its incorporation into the British Empire in the 1880s, Omar Cheta considers how modern laws redefined the commercial sphere, shaping a mode of market governance that would persist for decades to come.
He highlights the demarcation of a new law-defined commercial realm separate from the land regime and from civil or family-centered exchanges, and reconstructs these changes through both legal codes and state orders, as well as individual merchant voices preserved in court documents.
Omar Y. Cheta is assistant professor of history at Syracuse University. His first book, How Commerce Became Legal: Merchants and Market Governance in Nineteenth-Century Egypt was published by Stanford University Press in September 2025. He is currently researching the history of Arab Americans in Syracuse, New York, at the turn of the twentieth century.
Category
Social Science and Public Policy
Type
Talks
Region
Campus
Open to
All Students
Faculty and Staff
General Public
Organizers
Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs, Middle Eastern Studies Program
Accessibility
Contact Ciara Hoyne to request accommodations