Legal Pluralism and the Codification of the Late Ottoman Empire: A Re-imagination of Imperial Political Authority and Legal Thought

我的研究项目旨在考察从19世纪中期到20世纪初奥斯曼帝国晚期法律和法律想象力的转变。焦点将集中在奥斯曼帝国晚期的法律话语中所体现的紧张关系，即作为社会多元化帝国的一种古老治理模式的法律多元化与同时出现的全球编纂思想之间的紧张关系。这种对法律的重新想象涉及到修复以前多元和多中心的社会秩序形式的法律技术，以使复杂的土著社会实践对中央集权和不断扩大的奥斯曼帝国权力机构来说更“清晰”。将特别注意这一话语转变对各种法律行为者的社会影响及其在全球法律思想趋势框架内的背景。

My research project aims to examine the transformations of law and legal imagination in the late Ottoman Empire from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The focus will be on tensions, manifest in the late Ottoman imperial legal discourse, between legal pluralism as an ancient mode of governance for a socially diverse empire and the concurrent emerging global idea of codification. This re-imagination of law involved legal techniques of fixing formerly plural and polycentric forms of social ordering to make complex indigenous social practice more "legible" to a centralising and expanding Ottoman imperial authority. Particular attention will be paid to the social implications of this discursive shift for various legal actors and its contextualisation within the framework of global trends in legal thought.