Recent Publications in Law and Literature @routledgebooks

ICYMI: Recently published books in the area of law and literature, from Routledge: Chloe A. Gill-Khan, The Politics of Integration: Law, Race, and Literature in Post-War Britain and Frace (Routledge, 2019) (Studies in Migration and Diaspora).

After almost seven decades, Britain and France, nations with divergent political cultures and heirs to contrasting philosophies of 'integration', have proclaimed the failure to integrate their post-war ethnic minorities: at this present time, the ‘Muslim’. The ‘argument’ of this book, therefore, is a question: despite the legal, political and social commitments that emerged from the events of the Holocaust, why do both nations continue to govern minorities on the sites of the law and race? Through comparative readings of British Asian and Franco-Maghrebian literatures, the author examines the contours and patterns of British and French post-war governance and racism over four decades. Departing from prevailing theories in postcolonial studies that situate post-war racism within the narrative of colonialism or the politics of the nation-state, The Politics of Integration shows how we must re-appraise the inter-war histories of minorities if we are to ask more meaningful questions about the present. We are invited to take stock of how well theorization of post-war ethnic populations and their politics have served us in terms of asking: what does history tell us, and how and where do we - Europe and its minorities - go from here? As such, the book will appeal to scholars in multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences such as history, philosophy, literature, cultural and postcolonial studies.

 

Baber Johansen, The Islamic Law on Land Tax and Rent: The Peasants' Loss of Property Rights as Interpreted in the Hanafite Legal Literature of the Mamluk and Ottoman Periods (Routledge, 2018) (Routledge Library Editions: Islam, State, Society)

This book, first published in 1988, argues that a close inspection of the development of Hanafite law in the Mamluk and Ottoman periods reveals changes in legal doctrine which were not restricted to civil transactions but also concerned the public law. It focuses in particular on the interrelated areas of property, rent and taxation of arable lands, arguing that changes in the relationship between tax and rent led to a redefinition of the concept of landed property, a concept at the very heart of the Islamic legal system. This title will be of particular interest to students of Islamic history.