The concept of ritual has been all too loosely applied to violence and atrocity with assumptions of repetitiveness, mythic symbolism, and religious overtones. This paper examines a selection of modern cases of atrocity for specific ritual elements: attention to body and spaces as frames for meaning; a prescripted mode of action; and performative enaction of a new millennial or transgressive order. Focal cases include American lynching (nineteenth–twentieth centuries) and militia atrocities in Sierra Leone and Liberia (1990s), while examples of gendered atrocity in ritualized forms (perpetrated by Bosnian Serbs and the Islamic State) are broached in the conclusion. Ritualization is not typical to modern atrocities but allows perpetrating groups to experience meaningfulness in the violent acts they assemble, often in situations of crisis.

This paper explores the theoretical and analytic possibilities of the concept of gharīb to offer a new understanding of regional displacement in what we know as the modern Middle East. The concept of gharīb (pl. ghurabāʾ) has accrued a wide range of meanings across time and space, including stranger, outcast, and exile, as well as pauper. By occupying the space between estrangement and poverty, the gharīb allows for an intersectional understanding of inequality, experienced by a growing number of marginalized and displaced communities in the Middle East. This paper honors the gharīb while making an analytic shift away from the category of the “refugee,” which has long been the dominant framework for personhood in the study of displacement. Combining genealogical analysis of the word gharīb with ethnographic accounts of displaced and impoverished communities in post-2011 Lebanon, I argue that legal binaries such as refugee versus citizen, and internal versus external displacement, have been further blurred against the backdrop of ongoing and interlocking forms of structural violence, inequality, and lack of protection for marginalized groups. The right to belong, therefore, is less about citizenry and more about a mode of social and economic poverty. This is particularly the case in the margins, where the repercussions of the ongoing crises are first and foremost felt. The gharīb, in contrast to such legal binaries, can be an analytic tool that allows us to delve deeper into the complexities of belonging, futurity, and rights without falling into the traps of methodological nationalism and top-down regional demarcations.

This article describes how Egyptian state documents are scattered between governmental institutions, private collections, and the second-hand book and paper market. This scattering raises a practical question about the conditions under which official documents become discardable and commodifiable by bureaucrats, their families, and second-hand dealers. This scattering also raises a theoretical question about the nature of a state which takes uneven care in keeping a record of its own institutional past. After outlining the difficulties of access one faces in official archives in Egypt, the article fleshes out the sociological profile of different custodians of state paperwork—including families of bureaucrats, peddlers, and dealers—and the conditions under which state documents become commodified to this day. The overarching objective is not just to show the well-known limitations of national archives as a source of historical material, but also to show how actually existing “state archives” go well beyond the remit of official institutions, with notable consequences over our conception of the state.

In February 1799, the British East India Company rounded up French civilians in Pondicherry and put them on a ship loaded with prisoners of war. The ship continued its journey to Portsmouth in England, by way of the Cape of Good Hope and St Helena. Handwritten lists were the main tool used to select these deportees. If analyzed superficially, colonial lists can seem to depoliticize the violence of deportation by presenting it as the answer to technical problems. Instead, this article approaches the list as a media technology employed by colonial and military officials, and thereby highlights its iterative rather than fixed nature. The lists were unstable and based on contingent and constantly evolving information that bureaucrats and army officers on the ground inherited from previous colonial regimes, as well as from local populations. The act of listing encapsulates a tension between the agents who identified, categorized, selected, and trapped people on paper, and the tactics of these people, who sometimes found creative ways to jam this process. As illustrated by the breakup of “mixed race” families, these paper documents also reveal the conflicts and contradictions that ran within the imperial state between the twin imperatives of maintaining both security and humanitarian principles.

This article sheds light on a series of Xinjiang maps created by order of imperial Japan’s General Staff Headquarters in 1943. These maps, seventeen in all, offered panoramic views on Xinjiang’s topography, geological and meteorological conditions, ethnic composition, major cities, riverine systems, aviation ports, roads for motorized vehicles, wireless and postal systems, and various resources. Those maps invite the heretofore little-studied question of how Xinjiang figured in imperial Japan’s geostrategy. This article contextualizes imperial Japan’s heightened strategic interest in Xinjiang during World War II, particularly after the closure of the Burma Road, which paradoxically revitalized Chongqing’s Republican regime. These sources inform the argument that the place of Xinjiang in imperial Japan’s geostrategic thinking must be understood beyond the narrow lens of Sino-Japanese enmity. It warrants a world historical perspective. The article examines said maps and uncovers the multiplicity of Xinjiang’s toponyms and ethnonyms that encapsulated parallel and oftentimes contested temporalities. Tokyo’s attentiveness to ethnological understandings of the region’s indigenous populations reflects an aspiration to construct a political demography that tethered indigenous sovereignty to the authority of the colonial state, bypassing the domination of the Chinese Republic in Chongqing.

This paper examines how, in politically polarized contexts, people reconstruct the biographies of contested memorialized figures to challenge or reproduce dualistic metanarratives of national history. We analyze two sites of recent controversy in Scotland and Lithuania which have been engaged in struggles over how to memorialize individuals who, at various points in their lives, engaged in acts of both anti-imperial resistance and collaboration in those same empires’ systems of oppression. Their moral liminality—a term we employ to refer to the transgression of moral categories—blurs the boundaries between perpetrators and victims of imperial violence, calling into question binary frameworks underpinning broader national narratives. Based on a comparative media analysis of debates over the legacies of David Livingstone and Jonas Noreika, we find that though some people in both Scotland and Lithuania have embraced these figures’ moral liminality, others have, instead, suppressed aspects of their biographies to uphold traditional distinctions between national “heroes” and foreign “villains.” We argue that such moral binaries are either blurred or reproduced through the manipulation of three aspects of liminal figures’ biographical records: their agency, motives, and social impact.

Appeals to “decolonize” now range widely, from decolonizing the university to decolonizing Russia. This article poses the question of what work the concept of decolonization can and cannot do. It underscores how much can be learned about how decolonization came about if one explores the different goals that activists sought in their time. It suggests that if instead of looking for a colonial “legacy,” we explore historical trajectories of colonization and decolonization, we can reveal how political, economic, and social structures in both ex-colonies and ex-metropoles were shaped and reshaped over time. Finally, it brings into conversation with the literature on the decolonization of the empires of Western European states more recent scholarship on Russia and the Soviet Union, pointing to different forms of imperial rule and imperial collapse and also to the possibility of “reimperialization,” of reconstituting empire in new contexts.

World-historical analyses often view the “Asian” empires that survived into the twentieth century (the Russian, Qing, and Ottoman empires) as anomalies: sovereign “archaic” formations that remained external to the capitalist system. They posit an antagonistic relationship between state and capital and assume that modern capitalism failed to emerge in these empires because local merchants could not take over their states, as they did in Europe. Ottoman economic actors, and specifically the sarraf as state financier, have accordingly been portrayed as premodern intermediaries serving a “predatory” fiscal state, and thus, as external to capitalist development. This article challenges these narratives by uncovering the central role of Ottoman sarrafs, tax-farmers, and other merchant-financiers in the expanding credit economy of the mid-nineteenth century, focusing on their investment in the treasury bonds of Damascus. I show how fiscal change and new laws on interest facilitated the expansion of credit markets while attempting to regulate them by distinguishing between legitimate interest and usury. I also discuss Ottoman efforts to mitigate peasant indebtedness and the abuse of public debt by foreigners, amid the treasury bonds’ growing popularity. In this analysis, global capitalism was forged in the encounter between Ottoman imperial structures, geo-political concerns, and diverse, interacting traditions of credit, while the boundaries between public and private finance were being negotiated and redefined. Ultimately, Ottoman economic policies aimed to retain imperial sovereignty against European attempts to dominate regional credit markets—efforts often recast by the latter as “fanatical” Muslim resistance.

This article argues that the late Ottoman Empire saw the rise of a novel concept of difference, the “millet,” that fundamentally reordered the lives of the empire’s many subjects. Rather than a term with clearly identifiable content—“religion,” “nation,” “ethnicity,” or otherwise—millet should be understood instead as auguring the emergence of history as the organizing principle of the late Ottoman politics of difference. Unlike the Islamic distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim that had previously structured Ottoman rule, the millet paradigm did not stipulate any predetermined set of terms through which difference had to be articulated. Instead, it issued an injunction to Ottoman subjects to merely say who they were, to declare the name they went by—to confess. This simple injunction, however, which appeared to require nothing other than assent to the reality of history itself, tended to misfire. When it did, Ottoman subjects confronted the anxious truth that history—the purported ground of the millet paradigm of difference—was no ground at all.