Histories of law and economic life in the Islamic world

Abstract

In this article, I survey the long‐standing debate on the place of Islamic law in the history of capitalism. I first mark out a literature that has thought, either explicitly or implicitly, in comparative terms about the capitalist trajectories of the Islamic world and “the West,” and has grappled with the place of Islamic law in shaping that trajectory; I then explore a parallel literature that sidestepped the question of capitalist development altogether in favor of a more textually grounded approach to the study of Islamic law and Muslim economic life. I end with a set of reflections on how to better situate the study of Islamic law and capitalism in a more textured historical context, drawing on a nuanced literature on colonial legal history. Rather than studying Islamic law and capitalism within a sealed‐off civilizational container, as many had done in the past, I suggest that a more fruitful approach might involve embracing a broader world of connections, circulations, and historical entanglements.