Translate and Rule: Justice, Arabic Literature, and the Colonial Archive

Over the decades of the nineteenth century, Egypt changed dramatically, from a minor Ottoman province to a major player in global markets and a de facto British colonial territory.Integral to this transformation was legal reform: the Islamic system was replaced by laws adapted from the French Napoleonic code, edited by international committees, rendered in several languages, and applied in multilingual secular courts.Translation made law possible for Egyptians navigating international commerce and imperial rule.But translation also enshrined hierarchies of difference and remade ideas and theories of justice. Translate and Rule argues that translation played a central role not only in colonial lawmaking, but also in anticolonial Arabic thought.Combining methods from literary and legal history, Hannah Scott Deuchar shows how translated legal codes in colonial Egypt exacerbated inequities in the courtroom and transformed relations of commerce and property ownership.These legal vocabularie