Omar Youssef Cheta, How Commerce Became Legal: Merchants and Market Governance in Nineteenth-Century Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Omar Youssef Cheta (OYC): I am interested in capitalism as a historical process and wanted to find out how the brand of capitalism that we live under today came about. Looking back, I think that my interest in capitalism was inevitable. I grew up in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 1980s and ‘90s, and my social consciousness was formed at a moment of economic liberalization—privatization, reversal of rent controls, and the disintegration of the country’s state-run health and educational systems. I studied economics in college and was struck by the field’s apparent indifference to social questions. Later, my graduate education in New York coincided with the 2008 financial crisis.
Although it was clear to me that I wanted to research the history of capitalism, I was not initially sure how. Eventually, I decided to do so through the lens of legal history. This decision was partly intellectual, following from my realization that Egypt’s position within the nineteenth-century world economy, as an exporter of cotton and home of the Suez Canal, was facilitated by momentous legal changes. But there was also an element of chance to writing How Commerce Became Legal. While researching the book, I had to cope with the tension at the heart of the Egyptian National Archives: its impressive scale and restrictive access policies. When turning archival discoveries into historical analysis, I was naturally influenced by the academic networks I was a part of at that moment, most notably my graduate school advisor, Khaled Fahmy, whose innovative studies of criminal law and forensic medicine redefined Egyptian legal history.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
OYC: How Commerce Became Legal is a book about a formative but understudied period of Egyptian history. In the decades from the 1840s to the 1870s, Egypt was a politically autonomous province within the Ottoman Empire and a site of free market exchange centered primarily around cultivating and exporting cotton. Before that, Egypt’s cotton trade was subject to a state monopoly, and, after that, it was incorporated into the British Empire. In researching and writing this book, I arrived at three main conclusions.
First, although politically autonomous, Egypt’s legal landscape was a manifestation of a larger Ottoman legal culture. This fact can be observed through explicit references to Ottoman laws as well as through noting the parallels of the contemporaneous legal reform projects of Cairo and Istanbul. The legal imagination of government officials in both cities and the policy toolboxes they drew from were quite similar. In relation to commerce, the legal logic of a new mode of market governance in the mid-nineteenth century emanated from the fusion of Ottoman and French laws (the Ottoman Code of Commerce was largely a translation of its French counterpart) with existing merchant customs, and the quiet convergence of Islamic legal opinions with that dynamic legal scene. While this provenance was forgotten or erased under British rule, that mode of market governance persisted into the twentieth century and may be traceable today too.
Second, this book is my attempt to de-center the question of land in order to bring the merchants back into view. After all, the merchants, who were the main players in early modern urban politics, could not simply have disappeared in the modern period. Land looms large in the history of modern Egypt, and for good reason. Wealth and eventually political power were generated through agricultural land. The countryside was the site of the dispossession of peasants and the making of a new landowning class, of environmental challenges and infrastructural projects, and of capitalist profit-making and resistance to imperialism. In the cities, absentee landowners vied for political power and government agendas focused on extracting value from rural property and population. In How Commerce Became Legal, I show that in parallel to these historical developments, merchants whose wealth and power were not tied to land—at least, not exclusively or primarily—persisted in the urban landscape in ways that had not been well understood. Merchants occupied leading positions within what I call “the commercial-legal infrastructure.” This repertoire of laws and institutions that governed city-based market exchanges was an arm of the modern state but was largely operated by merchants who interpreted commercial law, served as experts and auditors, and determined what acceptable merchant customs were. We cannot understand modern Egyptian history without accounting for merchants’ roles in market governance and in city life more generally.
Third, in approaching market governance, I wanted to capture the experience of the historical individuals who engaged with economic and legal structures. This was a methodological challenge because it forced me to deal with questions of causality and agency: to what extent did economic and legal structures dictate individual actions? If the agency of the individual works only “under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past,” as Marx famously wrote, where is the historian to locate that agency in the archival traces of the past? Grappling with these questions, I reconstructed the life trajectories of merchants and law practitioners through piecing together references to them in archival documents and business letters. In the final analysis, I was able to show how some historical individuals inhabited economic and legal structures and used them to accrue material and social capital, while others could not access these structures or failed within them.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
OYC: This is my first book. Previously, I wrote academic articles about various dimensions of the intersection of law and capitalism in the nineteenth century. Because of the conventions of that genre, each of these articles was limited in scope. For example, I recently published on "The Imprisonment of Debtors in the Khedival Period” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Egyptian History. I also co-wrote with my late colleague Kathryn Schwartz “A Printer’s Odd Plea to Reform Legal Pluralism in Khedival Egypt” in Past and Present. Writing specialized articles advanced my thinking. In How Commerce Became Legal, I connected these research dots and forged a complex argument of many parts.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
OYC: The primary readership would probably consist of those studying the histories of capitalism, law, and/or Egypt.
But there is a central aspect to the book that might not be noticeable until one reads the table of contents: human experience. A reader who is interested in how ordinary individuals navigated a time of change and uncertainty that is not so different from ours; a world in which markets were expanding and legal mechanisms becoming pervasive, will find this book valuable. I conceive of the middle chapters of the book—chapters two, three, and four in particular—as a good resource for teaching about capitalism and law both on the undergraduate and graduate levels because of their biographical aspects and narrative style.
Naturally, I hope that a broader academic readership takes an interest in the book too. For those interested in the modern Middle East or late Ottoman Empire, How Commerce Became Legal contributes to our understanding of the critical juncture between the end of Mehmed Ali’s reign in the 1840s and the British occupation of the country in the 1880s. For students of imperialism, this book constitutes a substantive engagement with foundational ideas in that field, which are mostly known to us in their broad outline, such as indirect imperial influence and European extraterritorial privileges. As a study in legal history, the book offers an unconventional engagement with Islamic law. The history of the latter and where to locate it in colonial and postcolonial legal regimes is the subject of intense scholarly and public debates. Approaching this question from the angle of commercial law shows a quiet convergence of continental European and Islamic legal logics that is somewhat surprising to those who think about Islamic law from the standpoint of identity, nationalism, or colonialism.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
OYC: I am working on two different articles simultaneously. In the first I explore an aspect of the history of Arab Americans in Upstate New York. I had come across references to an early twentieth-century Syrian American initiative—the term “Syria” was used back then to refer to Lebanon and Palestine as well—to establish a chair in Arabic studies at Syracuse University, my current institutional home. So, I am deep at work in the university archives trying to piece together that story.
The second article project has its parallels with How Commerce Became Legal, but it focuses on Sudan not Egypt. I am grateful to Hengameh Ziai (SOAS, University of London), who introduced me to the archive of the northern Sudanese merchant and landowner Abdallah Bey Hamza, which she has led the effort to digitize and written about in several insightful published and forthcoming studies.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 3. “Musa and Hasan: The Merchants Who Used the Law”, pages 111 to 115)
[…] During the official interrogations that followed the defeat of the ‘Urabists, Hasan was accused of having received “money from abroad to stir up the minds of Egyptians against the Khedive (nuqud min al-kharij li-bathth al-mafasid fi adhhan ’ahali al-qutr al-misri didd al-hadra al-khidiwiyya).” Hasan refused to disclose the details of his wealth but, in response to the interrogator’s insistence, he ultimately responded: “I have repeatedly clarified this matter before but since the Commission is repeating the question, I will say this… the existence of these [large] amounts of money is not strange and should not arouse suspicion. The wealth of our family is well known, particularly that I have received the inheritance of Musa Bey al-‘Aqqad sixteen years ago….” Hasan’s statement was only partly accurate. As an active merchant, Musa’s estate did not include money and assets that were easily enumerated at his death. He had ongoing business partnerships and loans that he had extended to other merchants, which would only be settled years after his death.
The incomplete record of one of those inheritance-related disputes is instructive of Hasan’s utilization of his position on the merchant court to resolve some of these issues in his own favor. One of Musa al-‘Aqqad’s business partners in Khartoum was a certain Ahmad al-Rifa‘i. By the spring of 1871, both Musa and Ahmad had passed away and it fell to their sons, Hasan Musa al-‘Aqqad and Muhammad Ahmad al-Rifa‘i, to decide on where to go from there. It appears that Hasan wanted to dissolve the partnership, believing that he would extract a certain amount of money as a result, and he may have tried to do so amicably at first. The archival record begins with a situation that shows Hasan enjoying a double advantage over Muhammad. He was thoroughly familiar with and involved in the operation of the judicial forum responsible for overseeing the dissolution of the partnership. He was also well-established in Cairo whereas his opponent resided in Khartoum, where the business was based. The initial ruling issued by the merchant court in May 1871 was in Hasan’s favor, but its exact details are missing. It is possible that Muhammad did not get to present his case at that point because of being far from Cairo. Eventually, he did present a written contestation to the court, which decided to refer the matter to two auditors representing each of the litigants. Hasan had already named his own, and now the merchant court named Mahmud Bey al-‘Attar, a colleague of Hasan on the court, to represent Muhammad. The court also telegraphed the Khartoum Governorate to convey two instructions to Muhammad, namely, to send the company’s “ledgers and papers… within 60 days” and to be present personally or through a wakil before the auditors when summoned. The record ends here before a final resolution was reached but with Hasan well-positioned to achieve his goal, given his proximity to the site of settlement and his acquaintance with the auditors.
Approximately a year later, a similar dispute about another of Musa’s business partnerships unfolded. This time, it pitted Hasan directly against his father’s partner, Mustafa Afandi al-Hakim, a merchant based in al-Mahalla. The contract signed in 1864 specified that Mustafa would supply 500 quintals of cotton to Musa in installments (shay’ fi shay’) over the course of two years. It detailed the specifications of the cotton as well as the methods of payment — half of the price would be paid upfront — and delivery — the first installment would be ready in al-Mahalla within sixty days of the first payment. When Hasan gained access to the paper trail of this deal after his father passed away in 1867, he discovered that his father had received only about 400 quintals of cotton even though he had paid the agreed-on price for 500 quintals. It may have taken him a while to make this discovery and he may have reached out to Mustafa informally first to collect the difference. Speculation aside, Hasan turned to the merchant court in early 1872 to sue Mustafa over the undelivered cotton. Mustafa defended himself, presenting the original contract, signed receipts, and a record of the cost of transporting the cotton by train to Alexandria. He also objected to Hasan’s claim that one of the transactions was concluded without a paper trail, arguing that the merchant court “requires written evidence . . . otherwise [Hasan] has no right to demand the said amount.” In the end, Mustafa admitted to owing a small amount to Musa’s estate — less than 3,000 ta‘rifa compared to the almost 18,000 that Hasan was asking for — which he was willing to pay.
Judging from the court record, Mustafa’s defense seemed plausible. Particularly, his point about the necessity of a written document to establish debt was consistent with merchant court practices. Therefore, the way in which the case unfolded from that point onward is noteworthy. After studying the documents, the court decided on a date to hear the litigants’ oral arguments and issue its ruling. Hasan hired a legal practitioner, Dimitri, who represented him in this session, but Mustafa did not show up. In his absence, Dimitri started with a technical point regarding the accounting. He explained several errors that Mustafa committed in calculating the total debt. Those alone would not have accounted for the significant difference in numbers between what he admitted to and what Hasan was demanding. Dimitri then claimed that transporting the cotton to Alexandria was not a part of the original agreement. Without written consent from the late Musa, it was possible that Mustafa was the one who needed to transport it for his own reasons (li-darurat nafsihi) and, therefore, there was no obligation to reimburse him for that expense. Moreover, Dimitri added, an implicit admission of the undocumented debt could be inferred from Mustafa’s answers. The court unanimously concurred with each of Dimitri’s arguments and decided in absentia that Mustafa was responsible for the entire amount that Hasan demanded. Like in his previous dispute with Muhammad al-Rifa‘i, Hasan managed to utilize the commercial-legal infrastructure to his advantage. His claims may have been valid and his legal representative persuasive, but one cannot rule out the potential effect of a sympathetic court that was headed by Hasan and even Musa’s peers and an anticipation of legal defeat that led Mustafa al-Hakim to give up before the case was decided.
His deep familiarity with the workings of the merchant court may have led Hasan to utilize it as part of a larger strategy to force debt repayment outside the official channels. The pressure he exerted on Ibrahim al-Amin al-Jallab, whom he claimed owed him 110,000 ta‘rifa, is a case in point. On March 14, 1872, Ibrahim went to the merchant court to face Hasan’s Italian lawyer, Tito Figari. No decision was reached at the end of that session, but the court ordered the appointment of inspectors to “search Ibrahim al-Amin’s residence, seize whatever promissory notes and papers kept there and turn them in to the court.” Usually, in cases of debt-related disputes, the merchant court instructed merchants to present their ledgers for examination. In this case, it decided to use a heavier hand. The absence of an explanation for this measure in the court record opens the door for speculation: was Ibrahim known to be deceptive, or was Hasan’s influence a factor? Two weeks later, the court met again to discuss the case — this time in the presence of Hasan al-‘Aqqad. It decided to summon another merchant who it discovered had lent a smaller amount of money to Ibrahim and had not been paid yet. As the amount of debt to be settled as a part of this case increased, Ibrahim was facing even more pressure.
Two days later, Ibrahim submitted a written statement in which he admitted to his debt to Hasan and explained that it had all been a misunderstanding. The court’s summary of the statement is worth recounting here.
The two promissory notes [proving] the debt, dated 19 Safar 1285 [June 10, 1868], had his [Ibrahim’s] seal on them. Al-sayyid Hasan had demanded the repayment of the debt through government offices (mahallat al-hukuma) and the [merchant] court when they [i.e., him and Ibrahim] had a falling out (hasil baynahu wa baynahu munafasa wa mukhasama), and Ibrahim was objecting and complaining from al-sayyid Hasan. However, when they had a conversation and examined the documents and calculations, it became clear that the debt was legitimate and that the promissory notes were authentic…
Despite his unequivocal admission, Ibrahim was not in a position to pay his debt. Under pressure, he found another creditor, al-Shaykh Yusuf Muhammad al-Nur, who bought the debt from Hasan. In exchange, Hasan withdrew his lawsuit. As Ibrahim’s written account shows, when a disagreement ensued, Hasan’s decision to escalate went through “government offices and the [merchant] court.” While these official channels did not directly prompt a repayment, they constituted an effective instrument to force Ibrahim to search among his commercial network for an escape from Hasan’s pressure.