Anne Clément
The Criminal Courts of Colonial Egypt and India (1862-1919): Legal and Normative Pluralism in Context and in Action
Anne Clément is Assistant Professor of History at North Carolina State University. She obtained her PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Toronto in 2012. From 2010 to 2012, she also held a fellowship at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. Her dissertation analyzed the establishment and popular reception of the mahakim ahliyya, the modern state courts that were created in Egypt in 1884 on the French model but that were then deeply reshaped by the British. Focusing on the experiences of peasants tried for violent crime, she showed how some fellahs, stigmatized as immoral beings, promoted an alternative moral framework through violence and poetry, while others fought for their rights from within the system through the development of a new vernacular legal culture.
The Criminal Courts of Colonial Egypt and India (1862-1919): Legal and Normative Pluralism in Context and in Action
As a Rechtskulturen Fellow, Anne Clément will further explore both the reception of colonial criminal law in the Muslim world and the subsequent construction of vernacular legal cultures in the region. She will do so by conducting a comparative analysis of the criminal courts of colonial Egypt (Nile Delta) and India (Punjab) between 1862 and 1919 through the lens of legal and normative pluralism.
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