Rechtskulturen
2012/ 2013

Will Hanley

One System, Many Laws: An Institutional History of Egyptian Justice, 1875-1950

Will Hanley is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Florida State University. He studied at the Universities of Saskatchewan, Toronto, and Oxford before taking his doctorate in history at Princeton (2007). He is completing work on a book about the emergence of nationality as a social and legal category in Alexandria between 1880 and 1914. This study draws on the archives of the city’s British, French, American, and Italian consulates, as well as Egyptian and Ottoman police and administrative records. 

One System, Many Laws: An Institutional History of Egyptian Justice, 1875-1950

As a Rechtskulturen Fellow he will write on the broader institutional history of justice in Egypt between 1875 and 1950. During that period, Egypt was a site of overlapping empires, religious and cultural authority systems, and legal regimes that made it (arguably) the most complex jurisdiction in the world. This project aims to offer fresh data to scholars of legal and constitutional pluralism, while bringing their interpretative frame to historians of the Middle East and colonialism. He is also developing a digital tool (called Prosop) to help historians to collect and organize large volumes of demographic data.

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