| This dissertation is a 'thick' description and analysis of the institutions, practices and mentalites that framed a vital arena for the daily lives of the cosmopolitan denizens of mid-eighteenth-century Islamic Eurasia. It was within this arena that men, goods, ideas and knowledge circulated over long distances. Regularly crossing a raft of political and cultural boundaries, their flow and exchange was organised and managed by a kaleidoscope of individuals and communities who were generally literate and mobile, experienced in the ways of the world and relatively well-off, but excluded de jure from high public office. Among the most prominent of these were merchants, caravanners, pilgrims, clerks, mariners and clerics. These are the facets of the region---almost entirely neglected by scholars to date for the early modern period before colonialism---that are explored in this dissertation. Detailed evidence is presented to show that this far-flung arena of activities was marked, at least until the middle of the eighteenth century, by economic and territorial pluralism, an internalised hegemony, and a set of self-regulating customs with universal jurisdiction and legibility that placed strict limits on the executive power of political elites. This state of affairs was transformed in the decades that followed as the region was buffeted by an increasingly acute series of destabilising socioeconomic and political developments of both internal and foreign provenance. These led simultaneously to Islamic Eurasia's fragmentation and reconfiguration, setting the stage for the remarkable growth in Europe's political, administrative and economic entanglement with India, the Ottoman empire and Iran from the century's end. As a result, what had been a regional ecumene, largely free of internal borders for private circulation, exchange and mediation, was replaced by confessional polities much more conscious of their political and territorial boundaries and increasingly anxious to police them. It is argued that the principal vector for these structural changes to the fabric of everyday life was rapid erosion of the autonomy of universal customs and their diminished relevance throughout the region. Such transformations had a profound impact upon the status and role of the resident communities of cosmopolitan Islamic Eurasia. |
