Order Without Law

"That is precisely why I was drawn to this book. Ellickson is interested in how people navigate and solve their problems from the bottom up. He talks about the requirements of neighbourliness in terms of what I do if my cattle have strayed on to your land, and how the people in the area he is writing about are very committed to this idea and those who are not are shunned in various ways and made the subject of gossip. So people set up their own community and he says that people do it not in the shadow of the law but really in ignorance of, or indifference to, the law. What is interesting about the book is that it is set in the modern day in a county in California. Supposedly one of the salient divides between the developed and developing world is the rule of law in the developed world and how people know their rights and this creates order, and yet Ellickson shows that the people in this county have no idea of the laws but it doesn’t matter because they work it out for themselves. In that way, he ties in very well with the first book where Trivellato is saying that, actually, the rise of the modern state and legal tribunals are not so central to the story. So it is getting away from that state-centric focus which has particular reverberations when it comes to the Muslim world. Despite the differences in time and geography, there are also definite parallels between Ellickson’s book and mine. At the centre of my book there are these pirates but what really interests me are the Greek merchants who are in this difficult position. They need to get from point A to point B to sell their goods but it is a chaotic sea. So how do they manage it and solve their problems like trying to retrieve their goods and pay the right amount of customs dues? I am interested in looking at it from the businessman’s point of view. In the same way Robert Ellickson is looking at things from the point of view of the cattlemen. And Ellickson talks about how order often arises spontaneously. That also appeals to me because there’s a tendency when people talk about the Muslim world, even today and at the time of the Ottoman Empire, to describe this iron hand of the state which was there up until the end of the 16th century, and then when the Sultan died everything is seen as going to hell in the 17th and 18th centuries. And you still have echoes of that today when people discuss the Middle East . There is this idea that unless it is ruled with an iron hand the region will spin out of control. And Ellickson takes a focus that is non state-centric and I think I am always drawn to books that do not have the state at the centre. So his book is very much about that. Now, in important ways my book diverges from Ellickson’s. As I mentioned, he looks at how people operate out of an ignorance of the law. But in my study, and I find this fascinating, merchants way back in the 17th and 18th century were aware of the law and did go to court. You have women travelling all the way from islands in the Aegean to petition the Ottoman Sultan. People try Muslim courts and Christians courts in their search for justice. So back in the Ottoman Empire people seemed to be very savvy about their legal rights and we don’t really know yet why that was and how they had this knowledge."