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A Trust in the Family:
Wealth and inheritance under colonial legal regimes in the Arab-Southeast Asian diaspora
Hadhrami Arab migrations of merchants, traders, seamen, teachers, sojourners and settlers across the Indian Ocean rim began in the 1870s. Many travelled from southwestern Arabia to Singapore (under the British), the Netherlands East Indies (later Indonesia) and Malaya (now Malaysia). My lecture analyzes the histories of individuals, ‘families’ and wider social groups in Singapore regarding changing colonial property law and ‘personal law’, and changing conceptions of Shari’a as it became ‘Islamic law’ in British codifications. I focus on the inheritance and the transmission of goods through gifts, wills and trusts to highlight certain strategies, dilemmas and conflicts of inheritance that over many decades confronted a diasporic population in the high Imperial Age. The legalization of family, descent and the significance of ever elaborating documentation over many decades are at the heart of my current book project.
Michael Gilsenan
Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and Anthropology
Professor Gilsenan received his doctorate at Oxford University, having conducted research about religious authority and group formation in a Sufi order in Cairo, resulting in his book, Saint and Sufi in Modern Egypt: An Essay in the Sociology of Religion (Clarendon Press 1973). He then worked in a village in north Lebanon in the early 1970s studying violence, status, and power, resulting in the monograph, Lords of the Lebanese Marches: Violence and Narrative in a Lebanese Society (I.B. Tauris Press 1996). His book, Recognizing Islam: An Anthropologist’s Introduction (Pantheon Press 1983) is a classic text, used by generations of students and scholars.
Dr. Gilsenan taught at New York University since 1995 until his recent retirement. His ongoing research concerns the Hadhrami Arab diaspora in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, focusing on questions of law, inheritance, property, and multi-generational families in the 19th century colonial contexts through the post-colonial situations more recently.