"Constituting Modernity" originated from a critique of a liberal understanding of property relation as one between a person and a 'thing'. States are perceived to be fundamental obstacles on the way to an individual's appropriation of the "thing." State intervention is often considered to be a reason for a presumed absence of private property in non-European contexts. The research presented here contests these assumptions from different perspectives, both in a European and non-European context. As multi-disciplinary as it is wide-ranging, the work ranges from the practices of the 19th century Ottoman administrative government in the constitution of private property rights to the practice of cadastral mapping in British India. These essays, carefully prepared in full collaboration as part of a unified research program, cover Ottoman and British land laws, property rights in the British colonies, and the notion of property as a contested domain and a site of power relations in 19th century China. No such interdisciplinary study of private property exists. "Constituting Modernity" will not only set the tone of much research to come, but reworks the fundamental theory behind the scholarship to date.

While pre-modernity is often considered to be the 'time' of non-European regions and modernity is seen as belonging to the West, this book seeks to transcend the temporal bifurcation of that world history into 'pre-modern' and 'modern', as well as question its geographical split into two irreconcilable trajectories: the European and the non-Europea

While pre-modernity is often considered to be the 'time' of non-European regions and modernity is seen as belonging to the West, this book seeks to transcend the temporal bifurcation of that world history into 'pre-modern' and 'modern', as well as question its geographical split into two irreconcilable trajectories: the European and the non-European. The book examines shared experiences of modern transformation or modernity in three regions -- China, India and the Ottoman Empire -- which conventional historiography identifies as non-European, and therefore, by implication, outside of modernity or only tangentially linked to it as its victim. In other words, this work looks at modernity without reference to any 'idealised' criteria of what qualifies as 'modern' or not, studying the negotiation and legacies of the early modern period for the modern nation state. It focuses on the experience of modernity of non-European regions for they play a crucial role in the new phase of transformational patterns may have deeper roots than are generally assumed.

Rejecting European characterisations of 'eastern' states as Oriental despotisms, the volume conceives of the early modern state as a negotiated enterprise, one that questions the assumption that state centralisation must be a key metric of success in modernisation. Among other topics, the book highlights: state formations in the three empires; legislation pertaining to taxation, property, police reform, the autonomy of legal sphere, the interaction of different types of law, law's role in governance, administrative practice, negotiated settlements and courts as sites of negotiation, the blurred boundaries between formal law and informal mediation; the ability of 18th century Qing and Ottoman imperial governments to accommodate diverse local particularities within an overreaching structure; and the pattern of regional development pointing to the accommodative institutional capacity of the Mughal empire.

Tracing the complex histories of state or imperial formations through legal, administrative, and economic developments, the book argues that modernity as such no longer stands for experience of 'alienation' from specific historical trajectories, a characterisation which often haunted the 'modern' histories of the British empire in India, Ottoman reform state or the Communist Chinese state. Bringing together historians of the Qing, the Mughal and the Ottoman empires, this volume, principally, explores categories of historical explanation that span the European and non-European, pre-modern and modern experiences.

The European social sciences tend to absorb criticism that has been passed on the European approach and re-label it as a part of what the critique opposes; criticism of European social sciences by subaltern social sciences, their talking back, has become a frequent line of reflection in European social sciences. The re-labelling of the critique of the European approach to social sciences towards a critique from Southern social sciences of Western social sciences has somehow turned Southern as well as Western social sciences into competing contributors to the same globalising social sciences. Both are no longer arguing about the European approach to social sciences but about which social thought from which part of the globe prevails. If the critique becomes a part of what it opposes, one might conclude that the European social sciences are very adaptable and capable of learning. One might, however, also raise the question whether there is anything wrong with the criticism of the European social sciences; or, for that matter, whether there is anything wrong with the European social sciences themselves. The contributions in this book discuss these questions from different angles: They revisit the mainstream critique of the European social sciences, and they suggest new arguments criticising social science theories that may be found as often in the Western as in the Southern discourse.