CMENAS Colloquium Series. When Enslaved Men Could Sue Their Masters and Win: A Case from Nineteenth-Century Egypt

This presentation deals with a case preserved in the Egyptian National Archives that dates from 1858. The case deals with a dramatic case of twenty-seven enslaved men working in an estate belonging to a member of Egypt’s ruling family suing one of the high officials of the estate for beating to death one of the colleagues. The case offers fascinating details of the familiarity of these enslaved men with the law, and specifically with the decisive role forensic medicine played in the budding Egyptian criminal legal system. The case also casts light on the enslaved men’s conception of justice, the law and the state.

Khaled Fahmy is Edward Keller Professor of North Africa and the Middle East at Tufts University. He is a historian of the modern Middle East with specifical emphasis on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt. His academic publications deal with the history of the Egyptian army in the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as the history of medicine, law, and urban planning in Egypt. He also works on the history of Egypt’s wars with Israel: Suez 1956, June 1967, the War of Attrition, 1969-70 and the October 1973 Wars.

Co-sponsor: PICS

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