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In this event, chaired by Dr. Fatima Ahdash from the College of Law, Professor Alexandre Caeiro of the College of Islamic Studies will present a paper examining employment disputes and labor litigation in the political agency courts of the 20th-century Gulf.
Using a variety of historical and socio-legal methods, the talk sheds light on important yet overlooked aspects of the legal systems of Gulf sheikhdoms and how they operated in practice.
These courts were established in the Gulf sheikhdoms to protect British subjects and protected persons, safeguard Britain’s “moral and material interests,” and reconcile what officials described as the “theory” and “practice” of imperial rule.
For most of their relatively short history, the courts were modest operations run by amateur judges. As British policy moved from attempts to structure the legal pluralism of the sheikhdoms toward reforming local legal systems in the aftermath of World War II, the courts were burdened with the task of demonstrating the superiority of “modern law” over prevailing modes of dispute resolution.
This talk highlights how these courts were used by the diverse populations of the sheikhdoms in matters of criminal, civil, and family law. It shows how litigants sought to counter the increasing rigidity of the legal system through a variety of means, including the misrepresentation of nationality, the manipulation of the boundaries of jurisdictional authority, and the turn towards informal settlement.
Although the courts were frequently unable to offset local power imbalances, their popularity in the connected and rapidly developing world of the mid-century Gulf was enhanced by imperial networks, cooperation with international political actors, and links to global flows of capital and expertise.
