Beshara Doumani (UC Berkeley), David Warren Sabean (UCLA), Simon Teuscher (Universität Zürich)
Historians have long been concerned with processes of family property devolution, but most work has been done on rules and forms of intergenerational partition: partible and impartible inheritance, inheritance vs. succession, dowries, gender inequalities, and postmortem and premortem forms of wealth distribution. Among other things, current historical work has begun to emphasize differences in practices within the same cultural zones, legal frameworks, and political structures. And recent critical social history has started to probe older literature on patrilineal family structures, traditional Islamic and Roman law, or Asian clan familial and kinship structures. One fascinating innovation in this direction is recent work on the Near Eastern “waqf,” a legal foundation that mixes religious and pious elements with familial property ownership. The point of this institution was to “alienate” property in favor of a religious institution, while leaving Continue reading