Fahad A. Bishara
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| Office Location: | Wilson weight room |
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| Email Address: | fab4@duke.edu |
Education
- MA University of Exeter, 2006
- BA University of Southern California, 2004
Research Interests
I study the legal/contractual dynamics of (primarily Muslim) merchant networks in the Western Indian Ocean, asking the basic question of what it was that sustained transactions over great distances and hundreds of years in this basin of exchange. My research looks at how transactions were monitored and enforced informally within networks, but also how these networks interacted with various different courts systems in the context of a changing world of business in the 19th and early-20th centuries and within the framework of an expanding British empire.
While I have a firm grounding in Indian Ocean history, most of my work has been in business history, legal history and New Institutional Economics (which I see as straddling the intersection between economic and legal history). I also have a background in Middle Eastern economic history, East African economic history and Islamic commercial law, and have a strong interest in the history of economic thought.