A killing in Tripoli (1843): principle and contingency and personal diplomacy
Abstract This article examines the trial in 1843 and 1844 of Giovanni Battista Caruana, a Maltese, for the murder of a Jew in Tripoli. He was found guilty but was not executed because the victim's impoverished wife agreed to accept compensation. The case took place against the background of the British government's increasing impatience with what they saw as uncontrolled Maltese and Ionian communities, leading to the enactment of the Foreign Jurisdiction Act of 1844. It also demonstrated the importance of the individual authority of the Consul, Hanmer Warrington, and the extent to which consuls' personal objectives and opinions weighed on the development of British policy, and the extent to which Warrington's concern to uphold the law coincided with that of the Pasha of Tripoli, so that the case led to a close identification between the local government and the British consular representative.
Treaty law: the extent of consular jurisdiction in North Africa from the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth century
This article is based on a close comparative examination of the Treaties between the North African States of the Ottoman Empires, and Morocco on the one hand and the states of Western Europe and North America on the other in the early modern period. It shows that they formed a corpus of regulations and understandings that underpinned a ‘customary’ diplomatic law. It challenges the view that Europeans and North Americans legally enjoyed extraterritorial rights, because consuls had complete jurisdiction over their own subjects in legal cases where only their own subjects were involved. It argues that the boundaries of the consuls' job were very blurred in the treaties which was a result of the terminology used and the double function of consuls: to control their subjects as much as to protect them.
Household economy and gendered labor in the 17th centurya.d. on Guam
Abstract The gendered division of labor in household economies is well known in documentary accounts of many societies, although archaeological evidence for it is often elusive. Our study compares ethnohistorical accounts of household organization with archaeological patterns at a 17th-century village on the island of Guam in the Marianas archipelago to determine if these different sources of evidence provide similar insights. We investigated archaeological assemblages from two latte (megalithic) buildings to document their economic activities. Unexpected differences in their assemblages revealed that economic activities varied between the two latte buildings. They were domiciles of a single economically integrated household, but their disparate functions likely signaled a gendered division of labor. This study reveals aspects of gendered labor that documentary accounts do not fully describe. Our findings suggest that the assumption that domestic buildings were functionally redundant in traditional societies must be tested on a case-by-case basis.