The De Rossetti Affair: Legal Pluralism and Levantine Identity at the Crossroads of Empires

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, changes to Ottoman legal and financial structures upset the familial interests of the large Levantine clans that were an integral part of the Ottoman Empire from its centre in Constantinople to its peripheries. Many legal and political disputes involved influential individuals who were not strictly ‘European’ or ‘foreign’; rather they were long-term residents of the empire with strong ties to the Mediterranean basin. A forgotten part of Egyptian history, the De Rossetti family presented here exemplifies those families and individuals who transcended the ‘imperialist’ tag as part of a wider Levantine network. This article argues that extraterritorial legal claims had the direct, and generally unintended, effect of an imposed legal order that ensnared both Ottomans and non-Ottomans in disputes over juridical pre-eminence, a creeping institutional imperialism which case by case sought to undermine the Egyptian regime’s capacity to govern.