Abstract This focused study of one emigrant community in southern China explores linkages between internal and overseas migration during the nineteenth century, emphasizing both the diversity of lived experience and the contingent nature of categories that have informed the historiography of overseas Chinese migrants. Building on comparative studies that present an aggregate picture of changing migration patterns during the “mobility transition,” this microhistory shows how both preexisting and novel patterns of internal migration (urbanization, frontier migration, and military migration) shaped new strategies of overseas migration. For this particular emigrant community, new dynamics of migration in the mid-nineteenth century influenced the reputation of its emigrants, bringing about a transition from respectability to notoriety. Whereas earlier patterns of internal migration had linked this community to its neighbor on the opposite bank of the West River, new dynamics of migration in the nineteenth century bolstered the river’s role as a boundary. This community’s liminal place highlights the contingent nature of nineteenth-century tropes and current categories of overseas Chinese migrants.

Abstract This article focuses on the Council (Divan) of Amid in Diyarbekir Province as a petition-receiving institution throughout the eighteenth century. By drawing on the court records of the city of Harput, one of the sub-districts of Diyarbekir, and the tax farming registers of the larger province, the article discusses the role of the provincial governor in legal procedures. It argues that the Provincial Council had an important function in the operative field of law as it made it possible for the petitioning subjects in Harput to obtain judgments reviewed in the court of Harput in the form of ‘trial de novo’. While situating the emergence of the Council in the political-economic context of the time, the article also argues that the Provincial Council was an early modern institution which, in part, paved the way to the constitution of the nineteenth century provincial administration of the Tanzimat state.

Abstract This essay explores the theme of demonic descent in etiologies assigned to Lurs, Kurds, Afghans, and the Baloch across the past millennium. In it, I parse the imputation of nonhuman beginnings to these peoples while also examining retorts to that same accusation. While agents of premodern empires used the narrative of demonic descent to racialize peoples on the peripheries of sovereignty, demonized peoples replied with sacralizing genealogies that bound them to early nodes in Prophetic and Iranian history. I argue that we must attend to demonizing practices in Islamic historiography not only to write the historical struggles of dispossessed peoples, but to examine our own inheritances as narrators of the Islamic past today.