This historiographical talk connects recent works on post-Habsburg and post-Ottoman history with histories of interwar Egypt. Using the approach of global legal history, I experiment with the category of “sovereign local state” to describe post-Ottoman Egypt under British occupation until the 1950s and beyond.

Adam Mestyan is assistant professor in the History Department of Duke University. His second monograph, Modern Arab Kingship – Sovereign Local States In World History is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Recent publications include Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) and Primordial History, Print Capitalism, and Egyptology in Nineteenth-Century Cairo (Cairo: Ifao, 2021).

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Duration: 00:41:46