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This book looks at the Muslims in Mainland Tanzania, as well as what people in Southeast Tanzania understood by Islam, or by being Muslim, and what they sought to attain by becoming Muslim. This question may seem contrived: the personal reasons why a set of people, most of whom are now dead, changed their religious allegiance are unrecoverable. The most fundamental problem lies with the timing of the expansion of Islam. It is clearly shown that certain challenges and processes recurred over time in different guises.

The content derives from the British Academy’s public lecture programme which presents specialist research in an accessible manner. The papers range in subject matter over anthropology, literature, psychology, history and linguistics, demonstrating the depth and breadth of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences that the British Academy champions.

Traditional Chinese law, including Qing law, was often criticized as being inapplicable in civil trials, and it was often believed that the magistrate's court preferred mediation rather than decision-making. This volume challenges these views. With a detailed analysis of the Qing law codes and of 100 nineteenth-century case records from Baodi county, the volume examines much-debated issues such as the approach of Qing law to civil and criminal matters, punishment and mediation in civil trials, Confucius' preference for education and the idea of anti-litigation. This book brings a lawyer's perspective to some of the most debated issues in Chinese legal history.

What was the effect of the British empire on the cultures and civilizations of the peoples over whom it ruled? This book takes a novel approach to this important and controversial subject by considering the impact of empire on the idea of ‘heritage’. It reveals a dazzling variety of attitudes on the part of the imperialists — from frank ‘plunder’ of American, Asian, African, and Pacific peoples' cultural artefacts and monuments to a growing appreciation of the need for ‘preservation’ of the world's heritage in the places it originated. But it goes beyond the empire-centred view to consider how far colonized peoples themselves were able to embed indigenous understandings of their heritage in the empire, and how indeed the empire was very often dependent on indigenous knowledge for its own functioning. This book's case studies and unusual illustrations range from an extraordinary Anglo-African cathedral in the Sudan to palm leaf manuscripts in Sri Lanka, from Mayan and Indian temples to Shakespeare's Birthplace in Stratford-on-Avon.

This book is a comparative investigation of different regional histories of registration — a feature of societies common across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, but poorly understood in contemporary social science. Identity recognition of individuals by the groups they are born into or wish to affiliate themselves with has been a ubiquitous phenomenon of human experience. It has left widespread records in the form of legal, civic, and religious registration documentation. Yet, unlike the proliferation of censuses and state enumeration exercises of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, registration has attracted remarkably little scholarly attention. This volume provides an introduction to this new subject and presents a wide-ranging set of original studies of registration processes, offering a comparative conspectus across a time-span of over two thousand years. Registration has typically been viewed as coercive, and as a product of the rise of the modern European state. This book shows that the registration of individuals has taken remarkably similar, and interestingly comparable, forms in very different societies across the world. The book also suggests that registration has many hitherto neglected benefits for individuals, and that modern states have frequently sought to curtail, or avoid responsibility for, it. The book shows that the close study of practices of registration provides a tool that supports analytical comparisons across time and region, raising a common, limited set of comparative questions that highlight the differences between the forms of state power and the responsibilities and entitlements of individuals and families.