Editors' Note

Our last issue explored global and comparative urbanization, alongside other contributions examining the relationship between subjecthood and states. In this issue we continue to address the work of concepts and subjects in and of history by investigating four interrelated themes: race, internationalism, the law, and, finally, forms of temporality in history.

The opening section, "Race, Law, and Exception," organized by Sarah Ghabrial focuses on the erasure of complex legal legacies of colonial history and the history of imperial violence from Giorgio Agamben's compelling account of the logic of the state of exception. The essays by Ghabrial and Benoît Challand draw on French imperial history to emphasize the key centrality of race dif erence to conceptions of personhood and political sovereignty, while the essay by Vanessa Coddacioni underscores their continued relevance for the contemporary legislation of emergency powers in France around conjoint issues of immigration and terrorism. Wadie Said's essay draws on the legislation of Islamic terror and the stigmatization of the Muslim terrorist in the United States post-9/11 to reflect on the legacies of colonial violence and racial distinction in structuring exceptional state power and the justification of legal exceptionalism in our current moment of permanent war.

Next, we turn to the question of the law of the seas and its relation to maritime empires, territoriality, and state formation from medieval to modern times, which scholars have been revisiting to understand globalization today. Jeremy Kingsley argues that the term lex mercatoria, which "has a mythical legal status," is thought to have originated with Venetian merchants of the medieval age, whose worlds were global well before the "global turn" in contemporary historiography. Contributors to this special section challenge the terracentric narratives surrounding the rise of the nation-state, international law, and modernity by unpacking and dissecting the "mythical legal status" of lex mercatoria. Hassan Khalilieh examines the medieval Islamic institution of qiraḍ before the commenda emerged in medieval Italian communities. He presents a powerful provocation that inverts Mediterranean and maritime genealogies by showing how the commenda may have its roots in premodern Islamic law. Neilesh Bose and Victor Ramraj take up the Eurocentric claim of the "hegemony of a centralized modern state" and argue that it "belongs only to a narrow sliver of history." Considering the English East India Company's authority from 1600 to 1757 and its maritime networks, they show how a more plural understanding of lex mercatoria eclipses the authority of the modern state.

The section titled "The German Connection" looks at the burgeoning field of transnational history through the lens of South Asia's connection with Germany. Taken together, these essays challenge the singular focus on the British Empire for studies of "interwar internationalisms" and instead highlight a moment of intellectual and cultural ef orescence characterized by a specifically German engagement with ideas of Muslim minority rights, Marxist thought, and the human sciences. Razak Khan of ers the term minor cosmopolitanism to stress the network of connections produced through scholarly engagements across "various locales such as Delhi, Aligarh, Allahabad, Hyderabad, Bhopal, Lahore, Bombay, Kabul, Tehran, Beirut, Cairo, and Istanbul in addition to the metropoles (London, Paris, Zurich, Stockholm, Vienna, and Berlin)," and sees such connections as essential to shaping complex interactions between figures such as Syed Abid Husain (1896–1978) and his teacher Eduard Spranger (1882–1963) around ideas of the psyche, self-formation, and education. Meanwhile, Heike Liebau traces the interaction between South Asian and Weimar German academic circles, particularly through the work of Abdul Jabbar Kheiri and Abdul Sattar Kheiri and their encounters with German intellectuals. Liebau underscores the significant ways in which German archival collections illuminate the constitutive role of South Asian Islam in the history of science and Islamic studies. Finally, Ravi Ahuja's contribution, "In Place of an Afterword," encapsulates the ef orts to write Indo-German connections as a "container-breaking" methodology, one that bypasses national boundaries while simultaneously foregrounding the unusual, asymmetric, unpredictable, failed, and oft en toxic entanglements these entailed. By placing these entanglements squarely in the political context of the First World War, we are encouraged to consider shifts in global power and intellectual engagements (and inequities) as...