From Protection to Jurisdiction: Extraterritoriality and Legal Change in the Nineteenth-Century Mediterranean

In the early modern period, the Ottoman Empire granted Capitulations to an increasing number of European states. Though primarily intended to facilitate trade, the Capitulations also guaranteed a particular legal status for Europeans and a limited number of their Ottoman employees (called beratlılarin Ottoman Turkish). The merchants who came to trade in the Ottoman Empire—and, from the eighteenth century, in Morocco—could adjudicate disputes before their consuls and benefited from the intervention of their consul in disputes with Ottoman subjects. Although scholars have described these early modern privileges as a product of the personality of law (rather than territoriality), this approach obscures the extent to which jurisdiction was not definitively attached to individuals. Consular protection over foreign nationals and local protégés was a matter of constant negotiation, and the forum of adjudication depended as much on the case as on the status of the people involved. Only after the Napoleonic Wars did diplomatic officials begin to insist on a more rigid understanding of the personality of jurisdiction. This talk thus challenges the general assumption that the personality of law continued in the Middle East and North Africa long after it had been replaced by territoriality in Europe and Americas. Instead, the emergence of extraterritoriality suggests that in fact, the personality of law was imposed on the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century.