Posted on by Nathan Oman

From the Fuggers to Justice Ginsburg

One of the things that the law has always done is order the relationship between religion and the market. For example, the prohibition on usury, which for a long time was one of the central issues in commercial law, has religious roots. In the Bible, charging interest on debt is condemned. In the ancient world, debt was less a way of raising capital for new ventures than a response to misfortune. The money lender was less a financier than a predator who extended credit to the unfortunate to tide them over and extracted high interest, often as a way of enslaving the debtor or his children.  Hence the prohibition.

By the high Middle Ages, however, bankers such as the Fuggers were seeking to extend credit to merchants to finance commercial ventures. They developed what became known as the German Contract. The banker would from a partnership with the merchant in which the banker would contribute capital and share in the profits of the venture. Such investments did not run afoul of the prohibition on usury because, to use modern terminology, they took the form of equity rather than debt. The banker would then purchase from the merchant an insurance contract on the venture, in which the merchant agreed to accept the risk of the venture’s failure, promising – in return for a nominal fee – to pay the banker the expected profits in the event of failure. Insurance, not being a loan, did not come within the prohibition on usury. Taken together, of course, the partnership agreement and the insurance contract were the economic equivalent of a loan for interest. The papacy’s willingness to bless the German Contract is what launched the beginnings of modern finance.

Notice that in this legal world, commerce is supposed to be infused with religious values and the law is supposed to structure markets so that they reflect these godly concerns. Usury is a sin, one that cannot be allowed to stain honest commerce. The debate over the German Contract was a theological debate, one about whether or not the law could bless an arrangement that seemed to skirt the edges of what revelation defined as legitimate commercial activity.

The law continues to structure the relationship between commerce and religion. Consider Justice Ginsburg’s dissent in the Hobby Lobby case. Rejecting the idea that for-profit corporations could exercise religion, Justice Ginsburg’s argument was embarrassed by the Read more

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Ventura, “From Your Gods to Our Gods”

I’m slightly late in noting this, but our friend Professor Marco Ventura (Siena; Ventura, FYGTOGKU Leuven) has recently published this very interesting book, From Your Gods to Our Gods: A History of Religion in Indian, South African, and British Courts (Cascade Books 2014). Marco’s work is always penetrating and insightful, and this looks to be no exception. Here is the description:

The global world debates secularism, freedom of belief, faith-based norms, the state’s arbitration of religious conflicts, and the place of the sacred in the public sphere. In facing these issues, Britain, India, and South Africa stand out as unique laboratories. They have greatly influenced the rest of the world. As single countries and together as a whole, the three have moved from the colonial clash of antagonistic religions (of your gods) to an era when it has become impossible to dissociate your god from my god. Today both belong to the same blurred reality of our gods. Through a narrative account of British, South African, and Indian court cases from 1857 to 2009, the author draws an unconventional history of the process leading from the encounter with the gods of the other to the forging of a postmodern, common, and global religion. Across ages, borders, faiths, and laws, the three countries have experienced the ambivalent interaction of society, politics, and beliefs. Hence the lesson the world might learn from them: our gods promise an idealized purity, but they can only become real in the everyday creation of mixed identities, hybrid deities, and shared fears and hopes.

Posted on by

“The Prophet and the Reformer” (Grow & Walker, eds.)

This June, Oxford University Press will release “The Prophet and the Reformer: The Letters of Brigham Young and Thomas L. Kane” edited by Matthew J. Grow and Ronald W. Walker (Professor Emeritus, Brigham Young University).  The publisher’s description follows:

The Prophet and the ReformerUntil his death in 1877, Brigham Young guided the religious, economic, and political life of the Mormon community, whose settlements spread throughout the West and provoked a profound political, legal, and even military confrontation with the American nation. Young first met Thomas L. Kane on the plains of western Iowa in 1846. Young came to rely on Kane, 21 years his junior, as his most trusted outside adviser, making Kane the most important non-Mormon in the history of the Church. In return, no one influenced the direction of Kane’s life more than Young. The letters exchanged by the two offer crucial insights into Young’s personal life and views as well as his actions as a political and religious leader. The Prophet and the Reformer offers a complete reproduction of the surviving letters between the Mormon prophet and the Philadelphia reformer. The correspondence reveals the strategies of the Latter-day Saints in relating to American culture and government during these crucial years when the “Mormon Question” was a major political, cultural, and legal issue. The letters also shed important light on the largely forgotten “Utah War” of 1857-58, triggered when President James Buchanan dispatched a military expedition to ensure federal supremacy in Utah and replace Young with a non-Mormon governor.

This annotated collection of their correspondence reveals a great deal about these two remarkable men, while also providing crucial insight into nineteenth-century Mormonism and the historical moment in which the movement developed.

Posted on by

Tuna, “Imperial Russia’s Muslims”

This May, Cambridge University Press will release “Imperial Russia’s Muslims: Islam, Empire and European Modernity, 1788–1914” by Mustafa Tuna (Duke University).  The publisher’s description follows:

Imperial Russia's MuslimsImperial Russia’s Muslims offers an exploration of social and cultural change among the Muslim communities of Central Eurasia from the late eighteenth century through to the outbreak of the First World War. Drawing from a wealth of Russian and Turkic sources, Mustafa Tuna surveys the roles of Islam, social networks, state interventions, infrastructural changes and the globalization of European modernity in transforming imperial Russia’s oldest Muslim community: the Volga-Ural Muslims. Shifting between local, imperial and transregional frameworks, Tuna reveals how the Russian state sought to manage Muslim communities, the ways in which both the state and Muslim society were transformed by European modernity, and the extent to which the long nineteenth century either fused Russia’s Muslims and the tsarist state or drew them apart. The book raises questions about imperial governance, diversity, minorities, and Islamic reform, and in doing so proposes a new theoretical model for the study of imperial situations.