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A sixteenth-century Arabic legal text, Ibn Hajar al-Haytami’s Tuḥfat al-Muḥtāj travelled from the Middle East, via South Asia to Southeast Asia. It was used in the Muslim legal circles as well as in the colonial courts of British India and the Dutch East Indies. It was “translated” into Javanese (Kitab Toehpah), which was retranslated into Dutch and was interpreted by some colonial lawyers as a legal code of Javanese origin. It was taught in the traditional religious institutions and, eventually, at Leiden University for future colonial officials studying the Javanese language, who referred to it as the ‘Corpus Juris Javanum’. This journey of the Tuhfat is only one example of, first, how legal ideas and texts travelled across borders and, second, how these ideas shaped the legal traditions and systems encountered during their journey. These moments of interaction reveal how legal cultures negotiated, influenced, and conflicted each other. They also show how information and legal systems were reconstructed. Over centuries, intermixed legal systems evolved across the Indian Ocean world creating an ocean of law.Legal history in connection with the Indian Ocean world is relatively a new field. Recent work by many scholars in this area has added value to the cultural history of such regions as South, Southeast and East Asia, and the Middle East and of the workings of imperial and colonial structures. Interdisciplinary research and cooperation of scholars working on early-modern and modern history of the broader Indian Ocean world help trace back the journeys of legal ideas and to reconstruct these legal histories. This conference will provide a platform for scholars to discuss and share their work. We will address questions such as: how were legal systems formed regionally through interactions? To what extent did law play a role in the shaping of societal, multi-cultural or maritime settlements, and of empires and colonial states in general? How did law function in the cosmopolitan communities and how did the legal systems influence each other?From the context of existing historiography related to legal pluralism, spatialization of law, movement of ideas, information networks, and cultural brokerage, the main themes of the conference would be:Religious and secular laws: the construction, generalization and/or homogenization of laws varying from Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist to Confucianist legal notions against/with the ‘secular’ laws.Colonial and non-colonial laws: colonial legal discourses and the saving/reforming enterprise of non-colonial laws.Legal institutions: continuities, discontinuities and ruptures in differently functioning (pluralistic) legal institutions and their organizations.Micro and macro legal systems: macro legal theories’ regional functionality, micro legal practices’ negotiations with the broader systems.Relationships between theory and practice of law: texts and juridical manuals in practice, the exclusions and inclusions, selections and deletionsWe welcome a range of contributions about the cultural mechanisms of law in the Indian Ocean world. We aim this to be an interdisciplinary platform and therefore invite papers from historians, anthropologists, legal scholars and others whose research is related to the Indian Ocean legal world. We also invite papers focussing on various regions of the Indian Ocean rim from East Africa to East Asia in order to put together panels comprising of scholars working on different regions, time-periods, and themes for discussing the connections and comparisons in legal cultures. However, we intend to limit the approaches into a cultural historical perspective to understand how law played a role in the cultural formations and transformations.Abstracts of 500 words are due by 10 June, 2015 and should be sent to oceanoflaw@gmail.com. As an outcome of the conference, an edited volume / special issue of a peer-reviewed journal will be published. We encourage those, who are interested in publishing, to submit their full paper of no more than 10,000 words by 1 November, 2015.Keynote speakersThe renowned scholars, Prof. Paul Halliday (University of Virginia) and Prof. Engseng Ho (Duke University and National University Singapore), are the keynote speakers for this conference. The work of Halliday on law, legal pluralism in particular, shows the fruitfulness of comparing legal cultures of empires and addresses the need for more in-depth studies on legal pluralities. Ho, very recently, analyzed the travels of law in the Indian Ocean World. He proposes to use a “thick transregionalism” in order to unravel the multi-layered and complex contexts of legal cultures.Registration/FundingThe conference has no registration fee. For the expenses of your travel and accommodation, we strongly recommend that you seek funding at your home institution. However, we have limited funding for junior scholars/PhD candidates. If you would like to be considered for funding, please mention that while sending the abstract.For more details, please visit the conference-website: http://www.hum.leiden.edu/history/ocean-of-law/ConvenersSanne Ravensbergen MAMahmood Kooria MPhilSponsored by:Leiden University Institute for HistoryLeiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society (LUCIS)Asian Modernities and Traditions (AMT)Itinerario: International Journal on the History of European Expansion and Global InteractionLeiden University Fund