How Commerce Became Legal

How Commerce Became Legal: Merchants and Market Governance in Nineteenth-Century Egypt

Stanford University Press | September 2025

Focusing on the decades between the formalization of Cairo’s practical autonomy within the Ottoman Empire in the 1840s and its incorporation into the British Empire in the 1880s, Omar Cheta considers how modern laws redefined the commercial sphere, shaping a mode of market governance that would persist for decades to come. He highlights the demarcation of a new law-defined commercial realm as well as individual merchant voices preserved in various archives.

Praise for How Commerce Became Legal

“A remarkable study of market governance where the government is dispersed, diffuse, and at odds with itself. Omar Cheta masterfully weaves together rich and detailed character studies with perceptive structural analysis of how Egyptian commerce was brought under the rule of many laws.”
—Johan Mathew, Rutgers University

“How Commerce Became Legal sheds significant new light on the history of Egypt. Omar Cheta excavates the hitherto lost world of commercial regulation and adjudication in the Khedival period.”
—Kenneth Cuno, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

“This book makes a unique contribution to the economic historiography of Khedival Egypt. Omar Cheta deftly narrates both Egypt’s incorporation into the world market and the lives of local merchants, offering important insight into business strategies and merchants’ mastery of new means of transport and communications.”
—Pascale Ghazaleh, The American University in Cairo

Discussions of How Commerce Became Legal

	American Society for Legal History, Making Connections: New Works in Legal History Series, January 2026 (Interlocutor: Nurfadzilah Yahaya)
	School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS, University of London), Walter Rodney Collective Seminar Series (Discussants: Hengameh Ziai & Yosra Hussein)