Huricihan Islamoglu is Professor of Economic History and Political Economy, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey, and Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. Her research interests are economic history, economic theory as well as international relations and European studies. She is the author of Constituting Modernity: Private Property in the East and West (2004); State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire (1994); and Ottoman Empire and the World Economy (1987).Peter C. Perdue is Professor of History, Yale University. He was Professor of History, MIT from 1982 to 2008. His doctoral research at the Havard University was in History and East Asian Languages. He co-edited the recent volume: Imperial Formations (2007). Some of his monographs include: China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (2005); and Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500-1850 A.D. (1987).

• 1. Introduction by Huri Islamoglu and Peter C. Perdue 2. Empire and Nation in Comparitive Perspective: Frontier Administration in Eighteenth-Century China by Peter C. Perdue 3. Administrative Practice between Religious Law (Shari'a) and State Law (Kanun) on the Eastern Frontiers of the Ottoman Empire by Dina Rizk Khoury 4. Administering the City, Policing Commerce by Peter Carroll 5. Heaven and the Administration of Things: Some Remarks on Law in the Tanzimat Era by Serif Mardin 6. A World Made Simple: Law and Property in the Ottoman and Qing Empires by Melissa Macauley 7. Modernities Compared: State Transformations and Constitutions of Property in the Qing and Ottoman Empires by Huri Islamoglu 8. A History of Cast in South India: From Pre-colonial Polity to Bio-political State by Ananya Vajpeyi 9. Formal and Informal Mechanisms of Rule and Economic Development: The Qing Empire in Comparitive Perspective by R. Bin Wong 10. When Strong Men Meet: Recruited Punjabis and Constrained Colonialism by Rajit Mazumdar 11. The Fate of Empires: REthinking Mughals, Ottomans and Habsburgs by Sanjay Subrahmanyam