Project Name: Mapping Secular Smuggling and Religious Trade in the Middle East, 1914-1932

Grantee: Bret Windhauser

Discipline: History

Funding Cycle: 2024-2025

Project Status:

White Paper:

About the Project:

My project seeks to produce a website with aesthetically pleasing maps and visual guides showing documented cases of smuggling in, around, and through the Middle East during the British Mandate of Iraq from 1914-1932. These maps will allow the visualization of what I refer to as prolific “secular smuggling” and “religious trade.” A large part of this trade involved the smuggling of deceased bodies across borders for burial in holy cemeteries throughout the region. I, therefore, approach map-making through a decolonial lens to decenter imperial legal power when forming borders in the modern Middle East by reconceptualizing boundaries along religious geographies. This study thus challenges the contemporary construction of such legal borders in an attempt to reconstruct imagined pre-colonial socio-spatial borderlands through the vector of bodies and goods.