Fatima's inheritance: Law, Islam, and gendered archive-making in India's early modern global connections.

This article examines the seventeenth-century inheritance lawsuit of Fatima, a Muslim woman from a merchant family in the Indian Ocean port city of Surat, tracing how her legal case and its surviving record evolved through multiple stages of archival transmission. Initially, Fatima's complaint invoked Islamic law (sharʿ) to contest her mother's forced remarriage and assert her inheritance rights, reflecting the complex interplay of gender, law, and sovereignty in both Aceh and Mughal Surat. The lawsuit's text was later incorporated into a Persian manuscript anthology (inshaʾ) compiled by male Mughal officials, which abstracted diverse legal practices into a masculine-centered imperial legal order while preserving traces of women's active legal roles. Finally, the manuscript entered European scholarly circulation through the French Orientalist Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron, whose universalist natural law framework both acknowledged and struggled to reconcile the legal agency of Muslim women, revealing the gendered dynamics of knowledge production across colonial and pre-colonial contexts. The article argues for a critical approach to global legal history that recognizes archives as gendered products shaped by multiple actors, urging historians to consider how women like Fatima co-produced, yet were simultaneously obscured within, these historical records.