This volume honours the work of Abdul-Karim Rafeq, the foremost historian of Ottoman Syria. Rafeq's principal contribution to the study of the social history of Syria between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries lies in his pioneering use of the resources of the Islamic court records, the sijillat in the mahkama al-shar'iyya, for the writing of social and economic history. Rafeq has been the guide and mentor of many of his own contemporaries, as well as of younger scholars in the Arab world, Europe and North America. The volume attempts to follow and complement the major themes in the socio-economic history of Bilad al-Sham which have animated Rafeq's scholarship since the 1960s.