As someone who’s lived around the world, I know firsthand how cultures can collide, and the book, A Court at Constantinople, does a great job showing just that. After the Crimean War (1853 to 1856), Turkey wants to expand its international reputation and is selling business opportunities like hot cakes. They’ve negotiated a treaty with the British who want to impose their occidental legal system on a sharia-based Turkish system.
James Bingham, a young English lawyer and a commoner who’s won his position via the school of hard knocks, is struggling to succeed in his chosen profession. His fiancée has just died. Since he’s now unattached, he’s coerced into joining Her Britannic Majesty’s Supreme Consular Court at Constantinople. Bingham is ordered to work on legal reforms with Osman Mehmed, a Turkish law student, but there’s never enough time to get the job done. The two men meet Rosamund Colburne, an early feminist. The cases brought before the British court interweave with the story of these three young people’s lives. A brutal beating of a rich merchant’s daughter and the subsequent trials of the various suspects (the British suspects by the Sultan’s legal system and the Muslim suspect by the British system) highlight the legal and diplomatic channels between Turkey and Great Britain and the differences between the two legal systems.
The book has a lot of legal terms, but I felt they were needed to add verisimilitude to the writing.
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A Court at Constantinople (Eorthe Books, LLC, March 29, 2023) is available through:
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