Ottoman Mixed Commercial Courts

1 The question of jurisdiction over foreign litigants in Islamic and Asian countries has long been the object of close attention by Western states, which were reluctant to accept the jurisdiction of local courts over their nationals. Established to meet this very concern and based on the extraterritoriality principle, consular courts increasingly faced criticism in the nineteenth century as territorial sovereignty had become a rooted principle of modern international law. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the mixed commercial courts took over as a more defensible...