The first essay of the dissertation assesses the relationship between foreign financial aid and recipients' aggregate investment. Plagued by a difficult endogeneity problem, the literature has grappled with identifying instrumental variables that are uncorrelated with economic a…
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Selanik became one of most modernised and dynamic regions of the Ottoman Empire. With its tightly knit marketing networks and extensive railway systems, relatively well-developed financial markets, fluid land market, mode…
Throughout history, cultural encounters between the East and the West have led to attempts to struggle with the relations between Self and Other. It is a commonplace that dramatic events such as the fall of Constantinople (renamed Istanbul), the first siege of Vienna in 1529 and…
After suspending payment on their debts in 1875 and 1876, the Ottoman Empire and the largely autonomous province of Egypt were subjected to unprecedented forms of intervention in their domestic affairs. Spearheading the interference were two international financial commissions: …
This dissertation is a study of the New Order (Nizam-i Cedid ) army and the opposition it triggered during the reign of Selim III (1789-1807). It aims to present an alternative perspective on the Ottoman military reform and its implications for the course of the imperial transfo…
This dissertation explores the shifting boundaries between the center and the margins, between establishment and opposition and between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire through a contextual study of the life and works of a controversial Sufi, Meh[do…
Reflecting the extraordinary reach of the Ottoman Empire, the music that forms the basis of this thesis grows out of an enormously expanded set of cultural interactions driven in no small part by geography. My approach toward the interpretation and public offering of music influ…
This dissertation reintegrates the Mediterranean into the history of the development of the early modern British Empire. During the seventeenth century, the Mediterranean emerged as a distinct political, legal and commercial space within the wider currents of English expansion. …
This thesis aims to re-evaluate the spread of clock towers and their relationship with modernization in the late Ottoman Empire. Rather than associate the clock towers with Westernization, secularization, or centralization, it argues that the clock towers reflected what historia…
This dissertation is a comparative study of the establishment of settler colonies in the American Midwest (1778-1795) and French colonial Algeria (1830-1848). It examines how interactions between the Indigenous populations, colonists, colonial administrators, the military, and t…
American missionaries made a lasting impact on education and religion in the late Ottoman Middle East. After the 1880s, provincial-level conflicts increased and affected diplomatic relations between the United States and the Ottoman Empire. Much scholarship examines Washington-b…
This thesis will explore the concept of the patrimonial foundation of art in the Ottoman Empire and the relationship between the poet and patron by first examining the historical context to these phenomena. While discussing the notion of patronage, one of the significant questio…
In this dissertation, I investigate the missionary activities of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in the Ottoman Empire. I am particularly interested in exploring the impact of the activities of one of the most important missionaries, Elias Riggs,…
This dissertation explains why some political actors willingly surrender sovereignty to great powers and others choose to resist, often violently. It argues that political competition and conflict at a domestic level drive actors to surrender sovereignty. Where domestic politica…
This dissertation tells the story of how Russian strategies of imperial rule changed as a result of tsarist officials' efforts to expand their empire over the Caucasus in the long nineteenth century (1762-1918). Central to this work is the assertion the Caucasus represented a fr…
This dissertation examines the socioeconomic history of Kütahya, an inland town in western Anatolia, with a specific emphasis on the transformation that took place in the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth century. However, it is not a socioeconomic history of an urban center …
On August 25, 1915 the Allied Powers officially declared the entirety of the Ottoman Empire's Mediterranean coast under blockade after nearly a year of war and several months of direct hostilities with Ottoman troops. This blockade, while acknowledged to have played a role in pr…
The purpose of this thesis is to identify some of the contributions made by members and associates of the British Levant Company to the discourse about Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Britain between 1581 and 1774. The members of the Levant Company were brought to the lands of t…
In its first century, the Society of Jesus undertook numerous missions to the various Christian communities of the Ottoman Empire. In each instance, the Jesuits faced obstacles to their efforts to Catholicize the Christian Orient. Through an examination of the Jesuit experience …