This study examines the relationship between the state, society, and land in 'Ajlun (northern Transjordan) during the Ottoman empire and the British Mandate. It traces the ways in which the two states conceptualized land--in terms of absolute rights exercised over specific areas…
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This is a diplomatic history of an "unknown war" comprising part of the settlement of World War I in the Ottoman Empire. Lured by wartime diplomacy, imperial tradition, and a messianic crusade against Bolshevism, France made a grab at southern Turkey (Cilicia) in late 1918. Howe…
This dissertation examines the Ottoman transition to a new mode of kingship in the first decades of the sixteenth century by examining the life and work of Idris Bidlisi (861-926/1457-1520), one of the most dynamic scholars and statesmen of the period. It situates Bidlisi’s life…
This dissertation considers representations of the Ottoman Empire in British writings (poetry, novels, travel writing) from c. 1789–1846. During this period of British imperial expansion, I argue that the Ottoman Empire provided British writers with a rich counterimage of empire…
Although the predominant foreign language was French during the Ottoman Empire, English is now the most popular foreign language in Turkey. All the schools, state and private, offer English instruction, while the most reputable schools offer English-medium instruction. English L…
The Czechs in the early modern period found themselves situated between two political and cultural giants: the Holy Roman and the Ottoman Empires. As the Hapsburg emperors in Vienna consolidated their power over the Czech lands and the Ottoman sultans in Istanbul threatened them…
This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of the formative but obscure time in Ottoman history known as the Interregnum (1402-1413). The Interregnum was a period of dynastic warfare following the Battle of Ankara, in which the Ottoman Sultan Yildirim Bayezid I was crush…
In certain polities, the nature of the state can best be captured as a contract whereby the central administration delegates taxation in the countryside to provincial elites. More specifically, due to technological necessities, the center relies on delegates to exact taxes, and …
In the minds of most historians of imperial Russia, the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (r. 1825--1855) is closely linked with the ideological slogan known as Official Nationality. Consisting of three principles---Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality---and promoted by Russian official…
In this dissertation, I examine the transition period between Ottoman and British rule as experienced by the residents of Jerusalem, between the years 1912--1920. By treating Jerusalem as a mixed urban locale, consisting of Muslims, Jews and Christians of various ethnic and nati…
The conventional understanding of German expansion abroad, between unification (1871) and the First World War (1914), is that Germany established colonies in Africa, the Pacific Islands, and to a lesser degree in China. This colonialism began in 1884 with the recognition of Germ…
This thesis focuses on the international-domestic interaction within the context of the 1908 Ottoman Constitutional Revolution and examines it in relation to the intemational dimensions of the social transformation of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.…
In 1479, the Venetian painter, Gentile Bellini, traveled to Istanbul to serve as a court portraitist of Sultan Mehmed II. Gentile Bellini evidently brought with him a volume of drawings, which he gave to the sultan as a gift. The book contained scores of drawings made by Gentile…
This dissertation examines illustrated manuscript patronage in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Ottoman court and calls for a more nuanced understanding of the ideological, cultural, and social functions of its artistic projects. Although non-royal courtiers play…
A major factor cited in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire is the emergence of nationalist ideologies and identities among the empire’s ethno-religious minority groups. Such arguments, however, often fail to recognize roles played by the Ottoman state itself in promoting—albeit …
This dissertation is about Kara Feyzi, a bandit and rebel who commanded a heterogeneous network of violent malcontents that devastated local communities and imperial forces throughout Ottoman Rumeli (i.e., Ottoman Europe) from the early 1790's until 1806-1807, when he was finall…
The goal of this dissertation is to review historiographical trends and set new directions for late Ottoman history. First, I identify the three grand narratives of late Ottoman history as top-down political transformation, economic incorporation to the world-economy, and imperi…
This dissertation studies the political culture of the ruling family in Ottoman Tunisia from roughly 1770 to 1840. It re-imagines an era that nationalist and colonialist perspectives have insisted on labeling the "pre-colonial," by emphasizing Tunisia's position in the Ottoman E…
This dissertation is a comparative urban history of two provincial capitals and port cities in the Ottoman Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Salonica and Beirut. Specifically, it explores the complicated processes, struggles, and debates that emerg…