Ottoman Empire

This dissertation examines nonpolitical interpersonal violence in Istanbul during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909). The first chapter presents the social, political, and demographic context against which such violence occurred. In it I argue that by the time of Abdü…

This dissertation is an examination of the role played by an agency of the Ottoman Government, during the middle of the nineteenth century, in the resettlement of the largest influx of foreign Muslims experienced by the Empire during the seven centuries of its existence. Beginni…

This dissertation investigates the ways that religion overlapped with politics in the United States' diplomatic interactions with the Muslim world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It recovers the contributions of an underappreciated Protestant missionary named James L.…

This dissertation examines and defines Armenian Diaspora identities in relationship to and reliance on the deportations and mutual massacres of 1915. By examining these painful events, I clarify the key role this trauma continues to play on Armenian Diaspora communities' identit…

Two prevailing approaches in international relations neo-realism and constructivism emphasize the role of material capabilities or ideas in systemic change. Alternatively, this dissertation focuses on the change and persistence of domestic institutions of states that turn materi…

In the mid-1870s and 1880s many debtor countries faced severe external debt service problems and eventually had to agree on new contracts for the settlement of their debts. This process always involved power asymmetries in favor of the creditors. In some cases, the lenders were …

In the early 1980s Bulgarian archaeologists of the newly established Centre for Underwater Archaeology at Sozopol discovered the remains of a post-medieval ship in the southern Bay of Kitten, in the lee of Cape Urdoviza. Between 2000 and 2003, the Institute of Nautical Archaeolo…

The decade of the 1950s and early 60s in Turkey witnessed a proliferation of popular historical literature on Ottoman women. The uniqueness of these writings, in terms of the representations of Ottoman women they introduce, stand out in light of the erasure of Ottoman women from…

This dissertation has explored the gendered ways in which the fear of depopulation was articulated in the mid- to late nineteenth century Ottoman society. In a period marked by huge demographic turbulence, bureaucrats and medical elites became increasingly anxious about the fate…

This dissertation examines the relation between rural conflict and aspects of agrarian relations on the one hand, and the changing forms of state regulation, on the other, in mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Its main goal is to show that the changes at the level of state a…

This study examines individual, communal, and state responses to natural disasters in the Ottoman Empire. It focuses on two Jewish communities, those of Damascus and Aleppo, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The disasters considered are mainly of three types: epid…

This dissertation is a comparative analysis of political upheavals in the Middle East with partial comparisons to Russia. In chapter One, I compare successful state takeovers in Iran and the Ottoman Empire with a failed instance in 1905 Russia. Here revolutions are historicized …

This dissertation examines the construction of national identity, as revealed through France's relationship with the Ottoman Empire from 1660 to 1789. I reinterpret early modern France's cultural engagement with the Ottoman Empire and the image of the Turk, by arguing that fasci…

This study examines the dynamics between capitalism, the modern state and nationalism in the context of the Ottoman-Turkish history. It is argued that the capitalist transformation of the Ottoman state took place through a protracted process which began in the mid-nineteenth cen…

This dissertation examines the struggle of nationalist leaders and intellectuals to create a meaningful and coherent language of political identity in the final years of the Ottoman Empire and the first decades of the Turkish Republic. In so doing, it attempts to demonstrate two…

The inclusion of representational imagery in a sacred context is extremely rare in the history of Islamic art. This dissertation examines the evolution of the Ottoman En'am-i Serif , a group of manuscripts dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, in which sacred te…

In the early twentieth century the Ottoman Empire experienced vibrant intellectual debates on Islam and nationalism. A significant contribution to these debates came from Turkish Muslim intellectuals from Russia who immigrated to Istanbul in this period. This dissertation is on …

The image of the ghazi king (who leads religiously inspired raids) has been analyzed at the moment of its fullest and earliest manifestation in Islamic historiography during the reign of Mahmud of Ghazna in the early eleventh century CE. This is done by reconstructing the cultur…

This dissertation examines three interrelated aspects of Ottoman-Bosnian legal history: the development of the institution of muftiship, the production and re-production of fatwa-texts, and the nature of legal interpretation in Ottoman Bosnia from the mid-sixteenth century to th…

The two shrine complexes examined were established as independent institutions in the thirteenth century but became part of the Bektashi network in the classical Ottoman period (ca. 1453-1600). The focus of this dissertation is on the remodeling of the two shrines and an associa…