Introductory description

Why study the Ottoman Empire? For one, it comprised one of the largest and longest-lasting imperial formations in history, spanning over six centuries and stretching, at its height, across a geography that today comprises nearly 40 separate countries. The consequences of this imperial history—which formally came to an end barely one hundred years ago in 1922—are still felt today across Asia, Africa, Europe, and beyond. It is a principal aim of this course to introduce students to this empire of world-historical significance.

Yet beyond just this, what the module seeks to do is acquaint students with what might be termed “the Ottoman world”—and to consider how that world was destroyed by the great transformations of modernity over the course of the long nineteenth century. In its classical period, the Ottoman Empire operated in ways that we find difficult to comprehend today. How was it that kidnapped slaves often rose to the most important posts of imperial governance? Why did Christians and Jews often make recourse to Islamic sharia courts when they were free to use their own? How did women find justice and achieve power in an era when the concept of gender equality did not yet exist? Questions such as these hint at the Ottoman experience to which this course will seek to give texture.

Equally challenging is making sense of the empire’s crucial final century when the old Ottoman order was overturned by modernizing state reform, European colonialism, and the empire’s incorporation into the capitalist world system. These processes had surprising consequences that we will consider in the second half of the course. Why was it that the empire’s worst episodes of religious violence occurred after the establishment of religious equality? How did the rise of a regime of property rights beget mass dispossession? Why did the nineteenth-century Ottoman state—itself subject to European imperial encroachment—adopt a colonial and racialized relation to its own subjects in turn?

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Week 1: Introduction

Week 2: Ottoman Origins

Week 3: Imperial Institutions

Week 4: Islam

Week 5: Law

Week 6: The Other

Week 7: The Question of Decline

Week 8: The Ottoman Empire on the Eve of Modernity

Week 9: Modernity

Week 10: Religion

Week 11: Colonialism

Week 12: Property

Week 13: Sharia

Week 14: Time

Week 15: Nation

Week 16: Population

Week 17: Ottoman Afterlives

Week 18: Review

Week 19: Review

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a detailed knowledge of Ottoman history from start to finish.
• Communicate ideas and findings, adapting to a range of situations, audiences and degrees of complexity.
• Generate ideas through the analysis of a broad range of primary source material, including electronic resources.
• Analyse and evaluate the contributions made by existing scholarship.
• Act with limited supervision and direction within defined guidelines, accepting responsibility for achieving deadlines.

Indicative reading list

Edward Said, "Knowing the Oriental" (1978)

Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Battuta (2010)

Madeline Zilfi, "Telling the Ottoman Slave Story" (2010)

Nir Shafir, "Moral Revolutions: The Politics of Piety in the Ottoman Empire Reimagined" (2019)

Wael Hallaq, "What Is Sharia?" (2005)

Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (1988)

Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (2016)

Ussama Makdisi, "Ottoman Orientalism" (2002)

Nada Moumtaz, "From Forgiveness to Foreclosure: Waqf, Debt, and the Remaking of the Hanafi Legal Subject in Late Ottoman Mount Lebanon" (2018)

Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (1992)

On Barak, "Outdating: The Time of 'Culture' in Colonial Egypt" (2013)

Kabir Tambar, "Anatolian Modern" (2014)

Hannah Arendt, "The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man" (1951)

Michelle Campos, "Between 'Beloved Ottomania' and 'The Land of Israel': The Struggle over Ottomanism and Zionism among Palestine's Sephardi Jews, 1908-1913" (2005)

Interdisciplinary

This course includes readings and methods from Philosophy, Anthropology, and Religion.

Subject specific skills

Critical Engagement with Concepts, Comparative History, Interdisciplinary Integration

Transferable skills

Effective Writing, Research Proficiency, Critical Thinking