The Ottoman Empire and Europe, 1453-1922 (HI280)
**Note to students: The main reference point for this module is the Moodle page. Please navigate there for the weekly seminar program, important course updates, lecture slides, and the like.
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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?
