Ottoman History Podcast

with Camille Lyans Cole

hosted by Ayah Aboelela and Chris Gratien





| At the turn of the twentieth century, Basra was a provincial center on the southeastern edge of an Ottoman Empire undergoing a paradoxical process of fragmentation, expansion, and centralization. Yet as our guest in this episode, Prof. Camille Cole, shows in a new book, it was not marginal in the remaking of the late Ottoman Empire or the story of capitalism in the modern Middle East. In Basra, local elites utilize what Cole describes as "technologies of the state" — bureaucratic instruments, discourses, and symbols — to attain imperial status, harness resources, and accumulate capital. In this episode, we explore how the port of Basra became an important center for the business ventures of families straddling the modern borders of Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, and beyond, and how their legal, financial, and ecological entanglements chart a new history of Ottoman belonging in the Gulf region during the empire’s last century.   



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Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer

Sunucu: Can Gümüş



| Erken modern Osmanlı-Safevi dünyasında Kızılbaşlık, sınırları yalnızca inançla çizilen sabit bir kimlik değildi. Safevi hareketinin bir tarikattan bir imparatorluğa dönüşmesi sürecinde, Kızılbaş kimliği de siyasi bağlılıklar, mürit ağları, iktisadi kaynaklar ve ritüeller etrafında şekillendi; Osmanlı-Safevi rekabeti içinde yeni anlamlar kazandı. Bu bölümde Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer, Boundaries of Belonging: Sectarianism and Statecraft in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2026) kitabı temelinde Osmanlı yönetiminin Kızılbaşlara ilişkin sert mezhepsel söylemin her zaman tek biçimli bir uygulamaya dönüşmediğini gösteriyor. Bu sohbetimizde, Kızılbaşları Osmanlı ve Safevi devletlerinin politikaları karşısında edilgen bir topluluk olarak görmek yerine, bu politikaların şekillenmesinde rol oynayan aktörler olarak değerlendiriyor, aidiyetin sınırlarının nasıl kurulduğunu, Osmanlı ve Safevi imparatorlukları arasındaki hareketlilikle nasıl değiştiğini ve Safevi Devleti’nin dönüşümüyle Kızılbaşların konumunun nasıl yeniden tanımlandığını tartışıyoruz.



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with Aimee Genell

hosted by Ayah Aboelela and Chris Gratien





| After the defeat and breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, Great Britain and France established colonial mandates that remade the map of the modern Middle East. Yet as our guest Aimee Genell argues in a new book, those mandates had surprising Ottoman origins in the diverse forms of autonomy created in the empire over its last century. Rather than passive concessions to European powers and national movements, the agreements that redefined the empire's relationship to emerging Balkan nations, Egypt, Lebanon, Crete, Kuwait, and other areas with special status were the product of active engagement with an emerging arena of international law on the part of Ottoman lawyers, officials, and diplomats. As Prof. Genell explains, even in the empire's final days, amid the Wilsonian moment of self-determination, they looked to such agreements as a means of limiting rather than extending European influence over Ottoman territory. The flexible Ottoman model of autonomy in this view laid the foundations of the Mandate system, with lasting consequences for the region until today.   



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with Randa Tawil

hosted by Sam Dolbee





| At the turn of the twentieth century, large numbers of people from Ottoman Syria began to settle abroad, giving birth to the modern Arab-American diaspora. Yet for generations, what was lost in the history of their becoming American is the changes that happened along the way, as people undertook arduous and sometimes circuitous journeys across a world of both unprecedented mobility and scrutiny of migrants. In this interview with Randa Tawil about her new book, Race in Transit, we explore that liminal zone and the many itineraries of the early Syrian diaspora as reflected across archives in Beirut, Marseille, Liverpool, Manila, Washington, D.C., Michigan, and Texas. At every stage of their journeys, race played a role in the fate of these migrants, but as Dr. Tawil explains, it was far from a stable category. In crossing the globe, Syrian migrants also crossed a "global color line" and passed through shifting legal and conceptual boundaries that defined the politics of migration.         



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with Zozan Pehlivan

hosted by Chris Gratien and Ayah Aboelela





| What do environmental features like plants, animals, landscapes, and climate have to do with the political transformation of the Ottoman Empire? Everything, according to our guest in this episode, Zozan Pehlivan, author of The Political Ecology of Violence: Peasants and Pastoralists in the Last Ottoman Century. As Prof. Pehlivan explains, environmental history can be a fascinating window onto how imperial and global developments reshaped local society. Focusing on the region of Kurdistan, Pehlivan explores the changing relationships between peasants and pastoralists under the influence of commercialization, Ottoman centralization, and climatic change. She argues that these forces interacted to shape a "political ecology of violence," reflected not only in the shocking anti-Armenian violence of the 1890s, but also in quotidian conflicts over land and livestock fueled by Ottoman policy.   



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