Sexual regulations and prohibitions were a central mechanism of colonial rule, and there is a growing amount of literature addressing a variety of topics related to sexuality, intimacy, and empire. The question of prostitution has been widely debated in the study of empire. Heather J. Sharkey argued that the regulation of prostitution in Sudan was part of a larger attempt to control the movement of labor after the British abolished the slave trade in 1899. In terms of the French empire, Christelle Taraud published a landmark study on prostitution in North Africa, one of the first to move away from the colonial paradigm of exploited female sexuality. Taraud argued that prostitution was much less socially marginalized under the Ottomans but that the French administration organized a coercive system aimed at controlling, regulating, concentrating, imprisoning, and capitalizing prostitution in North Africa as soon as the French entered Algeria in 1830. However, these works have not adequately addressed many of the continuities between the colonial and pre-colonial periods in terms of policies.   My paper addresses the shared practices and attitudes about sexuality and prostitution between the modernizing Ottoman and Italian governments during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Specifically, I will be looking at Ottoman and Italian laws and medical texts related to the regulation of brothels in the city of Tripoli, in order to show how these governments organized and policed divisions between different ethnic and religious communities. This paper argues that both the Italian and Ottoman governments both saw controlling access to specific categories of women as central to a well-ordered city. The Ottoman authorities sought to prevent Muslim women from forming liaisons, temporary or otherwise, with non-Muslim men while the Italian authorities would increasingly regulate intimate interactions to try to prevent interactions between Muslim men and European women. Starting in the 1930s, there was a larger attempt to regularize the colony, which went hand-in-hand with stricter divisions between the local population and Europeans. However, European men continued to have sexual access to Muslim women. In conclusion, this project, by closely examining spaces of intimacy, sheds new light on the shared assumptions about sex and gender which spanned the Mediterranean.

There is hardly any reference in the Ottoman historiography to bureaucratic posts held by Shiites in the Ottoman Empire, except for anecdotal information. In all probability, historians’ apparent lack of interest arises partly from the invisibility of non-Sunni Muslim sectarian identity in the official documentation that the usual Ottoman practice was not to reveal them. Another reason for this might be the tendency to focus on, evidently more lucrative, antagonisms rather than grey zones in which Shiites and Sunnis interacted. Therefore, this paper aims to examine provisional and conditional incorporation of Shiite subjects into local bureaucracy. Indeed, many non-Sunni Muslim, including Shiite, subjects were recruited into the Ottoman bureaucracy in Iraq and Lebanon during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Examples demonstrate that there were numerous Shiites who were appointed not only as public officials to the shrine cities of Iraq and but also to many other local bureaucratic posts in Iraq and Lebanon. Drawing on biographic and prosopographic data as well as archival documents, primarily the personal registers (Sicill-i Ahvâl) in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul, this paper discusses experiences of certain Shiite subjects in the Ottoman bureaucracy and drives some conclusions about their recruitment and promotion patterns. Thus, the paper aims to illuminate aspects of the ambiguous legal and political positions of Iraqi and Lebanese Shiite subjects in the Ottoman Empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

My research focuses on an Ottoman and Turkish colonial administrative institution, the General Inspectorates (Umum-i Mufettislikler). I use this institution to analyze the continuity and change between the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1908) and the rule of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk by comparing their responses to political crises at the periphery. I focus on how the imperial administrative practices at the periphery transformed the Ottoman and Turkish centers. The General Inspectorates were founded in different geographies, at different times, in different contexts. They were created in Eastern Anatolia in 1895, then in Macedonia in 1902 during the reign of Abdulhamid II. There were some attempts to create General Inspectorates during the Young Turk era (1908-1918) but these attempts failed due to World War I. They reappeared during the early Turkish republican era (1923-1945) where they were first assembled in Eastern Anatolia as a response to the continuous Kurdish rebellions that resulted from the Turkish state’s political and militaristic expansion into the Kurdish region. By tracking the roots of the General Inspectorates, I examine the spatio-bureaucratic management of the periphery by the Ottoman Empire and Turkish nation-state starting from 1895 to 1945. The General Inspectorates became the imperial “crisis management” tools in “rebellious” regions, bringing multiple cities under the absolute authority of one inspector or high commissioner. The inspectorates carried out reform projects with the goal of transforming and subjugating the designated regions to oppress rebellions and prevent territorial losses. They served the state by helping centralize its authority, reoccupy the periphery, develop infrastructure projects, create new settlements, and implement demographic engineering projects by violence, forced assimilation, and population transfers. I argue that the early republican era (1923-1945) is not solely a period of nation-state building but also a period of internal colonization in which the inspectorates played a central role. The Ottoman imperial and colonial administrative know-how was implemented through institutions like the General Inspectorates and bureaucrats who served across the empire. The significance of the General Inspectorates lies in their role in shaping the main characteristics of the modern Turkish state. Eastern Anatolia became a laboratory for the top-down Kemalist “civilization project” which was carried out through the inspectorates. In return, the Kemalists’ confrontation with the Kurds in Eastern Anatolia and their response to Kurdish rebellions institutionalized the authoritarian and racist characteristics of the Turkish state. In parallel, this confrontation with the Kurds shaped modern Turkey’s Middle East policy.

Starting with the Al-Ahsa Campaign of 1871, the Ottoman government attempted to reassert its authority and bring the Najd and Al-Ahsa regions under its direct authority. Despite the significance of the region assumed by the Ottomans, the research till date has remained limited in scope with regards to this development. The Najd and Al-Ahsa were overshadowed by a plethora of scholarly works written with respect to the reassertion of the Ottoman authority in the nineteenth century in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Hejaz, etc. Except for a few scholars, the Najd and Al-Ahsa have been virtually unknown to Ottoman historians. Moreover, the thin literature on the Ottoman presence in the Najd and Al-Ahsa generally focuses on the historical developments from the perspective of the Ottoman state, the Saudi dynasty, and the British Empire, thus excludes the agency of ordinary people. By examining hitherto un(der)examined Ottoman archival documents, this study argues that locals were active participants in the ‘building’ of Ottoman governance in their respective regions and forged a dialogic relationship with the Ottoman administration that gave legitimacy to Ottoman authority. By studying the complex negotiations, mediations, and interactions between the Ottoman state and the local population, this study aims to incorporate the Najd and Al-Ahsa regions into the Ottoman historiography and extend the literature on the Ottoman modernization and centralization in the Arab lands to these regions as well as including the voice of the ordinary people by examining the agency of farmers, merchants, slaves, poets, scholars, and other neglected groups.

The tumultuous period of the Republic of Turkey between 1959 and 1971 included two coup d’états and two unsuccessful attempted coup d’états. The 1960s in Turkey have unique aspects when compared with Western European and North American experiences. Turkey fits into the anti-imperialist trend in Third World countries in the call for full independence during the tense period of the Cold War. Yet, the Turkish 1968 also demonstrates some regional Middle Eastern phenomena such as the toppling of the political establishment via military takeover. Importantly, this paper shows that how young students at Turkish universities departed over the course of time from their elder leaders in the Old Left, expressing an anti-authoritarian spirit in addition to anti-imperialism. Finally, women activist rebelled against the dominant attitudes of the fellow male activists in terms of decision-making processes and sexual liberty. This paper focuses on certain symbolic incidents and figures such as occupation of universities by students, protesting the 6th American fleet and NATO in the Bosporus, armed resistance with the gendarmes in the countryside and bank robbery, and smuggling into Palestine to fight the Israeli forces. During the evolution of Kemalist generation into all kinds of belated leftist ideas and ideologies this paper elaborates how youth surpassed in their radical activism with the cautious and calculating elders in Marxist-Leninist camp in Turkey when there was parliamentarian experiment and trade union solidarity with shantytowns in urban centers of Turkey going on as well as the expectation and cooperation with some military figures for a potential leftist military takeover. This paper projects the modest but significant moment of anti-authoritarian attitude and limited counter-culture of the rebellious generation of Turkish Sixties.

Was the Ottoman Empire a colonial power? For some recent studies (e.g. Deringil, Minawi, Ennas, Emrence, and Eldem), the answer is affirmative: The Ottoman Empire was just another example of “the Other colonialism”. These studies maintain that the Ottomans assumed a “civilising mission” and adopted common colonial practices akin to those of their colonial rivals in Europe. Especially indicative, some administrative practices employed by the Ottomans in their Arab provinces and North African regencies, and the political discourse they expressed against their nomadic or tribal subjects in these realms are viewed as unequivocal tokens of Ottoman colonialism. However, I challenge the foregoing assertions and argue that “Ottoman colonialism” is an impossible concept on legal, philosophical, and economic grounds. To begin with, from the perspective of legal theory/philosophy, colonial practices are the result of a colonial mind, which requires a long intellectual and economic preparation to be fashioned (Mitchell). Historically speaking, colonialism was primarily a result and fertiliser of the capitalism and industrial economy. The transfer of resources such as raw materials, human labour, agriculture etc. from the colonised country to the core country was initially needed by the industrial economy and then contributed to the capital accumulation further of the colonisers. Considering the limited scale of Ottoman industrial production compared to the European countries during the 19th century, the need for raw material and the human labour was less likely to be a part of the agenda of the Ottoman sultan and the governing elite. In fact, no contemporary testimony exists for Ottoman treatment of provinces as colony in which the elite coming from the centre endeavoured to transfer the local resources for serving the capitalist interests of the centre. It would also be less lucrative for investing to create a colonial administration when no pressure for providing resource to feed a large industrial/capitalist was felt during the 19th century. Therefore, just as “the Islamic State” is an impossible concept (Hallaq), because of the incompatible formative elements of the “state” and “Islam”, I argue that “Ottoman Colonialism” is also an impossible concept because of the lack of capitalist/industrial institutions as well as social and philosophical outlook for such matter.