The acceleration of the Ottoman Empire’s “modernization” project during the so-called Long Nineteenth Century had a direct impact on the practice of architecture in the Empire; it led to the establishment of new institutions and professionalization practices which had a discriminatory effect on non-Muslim communities due to the nationalist tendencies in these reformations. Specifically the violence and massacres against the Armenians, and therefore the discrimination against and the displacement of the Armenian architects, builders, and citizens form the focus of this project. My paper confronts this contested modernization process in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world, by focusing on the works and lives of a number of actors, including Armenian architects, builders and their migration and property rights, during the transformation from the Empire to the Nation-state. By discussing cosmopolitanism, labor and the nationalization of architectural narrative at the turn of the twentieth century, I aim to show that the history of modernism and modern architecture in Turkey needs to be (re)written to include a history of migrations and different forms of displacements. Therefore, my paper places Turkey and the Armenian architects into focus in order to reveal the agency of the Armenian architects (who constituted the majority in the construction sector until the reformation period in the late nineteenth century) and citizens in the Ottoman and Turkish urban environments, and to highlight the role that displacement —of people, objects and ideas— has played in forever connecting the Turkish state, the Armenian architects and their ever-present absence. I am going to analyze the contested history of these non-Muslim builders, citizens, and their property rights —an integral part of citizenship rights— to demonstrate how confiscations and dispossession are an essential part of understanding the afterlife of buildings. The concept of displacement here becomes both an analytical framework, and the object of analysis. It will also help transcend the limitations of the single-sited research and the over-determined periodization of the empire vs. nation-state. How do property rights influence the way we discuss history of architecture in Turkey? How do issues of authorship, migration, and dispossession complicate the ways in which we understand the influence of Armenian architects and builders when we read the urban landscape of Turkey? My research focuses on the displacement of the property rights and the confiscation laws, to question the production and destruction of space in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey

This research uses a multi-scale spatial and discursive analysis to examine how a specific site informed colonial knowledge production in the 19th century Western Indian Ocean. With a focus on slave markets in Zanzibar and Muscat, I borrow from Lefebvre to situate these sites as dynamic spatial productions. Informed by new historiographies of East Africa, the Persian Gulf, and British abolitionism, we can approach slave market dynamics as grounded in the Western Indian Ocean world. Concomitantly, by focusing on how markets were represented and perceived by European observers, it is possibly to look at an array of imperial anxieties as unfolding spatially. This project, in this context, presents slave markets as spaces that were simultaneously produced by various ‘indigenous’ interregional actors, and by the European colonial imagination in an age of abolition and growing imperial ambitions. Reading 19th century British sources, I advance an argument for considering slave markets in Muscat and Zanzibar as spaces that not only illustrate an interconnected maritime arena, but also as important sites of colonial knowledge production that informed British imperial advances in the Persian Gulf and East Africa alike. Focusing on a series of first-hand accounts of the slave markets, together with parliamentary debates, newspaper articles, political diaries, and letters documenting the Western Indian Ocean slave trade, this project traces space as it unfolded in British antislavery rhetoric, particularly during the second half of the 19th century. The first section reads accounts of the market as telling of a transregional production of space where consumption, sociability, gender, performance, mobility, and power relations are displayed. The second and third sections explore how the slave market unfolded in the British imperial imagination in the context of a discursive and geopolitical shift associated with the re-imagination of Britain as an expanding, slave-less empire of free trade. I analyze how the slave market unfolded for visitors as a source of colonial knowledge production that evoked civilizational commentary. I then examine the ‘macro’ discursive level of parliamentary debates, newspaper articles and their associated images, public letters, and abolitionist publications to situate the slave market as a space of rhetorical relevance for abolitionism and imperial interests. In the concluding section, I locate this discursive production leading to the eventual prohibition of the slave market in 1873 as contributing to geopolitical shifts in the late 19th c. and to future conceptualizations of imperial relations.

This paper uses a spatial approach to construct a history of the Red Sea islands of Tiran and Sanafir, which lie at the entrance to the Gulf of Aqaba and whose borders were never delimited until April 2016, as a way of understanding the public outcry against the Saudi-Egyptian maritime border agreement that determined the islands fell within Saudi territorial waters. Using published archival documents from the British Foreign Office, reports from international organizations, and news accounts, as well as studying the political rhetoric of regional leaders on the status of the Gulf of Aqaba, this paper argues that the modern history of Tiran and Sanafir Islands, from the mid-nineteenth century through to present times, is one of a series of competing and complementary processes that transformed the islands into an ambiguously defined space for power, even identity, competition. Driven by evolving political interests, Tiran and Sanafir Islands became sites of rival visions of political organization as various emerging powers—including British, Ottoman, Egyptian, Israeli, and Saudi authorities—sought to define borders or competed over access to the Gulf of Aqaba. The islands were subjected to successive processes of territorialization (associating political authority with territory), geopoliticization (giving territory significance in the context of imperial or regional power competition), and nationalization (ascribing national identity to territory) that are now in conflict with an emerging neoliberal policy seeking to manage the flow of capital and goods in the Gulf of Aqaba. Each process layered itself over those that preceded it, instituting spatial norms that enhanced or challenged ones prior processes established as well as incorporating the islands and their surrounding geographical space into evolving systems of international organization. In the ambiguity that ensued, the islands and the Gulf were subjected to multiple sovereignization efforts, in which different political entities understood them as sovereignizable and sought to impose competing sovereign and spatial regimes. In the process, the association of sovereignty with territoriality became further entrenched in the political imagination of the region, creating assumptions that the 2016 border agreement overturned. The case of Tiran and Sanafir Islands, thus, demonstrates that the production of modern borders was and remains a fragile and disruptive process because the concepts of sovereignty and territoriality, as spatial configurations, were historically dependent developments that emerged unevenly and independently of each other through contestation, cooperation, conflict, and settlement between various political actors.