The Abdullah Quilliam Society of Liverpool recently posted pictures and a video of the Victorian-era stove of the former Liverpool Muslim Institute (LMI; established in 1887). The caption and commentary implied that Abdullah Quilliam (1856-1932), an Anglo-convert to Islam, had single-handedly fed the poor in the late nineteenth century. There was no mention of other LMI members. It was another example of activists and historians ignoring the contribution of other Liverpool Muslims, especially female Muslims who played a critical role in the Institute’s activities. The female Liverpool Muslims were vibrant members in the LMI. They wrote articles and poems in the LMI’s publications, led charitable works, and participated in weekly meetings – contributions that are often missing in current historiography. There is an erasure of female British converts, which includes their interaction with British society, their attempts to integrate into the broader “Muslim world,” and their engagement with the Ottoman state. My paper describes Ottoman officials’ observations about the Liverpool Muslims, focusing on what the officials wrote about the female converts. I use the Ottoman Archives to narrate the female converts’ appeals and petitions to Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909) when they faced hardships. They wrote to Abdülhamid II with confidence that their “Caliph” would acknowledge their concerns and act on their behalf, despite not being Ottoman subjects. I argue that the women petitioned Abdülhamid based off of the late nineteenth century pan-Islamic discourse about the sultan-caliph’s interest in protecting Muslims outside his well-protected domains. I explain how the female converts engaged with Ottoman officials and Abdülhamid II as trans-imperial subjects, believing themselves to be part of the idea of “the Muslim world,” governed by Abdülhamid’s religious authority and benevolence. Some female converts gauged their faithfulness to Islamic practices based on their perceptions of Islam as practiced in the Middle East and other majority Muslim lands. For this reason, they requested that Abdülhamid pay for them to relocate and live amongst “true believers.” The Ottoman Archives enhance our understanding of how Ottoman officials viewed British Muslim converts (both men and women). I foreground the perspectives of British female converts through Ottoman documents to explore the relationship between the Ottomans and Liverpool Muslims in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

My paper seeks to examine the survival strategies of Muslim Ottoman women, living without the financial support of “a male breadwinner” in their families, by analyzing their petitions sent to the state departments and to the Sultan to request financial aid. Petitions are significant sources to get out the voices of economically destitute women who used “discursive strategies” to exercise their agency while bargaining with the state by carefully choosing their words in their petitions to manipulate the system for their own sakes. For example, these women represented themselves in their petitions as being moral mothers, wives or daughters of their sons, husbands and fathers in order to be legible “subjects” to the patriarchal state that reinforced “traditional gender roles” for women in family and society. The case of Mustafa Edib Pa?a’s family is a unique example in this sense to trace how the Pasa’s wife and two daughters used certain strategies to get privileges from the state through petitioning between the years of 1888 and 1907, a time period which mainly covers the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II. Mustafa Edib Pasa was a ferik (major general) in the Ottoman army who got retired and died in 1872 after serving almost forty-five years for the Ottoman state. After his death, his family was granted a very small amount of salary, which led them to economic destitution and trauma. In order to alleviate their economic distress, his wife and daughters petitioned to various state departments and directly to the Sultan to request a salary raise by emphasizing their state of poverty and Mustafa Edib Pasa’s “self-sacrificing” services for the state and the Sultan. By strategically claiming in their petitions that “a just and merciful” Sultan could not let such a Pasa’s family live in poverty and destitution, not only they aimed to manipulate the system for their own sakes but also they became a source of legitimacy of a just Sultan and its regime. Thus, while this paper aims to show these women’s endeavors and strategies to voice their requests, it also mirrors the socio-economic and political transformations of the Ottoman state in the late nineteenth century Hamidian period and how these transformations affected the everyday lives of Ottoman subjects, particularly women, on the ground. Finally, this paper seeks to reveal the agency of destitute Ottoman women in the Hamidian era and to bring new insights to Ottoman gender historiography.

Marriage and matrimonial strategy constitute a basic means of social reproduction. By the same token, spouse selection and marital union are socially charged affairs that validate the concept of marriage market. However, a unitary treatment of the social reproduction of the Ottoman élite is curiously absent. On the one hand, we have a catalogue of royal marriages and sons-in-law culled from multiple archival sources that rarely ventures beyond royal appanage. On the other hand, we have familial profiles for several towns in Anatolia and Syria mostly based on probate inventories and court records, as part of family history and politics of notability. Thus, current research is biased towards a court-centric model of imperial politics. It hardly distinguishes between the roles and actions of the court members and simply reports an aggregate effect. Moreover, the prevalent factionalism of the imperial politics does not meet an analysis of the matrimonial strategies of the pasha households and the officialdom, hence the implication on honors, entitlement, and social stratification is amiss. The paper addresses this imbalance and research lacuna by means of a mixed-methods approach combining social network analysis and qualitative comparative analysis. Consequently, if we inquire into the coherence and longevity of the Ottoman élite, a comprehensive analysis of kinship ties is the crux of social reproduction against assets drawn from official positions and courtly circumstances.

There is a growing interest in the study of slavery in the Ottoman Empire. This paper is situated within the time-period of the late nineteenth century when the British increased its pressure on the Ottoman Empire to suppress the African slave-trade. In this paper, I will be using diplomatic correspondences regarding runaway slaves who take refuge at the British missions. Particularly, I will be focusing on a certain young black man who was detained by the Malta police while he was traveling with his master on the grounds that he was a slave and had to be freed. Ensuing diplomatic scuffle surrounding the case tells us a great deal about how Ottomans imagined their slavery to be, and how they created a difference between themselves and the West in an effort to strengthen their imperial legitimacy. In this regard, the debate around the issue of domestic slavery was about the status of slaves as much as it was about sovereign independence and compassion. I argue in this paper that European intervention was a type of moral intervention that violated the customs and traditions of the Ottoman family. This, I believe, is an illustration of the reach of European international law into the heart of the Ottoman social life. I interpret this as public interest in private affairs. The international anti-slavery movement then, whether in the late nineteenth century or earlier, could be seen as the violation of the public-private divide. Studies on the history of colonialism have shown how managing of inter-racial relations, master-slave, or free-freed relations, in the colonies, were important instances and questions through which imperial categories of inclusion and exclusion were developed. In this regard, the case of the Ottoman Empire is an important addition to the study of slavery, domestic arrangements, and politics of intimacy.

“...(O)ur Arab Kalfa, Zeynep Hanim, for whom we searched far and wide suffering a thousand hardships just to give our home that taste of the old world” says Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar in his prominent novel, the Time Regulation Institute. He also adds the point of surprise to the hardship he endured in finding Zeynep Hanim in 1954 in Istanbul, as it would not have been the case in his childhood when “there were so many blacks in Istanbul.  Besides the quantitative comparison he made for the number of black people in Turkey “the taste of the old world” was actually a general perception regarding the presence of black people from the onset of the Republic. After the ambiguous treatment of the enslaved people in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, the new Turkish state had initiated a variety of steps to dissolve the institution of slavery and slavery-like practices in 1926 and 1930, respectively. This paper aims to lay out a discussion on the ways in which early Turkish Republic dealt with the legacy of African slavery that was inherited from the imperial past. It argues that drawing the boundaries of Turkishness was deemed necessary for the early Republic in a way to disown the immediate imperial past and constitute its own political legacy. In such an official framework which was deeply invested in drawing the racial contours of citizenship, the descendants of enslaved Africans now citizens of the modern state, had to be rendered invisible. Relying upon parliamentary debates on slavery and the lawsuits involved African descended people as well as articles from the newspapers in early republican Turkey, this paper explores the ways in which blackness and the practice of slavery were transmitted into the nation- state setting. Finally, it argues that carrying the imprint of slavery, blackness was framed within the imperial imaginary thereby the black citizens of the nation-state, were turned into the reminders of the imperial past.