This workshop will be framed around Dr. Atabey’s articles: “Ransom Intermediaries and the Redemption of Ottoman Captives in the Early Modern Mediterranean: A Sociolegal View from Seventeenth-Century Galata” and “European Men, Ottoman Women, and Legal Agency in Early Modern Istanbul”.
We will explore the use of Ottoman legal documents for Mediterranean history. It prioritizes court records from seventeenth-century Istanbul and supplements them with other valuable sources, such as complaint registers and registers of important affairs. It examines what these documents reveal about social and commercial interactions between Ottoman subjects and Europeans—mainly the British, Dutch, French, and Venetians—as well as Ottoman subjects’ relationship to the Mediterranean. The conversation will focus on the possibilities these sources offer for illuminating the dynamics of relations and interactions on the ground that diplomatic sources alone cannot capture.
Ali Atabey is an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His research focuses on early modern Ottoman and Mediterranean history. He specializes in the social and legal history of the Ottoman Empire, with a particular emphasis on ethnic and religious communities and urban space. He has published on various topics, including piracy, captivity, slavery, and gender in Ottoman legal culture. He is currently working on a monograph that explores the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in early modern Istanbul.
Click here for the readings for the workshop.
Brown-bag lunch will be provided for the workshop participants.
This event is sponsored by ASM (Associated Students of Madison), the Kemal H. Karpat Center for Turkish Studies, and the War in Society and Culture Program at the Department of History.
