Cities are Back in Town seminar: Presentation of the book « Bedouin Bureaucrats. Mobility and property in the Ottoman Empire »

Presentation of the book « Bedouin Bureaucrats. Mobility and property in the Ottoman Empire »

Bedouin Bureaucrats examines how tent-dwelling, seasonally migrating Bedouin engaged in these processes of Ottoman state transformation on local, imperial, and global scales. Narrating the lives of Bedouin individuals involved in Ottoman administration, Nora Elizabeth Barakat brings this population to the center of modern state-making, from their involvement in the pilgrimage administration in the eighteenth century and their performance of land registration and taxation as the Ottoman bureaucracy expanded in the nineteenth, to their eventual rejection of Ottoman attempts to reallocate the « empty land » they inhabited in the twentieth. She places the Syrian interior in a global context of imperial expansion into regions formerly deemed marginal, especially in relation to American and Russian empires. Ultimately, the book illuminates Ottoman state formation attempts within Bedouin communities and the unique trajectory of Bedouin in Syria, who maintained their control over land.

Speaker

Nora Elizabeth Barakat is a historian of the late Ottoman Empire and the Modern Middle East.  Her research focuses on people, commodities and landscapes in the interior regions between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her first book, Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire, came out with Stanford University Press in 2023, and her articles have appeared in the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient and the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association.   Her current research explores the twentieth-century legacies of late Ottoman economy-making efforts in the Eastern Mediterranean, Iraq and the Persian Gulf, particularly the codification of civil law.  Nora teaches Modern Middle East History at Stanford University, and previously taught at New York University Abu Dhabi and Qatar University.  She is the co-founder of the collaborative research groups OpenGulf and Ottoman Political Economies.

Discussant

Sukriti Issar, Associate Professor of Sociology, CRIS, Sciences Po