Donald Quataert, SUNY Distinguished Professor of History at Binghamton University and a member of the International Labor and Working-Class History Editorial Board, died on February 10, 2011. Don earned his A.B. at Boston University, his A.M. at Harvard University, and his Ph.D. at the University of California-Los Angeles. He was the recipient of numerous fellowships, including several Senior Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A leading historian of labor and the Ottoman Middle East, he wrote and edited many books on political, social, and labor history, especially the latter. He also authored dozens of articles on a wide variety of topics. Don's work focused on ordinary people, including peasants, miners, guildsmen, and women workers.
Don's earliest work was in agrarian history, but more than anything else, Don had a deep commitment to archival research and to labor history. He was at home in the archives of the Crédit Lyonnais in Paris and in the Prime Ministry Archives in Istanbul, as well as in collections throughout Europe and in North America. He often published primary-source material for use by other historians. His knowledge of worldwide labor history was prodigious, particularly the history of coal miners. Discussing the miners of the Zonguldak region of the Black Sea coast, a subject of particular interest, Don could effortlessly make a comparative point by referring to the work on coal mining by Rolande Trempé in France or Klaus Tenfelde in Germany. Don was also interested in the role of the Ottoman Empire in world history and was an enthusiastic supporter of global history. He and Jean Quataert taught a course on modern world history to undergraduates at Binghamton.
Amid an Ottoman historiography where so much work concentrated on political history, Don helped to provide a wider context. Don's book Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution (1993) presented a comprehensive setting for Ottoman economic history and showed that Ottoman producers, particularly small producers in domestic production, vigorously responded to the onset of cheap British textiles. The volume, An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914 (1994), edited by Halil İnalcık with Donald Quataert, is a truly monumental source of information on demography, land tenure, and manufacturing in the Ottoman world. His survey, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (2000, 2005), has been extraordinarily well-received and is now in its second edition. So far, translations have appeared in Turkish, Greek, Portuguese, Korean, Italian, and Arabic.
Perhaps the foremost concern of Don's later work was proletarianization and class formation in the Ottoman world. His great familiarity with the labor historiography of Western Europe meant that Western models did not intimidate him. He recognized the need to understand the unique features of proletarianization processes in non-Western worlds. His discovery of materials on Zonguldak miners, as detailed and extensive as the best Western sources, gave him the opportunity to carry out a sustained comparison of work East and West and a chance to refine his ideas about the effects of Ottoman regulatory policies and the Mediterranean economy on the making of the working class.
Don was a man of great personal integrity. In 2005, when he was the chair of the Board of Governors at the Institute of Turkish Studies, he published a book review, “The Massacres of Ottoman Armenians and the Writing of Ottoman History.” In the wake of demands from Turkish authorities that he repudiate this review, he resigned his position, believing that Turkish government efforts to influence Institute policy violated fundamental standards of academic independence.
Don was also a longtime friend of ILWCH. Years before he joined our Editorial Board he promoted the journal, recommending potential contributors and sending ideas for issues. At his suggestion, ILWCH created a Labor Archives section, devoted to the publication of valuable primary sources; the first publication in this section was “A Coal Miner's Life during the Late Ottoman Empire,” in Issue 60 (Fall 2001).
The worldwide community of students of labor and labor history will miss him.
