Gertrude Bell had been conducting journeys in the Middle East for much of the fifteen-year period before her recruitment to British Military Intelligence in November 1915. While her interest in archaeology had given her a personal motivation for exploring some of the less well visited areas of the Ottoman Empire, this knowledge made her uniquely qualified to advise the British about certain key regions during the First World War. This article considers how Bell made the most of her unofficial status, using both her background and the networks she had built over the course of her life to promote herself and to develop her spheres of influence. Her work, conducted independently and unofficially before the First World War, enabled Bell to operate with increasing agency in official contexts. Informed particularly by material from the Gertrude Bell Archive, this article focuses on Bell’s private letters and diaries and her publications to clarify questions about the motivations and significance of her travels not addressed in more formal records.

This paper endeavors to scrutinize the political and economic transformation within Central Saharan regions, concentrating specifically on Ghadames and Murzuq from the 1700s through the 1850s. Despite being neighboring regions, their respective political and economic systems exhibited stark contrasts, which precipitated divergent responses when broader regional shifts occurred following the 1790s. After the Ottoman Empire’s establishment of direct rule in Tripolitania in 1835, the changes became more pronounced. Consequently, not only did these regions undergo significant internal transformations from the 1700s to the 1850s, but local actors also significantly influenced the Ottoman Empire’s engagement with the Sahara.

This article examines public toilets in late Ottoman İstanbul as liminal spaces where urban governance, public health, and everyday life intersected. It argues that these sites functioned as arenas through which modern notions of hygiene, order, and civilization were articulated and contested. Drawing on archival documents, municipal records, and contemporary accounts, the study shows that while purpose-built public toilets began to emerge in limited numbers in the early twentieth century, urban sanitation largely relied on mosque latrines and other semi-public spaces, blurring the boundary between public and private. At the same time, sanitary interventions in bureaucratic buildings reveal how the modern toilet was imagined as a controlled, technical environment, even as persistent problems exposed the limits of this ideal. Taken together, these sites demonstrate that sanitation did not follow a linear trajectory of modernization but unfolded through technological experimentation, institutional frictions, and everyday practices shaped by concerns over smell, gender, and property value. By tracing how waste, infrastructure, and urban space were continuously negotiated, the article positions public toilets as critical nodes in the making of late Ottoman urban modernity.

Smugglers dominated the major routes of migration from the Ottoman Empire to the United States starting from the second half of the nineteenth century. Using the Syrian American press in New York, this article explores how Syrian diasporic activists in the United States married smuggling with patriotism against the backdrop of anti-immigrant nativism. It demonstrates the diasporic impulse to reform the Syrian migrant smuggling economy in line with the racial prerequisites of transatlantic border regimes. The essay argues that representatives of the Syrian American diaspora did not question the moral legitimacy of the smuggling profession. Instead, they sought to impose patriotic paternalistic standards on Syrian smuggling agents to retain the physical and moral wellbeing of US-bound Syrian migrants facing limitations on their freedom of travel. Preserving the “comfort” and “honor” of probationary white Syrian immigrants obsessed diasporic activists who were anxious about the nation’s racial standing at the US borders. The essay finally analyzes the overlaps of reforming the Syrian smuggling industry with the performance of Ottoman citizenship following the 1908 Young Turk Revolution through World War I. It examines the entanglements between Syrian diasporic proposals of expanding the Ottoman emigration bureaucracy and the exercise of political self-government from abroad.

This article examines exile as a mode of punishment and governance in the late Ottoman Empire. Drawing on foreign ministry and diplomatic records, intergovernmental correspondence, and penal legislation, I argue that exile was part of an expansive and legally entrenched system of punitive mobility characterized by the forced movement of convicts. Against narratives that treat imprisonment as the defining mode of modern punishment, I show how the lines between exile and incarceration were blurred in law and practice across the Tanzimat (1839–1876) and Hamidian (1876–1909) eras. At the center of this analysis of attempts to expand the exile regime are proposals—inspired by Imperial Russia but consistent with Ottoman policies of internal deportation and settlement—to establish settler penal colonies in Yemen and Libya that would simultaneously purge the imperial interior of seditious subjects and develop frontier provinces through convict labor. In tracing the emergence and denouement of these plans for creating an “Ottoman Siberia,” the article explores how proposed convict settlement intersected with the pressures of managing Muslim refugees and migrants (muhacirin). While plans for both free and unfree settlement were shaped by overlapping spatial imaginaries and developmentalist logics, the article considers why migrants were prioritized. Recovering this history situates the Ottomans within global histories of convict transport that have been dominated by the study of maritime colonial empires. It raises productive questions about the place of exile in governing an empire defined by movement and about how Russian exile shaped the parameters of Ottoman punitive mobility.

This article examines the transformation of the Ottoman empire’s maritime boundary policies in the Red Sea during the early modern period. It focuses on the dual character of the Red Sea, as both a religious frontier safeguarding the Holy Cities and a strategic maritime corridor within global trade networks. Drawing on Ottoman and British archival sources, the study analyses the period from 1517 to 1798 in three distinct phases: a closed sea era shaped by the Portuguese threat (1517–1608); a phase of negotiation with friendly European actors (1608–36); and a period of controlled openness (1636–1798), in which limited access was granted to merchants recognised as müsteʾmin (protected foreigners). The article argues that Ottoman maritime sovereignty in the region was not exercised through absolute control, but through a flexible and negotiable mode of boundary management. This perspective offers a contribution to early modern debates on imperial border-making and sovereignty by revealing how empires balanced ideological commitments with economic pragmatism.

The objective of this study is to examine the policies of the Russian Empire and Persia regarding the election of the Catholicos of All Armenians. The expansionist ambitions of the Russian Empire in the South Caucasus led to confrontation with Persia, and within this context the cultivation of a pro-Russian worldview among the Armenian population became a priority for Russian authorities. Consequently, the Catholicosate of All Armenians—the most influential Armenian institution of the period—emerged as a target of both Russian and Persian intervention.

The election of the Catholicos thus became a primary foreign policy issue for the two empires. The electoral process itself reveals divisions within the Armenian clergy, as rival factions sought to establish a Catholicos under Russian or Persian patronage. Taking advantage of these circumstances, Tsarist authorities actively intervened, promoting their preferred candidates and thereby breaking with the traditional practice of autonomous election.

This study draws on archival documents from the Catholicosate of All Armenians, which provide the basis for a comprehensive analysis of the election process, the responses of the Armenian clergy, the manifestations of Russian-Persian rivalry, the resulting diplomatic confrontations, and the involvement of the Ottoman Empire. By systematically reconstructing these events from original sources, the study highlights the ways in which imperial rivalries directly shaped Armenian ecclesiastical life, offering new insights into the intersection of religious authority and regional power politics in the South Caucasus.

The imperial rivalry between the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg monarchy is widely recognized as one of the defining conflicts of early modern Eurasia. Until recently, historiography has focused on wars and seemingly intractable differences between them, although their shared history is equally marked by communication and pragmatic efforts at mutual understanding. Drawing on the cultural history of diplomacy and theories of Orientalism, this study examines the seventeenth-century Habsburg monarchy’s concept of the Ottoman Orient within the empire’s highest decision-making forums, based largely on unpublished archival documents. At the center of this inquiry is the Aulic War Council (Hofkriegsrat), the institution responsible for Eastern affairs in the monarchy. As a starting point, the study presents the specific geopolitical context in which the Habsburg image of the East covering Eurasian space developed. It then provides an overview of the Habsburg diplomatic apparatus within the War Council, explaining its structure, key actors, and operational mechanisms. Focusing on a specific diplomatic genre—the final report—it also shows how decisions regarding the Ottomans and the Eastern world were made, emphasizing the role of knowledge accumulation, strategy-building, and overarching political objectives in shaping Habsburg policy.

Motivated by the existential threat of Ottoman expansion, Vienna required a constant flow of information from Constantinople as early as the first half of the sixteenth century. Following the establishment of a resident embassy in the Ottoman capital in 1547, Vienna soon built a dense network of diplomats, Sprachknaben, and other agents, enabling the Habsburg monarchy to develop a sustained system of information production on the Ottoman Empire. By the early eighteenth century, the original urge to achieve, through diplomacy, a near certainty about prospective political or military developments in the Ottoman Empire evolved into a full-fledged knowledge ecosystem, which I term the “Habsburg diplo-Wissen regime.” As this article demonstrates through three case studies of record-keeping and archival preservation from 1682, 1699–1700, and 1719–20, the distinctive quality of this diplo-Wissen regime lay in an asymmetrical flow of information from Constantinople to Vienna, which remained unmatched on the Ottoman side until the early nineteenth century.

How do competing political projections, economic motives, and security rationales inform infrastructural policy? How do state actors project infrastructural imaginations into the future when they perceive the present to be under duress? This article examines these questions by looking at Turkey’s infrastructural development from the late Ottoman period to the early Cold War through archival research and fieldwork. In this article, I argue that state actors can clash over the objectives, disposition, tempo, and modality of infrastructural development and opt for policy choices that may seem counterintuitive from the perspective of theories that treat infrastructure as a force multiplier of state power and identify in the state an insatiable and uniform drive for infrastructural power. These clashes are framed as contestations over infrastructural ideology and shows how state elites may consciously pace, manipulate, and even withhold infrastructural development in national territories, particularly in light of crisis perceptions and conditions. It claims that contests over infrastructural ideology arise from the recognition that infrastructure is ambivalent and can accommodate different power projections. In tracing Turkey’s infrastructural development since the Ottoman era and the gradual consolidation of centripetal preparedness as the state’s predominant infrastructural ideology, the article demonstrates how unorthodox forms of infrastructural policymaking under crisis conditions can entrench spatial fragmentations and skew the distribution of resources and life chances across national space and populations.

Flows of Spanish American silver have long been bound up in narratives of early modernity, the growth of globalization, and the coming of capitalism. This article reconsiders these narratives through a trial held in seventeenth-century Ottoman Istanbul of imported lion dollar coins that were suspected of being false. The trial shows the different ways groups—both within and outside the state and transacting on different scales from local to interstate—sought to impose criteria of evaluation on coins as they crossed oceans and empires in an era of incomplete state power and growing interstate trade. The trial worked to align competing understandings of money and restored confidence through a performance of measurement. In reckoning with competing understandings of money before multiple monetary authorities, social relations, as much as the physical coins, were on trial. By moving past a traditional divide between thinking globally about money as a trade commodity and thinking comparatively about money as a creature of the state in distinct polities, the trial of the lion dollars shows how early modern money was made and remade through a process of global circulation and far-reaching interactions with competing authorities.

This article reexamines the Ottoman Turkish term millet, which is supposedly central to understanding Ottoman governance over non-Muslim subjects. While scholars have largely assumed that the use of millet for non-Muslim collectives reflected top-down imperial control, this article challenges that premise by extensively examining how the term was employed in Ottoman documents from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The findings reveal that the extant understanding of millet as a rigidly defined, state-recognized confessional community lacks empirical support throughout the empire’s history. Instead, the term millet, as used in Ottoman documents, vaguely denoted a group of people who supposedly shared a common origin and culture, though not necessarily defined by a common religion or confession. Furthermore, millet’s use for non-Muslim collectives gradually increased from around 1805, not due to state imposition, but influenced by non-Muslim actors who responded to millet’s acquired distinction as a term denoting modern nationhood. Thus, this article contributes to revising the prevalent state-centric view of Ottoman history by demonstrating the participation of non-Muslims in the development of Ottoman discourse.