Join us for the CESTA Tuesday lunch seminar on November 12th, from 12:00 to 1:15 pm, on "Charting the Empire: Power, Wealth and Death in the Ottoman World, 1700-1850". The project team, Ali Yaycıoğlu, Associate Professor of History at Stanford, Fatma Öncel, Assistant Professor of History and Sociology at Bahçeşehir University, and Jordan Rothkowitz, MS student in Computational and Mathematical Engineering, will talk about their groundbreaking project exploring the political economy of the Ottoman Empire in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa from the 1780s to the 1830s, shedding light on the Empire’s role during the global "Great Divergence" and "Age of Revolutions" through digital analyses of complex fiscal codices. RSVP for lunch or to receive the Zoom link here.

Talk Abstract

The talk will delve into how the project illuminates complex networks—archives, actors, and finances—using the fiscal codex as a key resource. These networks reveal interconnected individuals and state entities through intricate debt and credit chains, offering a fresh perspective on the state’s role in private wealth, debt, and the power dynamics that shaped the Empire’s economic framework. Special attention will be given to the project’s in-depth exploration of fenn-i siyaqat, an accounting technique central to Ottoman fiscal documentation, highlighting its role within the Empire's bureaucratic practices before it faded in the Tanzimat era. 

Charting the Ottoman Empire offers a methodical approach to analyzing Ottoman fiscal archives, beginning with the labor-intensive process of structuring spreadsheet data from the codex and advancing to relational database development. This journey—from manually coding unstructured information about actors, debts, and fiscal officers to designing complex SQL queries—allows historians to map intricate financial and political networks. This database-driven approach highlights new epistemic practices within Ottoman fiscal studies, with each query and relational insight serving as an analytical tool to unlock fresh interpretations of the Empire’s economic orientation, debt structures, and wealth-building dynamics.

About the Speakers

Dr. Ali Yaycıoğlu is Associate Professor of History at Stanford. He is a historian specializing in the History of the Ottoman Empire, Middle East, and Modern Turkey. Currently he is serving as the director of the Abbasi Program of Islamic Studies and the Middle East Studies Forum. His research focuses on different dimensions of political, economic, and legal institutions and practices, as well as the social and cultural dynamics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dr. Yaycıoğlu is particularly intrigued by visions, representations, and documentation of concepts like property, territory, and nature in early periods. His is also interested in the application of digital tools to comprehend, visualize, and conceptualize these historical perspectives. Dr. Yaycıoğlu offers courses on the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Empires, Markets, and Networks in the Early Modern World, Global History of the Age of Revolutions, Doing Economic History, and Digital Humanities. Dr. Yaycıoğlu's first book, Partners of the Empire: Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford, 2016), reevaluates the Ottoman Empire within the global context of the revolutionary age in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He also co-edited the Ottoman Digital Humanities Special Issue of the Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies(2023) and Crafting History: Essays on the Ottoman World and Beyond in Honor of Cemal Kafadar (Boston, 2023). Dr. Yaycıoğlu's essays on the history and contemporary affairs of the Republic of Turkey were published in his Uncertain Past Time: Empire, Republic, and Politics (in Turkish, Istanbul, 2024).

Fatma Öncel works on Ottoman social and economic history. She is a faculty member at Bahçeşehir University and an affiliated researcher at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford University. She currently teaches in the Ottoman History Master's Program at Bahçeşehir University.  Dr. Öncel conducts research in rural history, land question, the Balkans, and digital humanities. She examines the effects of tax, labor, and property institutions on Ottoman political and economic regimes. Furthermore, she approaches Ottoman archive sources in the context of digital data epistemology and data ethics.