As a historian of the Ottoman Empire, I seek to challenge conventional scholarship that frames the empire’s encounter with modernity through binary oppositions—reactionary versus progressive, secular versus religious, and Western-oriented versus Eastern-oriented. Ahmed Cevdet Pasha offers a particularly useful lens to this end: using him as a historical guide into the second half of the nineteenth century, I work toward more nuanced and connected histories of the period.
Book Project
My primary project is a book manuscript based on my dissertation, which examines Ahmed Cevdet Pasha and uses his career, writings, and ideas to rethink Ottoman governance, legal modernity, and intellectual life in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Ongoing Projects
I have a few other ongoing projects. One article in preparation examines the Ottoman protégé question in the Bosnian borderlands during the 1860s. In another article, I aim to situate Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi’s Takhlîṣ within the connected Ottoman intellectual world of the mid-nineteenth century, characterized by multidirectional intellectual circulation, examining intra-Ottoman intellectual networks. I am also developing a new research agenda on what I term paternalistic utilitarianism in Ottoman provincial governance during the 1860s. It examines a governing logic that sought to mobilize local resources and populations, often coercively, on the premise that such measures ultimately served the population’s collective welfare.
Dissertation Abstract
Moving beyond fragmented, anecdotal, and often teleological treatments, this dissertation offers a connected history of Ahmed Cevdet Pasha (1823–1895), one of the most influential figures of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. It conceptualizes Cevdet Pasha as a man of empire whose ideas, practices, and writings were inseparable from the Ottoman imperial order and its transformation and preservation in the long nineteenth century. It uses his career as a lens through which to reassess Ottoman governance, legal modernity, and intellectual life in the second half of the century. Drawing on extensive archival materials, the dissertation advances three interrelated arguments that examine distinct yet interlocking facets of his imperial identity as governor, jurist and lawmaker, and intellectual. In the realm of governance, it examines Cevdet Pasha as a theorist, practitioner, and narrator of Ottoman administration, focusing on his interpretation and implementation of the Islahat Edict of 1856, particularly with regard to the incorporation of non-Muslims into the Tanzimat polity through what I term an imperial social contract: a flexible yet deeply hierarchical framework that placed Muslims, and especially Turks, at the apex. In law, the dissertation analyzes Cevdet Pasha’s role as the chief architect of the Mecelle (1868–1889), conceptualizing it as a multi-layered project of Ottoman legal modernity. It argues that the Mecelle was modern codification grounded in Ottoman imperial and Islamic legal traditions and an instrument of legal unification that resisted European extraterritorial claims while asserting Ottoman imperial authority across contested and trans-imperial spaces. In the sphere of ideas, the dissertation examines Cevdet Pasha as an intellectual and situates him within broader Ottoman, Nahda, and selected Asian intellectual networks, demonstrating that he articulated an earlier, historically grounded critique of European civilization as early as the 1860s, well before the late nineteenth-century escalating brutality of European imperialism. Simultaneously, he advanced the Ottoman polity’s civilizational standing by reconstructing earlier “golden ages” of Asian, Islamic and Ottoman civilizations. Last but not least, this dissertation argues that civilization became a contested repertoire of prescriptions through which global Asian intellectuals and reformers designed distinct roadmaps for transforming their societies.