You are kindly invited to the seminar entitled “The Russian-Ottoman Wars and the Transformation of European Warfare” organized by the Department of History.
Date: 03 February 2026, Tuesday
Time: 12.30
Avenue: A-130 Seminar Room
Title: The Russian-Ottoman Wars and the Transformation of European Warfare
Speaker: Victor Taki, Concordia University of Edmonton, Canada
Abstract:
The Russian-Ottoman wars constitute one of the longest conflicts in history, which helps to trace the changes in the character of modern European warfare. Focused on “the long nineteenth century”, this talk will first address the conservative reaction of the tsarist and the European militaries to the challenge of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. It will then examine incremental “democratization” of warfare leading to the emergence of mass citizen armies based on universal military service. Special attention will be paid to “population politics”, or a set of measures aimed at neutralizing potentially hostile ethnic and religious groups, and at taking advantage of the potentially sympathetic ones. Approached from these angles, recurrent Russian-Ottoman wars of the nineteenth century illuminate the transformation of “regular” European warfare of the Old Regime type into the total war of the twentieth century.
Bio:
Dr. Victor Taki is Lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences at Concordia University in Edmonton, Canada, where he teaches courses in Comparative History. Dr. Taki received his PhD in Comparative History of Central, Southeastern, and Eastern Europe from the Central European University in 2008. His research interests cover the cultural history of Imperial Russia, its entanglements in the Balkans, and Russia’s impact upon the peoples of Southeastern Europe. His recent study on “Russia’s Turkish Wars”, published in 2024 by the University of Toronto Press, explores tsarist strategists and commanders involved in the Russian-Ottoman wars.