You are kindly invited to the seminar titled as “The making of corporate bodies in the late Ottoman Empire: Law, property and Greek communal institutions in Istanbul.” organised by the Department of History.
Date: 14 November 2023, Thursday
Time: 16.30
Avenue: A-130
Title: The making of corporate bodies in the late Ottoman Empire: Law, property and Greek communal institutions in Istanbul
Speaker: Ayşe Ozil, Sabancı University
Abstract
Greek Orthodox communities were part of a major drive towards modern institutionalization in the late Ottoman Empire. Many of them established churches, schools, and philanthropic associations, contributing to a transformation of the institutional landscape of the empire’s towns in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Focusing on Istanbul, this paper traces how this development was shaped on the legal level to explore the ways in which non-Muslim corporate bodies integrated into the Ottoman framework and the challenges associated with this integration. It follows this development over the management of communal property which emerged as a defining platform on which corporate bodies were tangibly formed and their connection to the legal sphere was played out. The paper delineates the layers of this connection with regard to both the buildings of these institutions and their revenue-bringing properties. Engaging in a comparative examination of communal administrative mechanisms and the Ottoman legal system, the paper follows the intricate trajectories regarding the making of communal corporate bodies in a modernizing empire.
Bio:
Ayşe Ozil is an Associate Professor of History at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabancı University. After receiving a BA in Political Science and International Relations and an MA in History, both from Boğaziçi University, she completed her PhD at the University of London, Birkbeck College. Before joining Sabancı University, she was a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University and a visiting researcher at Leiden University. Dr. Ozil works on the social history of the late Ottoman Empire with a focus on ethno-religious community making, social networks, and questions of modernization. She is the author of Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire: A Study of Communal Relations in Anatolia (Routledge, 2013), which offers a critical reappraisal of the millet system. She has also published on modern institutionalization, concentrating on law, urbanization, and education. Her work appeared in journals such as Turkish Historical Review, International Journal of Turkish Studies, and Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. She is currently working on communal corporate status in late Ottoman Istanbul. She is also involved in a number of funded research projects. She is the principal investigator at a Tübitak 1001 project about the modernization of commercial buildings (han) in the Galata port in the late Ottoman period. She is also a researcher in the ERC project Ottolegal at Sabancı University and an NEH project at UC Berkeley.