Middle Eastern and North African Colloquium Series

Quiet Revolutions and the End of the Ottoman Empire

Bio: Christine Philliou specializes in the connected histories of the Balkans and Middle East since the 17th century, focusing particularly on the emergence of the Greek and Turkish nation-states out of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries. She has worked, and is interested more broadly in comparative empires and in interfaces between cultures and histories in Europe and the Middle East. Her books, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (2011), and Turkey: A Past Against History (2021), have been translated into both Greek and Turkish, and she has published widely in scholarly journals as well as in broader forums such as PublicBooks and Jadaliyya. She is currently working on a third book and developing a collaborative digital/public humanities project, the aim of which is a granular reconstruction and analysis of the Greek Orthodox communities in the larger context of late Ottoman Istanbul/Constantinople (1821-1923) using a wide range of Ottoman and Greek sources. 

Abstract: Scholars have long discussed several revolutions associated with the Ottoman Empire - such as the Constitutional Revolution of 1908 and the Turkish national revolution/War of Salvation 1919-1922. In this talk I will present a case for a quieter revolution that was going on in these final decades of the Empire's history, through the case of histories that were penned at the time.