Bayraktar, Uğur

Boğaziçi Üniversitesi, École des hautes études en sciences sociales

Research Topic: Notables and Reform: Making of Imperial Peripheries in Ottoman Kurdistan and Albania, 1800-1878

Dr. Bayraktar holds a joint PhD in History from Boğaziçi University and EHESS (2015). In his dissertation, he investigates political, social, and economic transformation of an Ottoman peripheral province, i.e. Diyarbekir, by focusing on the transformation of family estates into modern private property. His research interests include the nineteenth-century transformation of hereditary land holdings, local politics, and political and patronage networks in the Ottoman Empire. During his stay at ANAMED, he plans to expand his dissertation to a manuscript by adding another peripheral province, Albania. His project explores the phenomena of Ottoman borderlands from a comparative perspective. By focusing on the structures of local politics in Ottoman Kurdistan and Albania, his research conceptualizes a colonial/imperial state building in a comparative account of Hazro (in northeastern Diyarbekir) and Dibra (in western Macedonia) throughout the nineteenth century. Underlining the continuity of the local notables in the Ottoman borderlands, his project aims to conceptualise the Tanzimat reforms in borderlands as a negotiated space between the local political actors and the imperial officials and revise the idealised view of the central state. Elaborating upon the difference compared to administrative practices in the central provinces, the project plans to investigate the trajectory of imperial/colonial reforms in the imperial borderlands.