Özizmirli, Görkem

Boston College

Research Title: Sweat for Bread: Port Laborers and the Transformation of Labor in Istanbul from 1730 to 1807

Mr.Özizmirli is a PhD candidate in History department at Boston College. After graduating from Ankara University Faculty of Political Sciences with a double major in International Relations and Radio, Television, and Cinema, he completed his master’s thesis at Koç University in 2014 in the department of Comparative Studies in History and Society. He is interested in the material, cultural, and ideological transformation of labor and laborers in the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century, with a special interest in the patterns of political activism and labor consciousness among port and transportation laborers. His project aims to explore the cultural and ideological patterns of labor consciousness instead of attempting to trace the makings of a crystallized “industrialized class-consciousness.“ His research addresses the social conflicts and labor processes of Istanbul through the eighteenth century’s massive movements of population, new methods of capital accumulation, and changing property relations in order to envision a “pre-industrialized Ottoman Empire“ through the lens of labor and through the eyes of laborers.