Abbasi Annual Conference '24: "The Sarrafs: Money, State, and Finance Dealers in the Ottoman Empire (1700-1900)"
History Department
Middle Eastern Studies Forum
Taube Center for Jewish Studies
615 Crothers Way, Stanford, CA 94305
123
The Sarrafs Conference focuses on financial actors and capitalist expansion in the Ottoman Empire from the 18th to the 20th centuries. The panels will explore the profiles and roles of financial actors, such as individuals, families, and institutional players like banks, in expanding networks of debt and credit on local, regional, imperial, and global scales. The conference will engage with ongoing discussions about the structure of these networks, forms of trust, and the role of ethnic, religious, or communal identities in relation to state institutions. It will also investigate the evolving dynamics of public finance, the state, and the legal systems and instruments involved in capital expansion in this context.
Conference Program
Friday, November 22, 2024
Panel I (9:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.)
Ellen Nye, “Ottoman Sarrafs and Foreign Finance, c. 1700”
Anıl Aşkın, “The Sarrafs and Usurers of Niğde in the Eighteenth Century”
Hasan İlban, "Navigating the Inclusivity of the Ottoman Financial System: British Financial Engagements and Entanglements in Ottoman Provinces, 1690-1815"
Zoe Griffith, “Egyptian Financial Networks in the Long Eighteenth Century”
— LUNCH BREAK —
Panel II (2:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.)
Ali Yaycıoğlu, “Sarrafs, Their Networks and Public Finance in the Ottoman Age of Revolution, 1790-1820”
Murat Bozluolcay, “Going After the Sarraf’s Wealth: Rafael Farhi and the Provincial Economy of Damascus in the 1820s”
Başak Yağmur Karaca, “The Amiras: An Armenian Insight into Ottoman Imperial Governance”
Saturday, November 23, 2024
Panel III (9:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.)
Aron Rodrigue, "The Arie of Samokov: The Chronicle of a Jewish Sarraf Family in the Ottoman Balkans in the 19th Century"
Orit Bashkin, “The Khoja and the Mamluk: Jewish Sarrafs in Basra”
Aviv Derri, “Globalizing Ottoman Finance and Financiers of the Nineteenth Century”
Dimitrios Stergiopoulos, “Bankers, Banks, and Sarrafs in the Late Ottoman Empire: The Interactions Between the Bankers of Galata and the Sarrafs of Fatih”
— LUNCH BREAK —
Panel IV (2:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.)
Fatma Öncel, “Sarraf in the Borderlands: The Effects of War Finance on the Land Market in the Ottoman-Greek Border”
Nora Barakat, “Codified Debt: Excavating Legal Constructions of Everyday Credit Relations in 1890s Gaza and Homs”
Emre Dağlıoğlu, “The OPDA as an International Sarraf”
Speaker Bios
Ali Yaycıoğlu is an Associate Professor of History at Stanford University and the director of the Abbasi Program of Islamic Studies and the Middle East Studies Forum.
Anıl Aşkın is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Brown University.
Aron Rodrigue is the Daniel E. Koshland Professor of Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University.
Aviv Derri is an assistant professor at Ben Gurion University.
Başak Yağmur Karaca is a PhD student in history at the University of Southern California.
Dimitrios Stergiopoulos is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of California, San Diego.
Ellen Nye is the History of Capitalism Fellow at Harvard Business School and an Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University.
Emre Dağlıoğlu is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Stanford University.
Fatma Öncel is a faculty member at Bahçeşehir University and an affiliated researcher at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford University.
Hasan İlban is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Birmingham, UK.
Murat Bozluolcay is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the rank of Instructor at the University of Chicago’s Institute on the Formation of Knowledge (IFK).
Nora Barakat is an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University.
Orit Bashkin is a professor at the University of Chicago.
Zoe Griffith is an Assistant Professor of History at Baruch College, CUNY.