Ottoman Social and Economic History I

HIST 511 is a graduate-level reading of how the Ottoman polity actually worked from frontier beylik to imperial world power — the tımar, kapıkulu, palace, and reaya not as a list of institutions but as an interlocking system that organized land, tax, and loyalty across Anatolia and the Balkans. You'll spend the semester in weekly seminar discussions, writing reports, and producing an original research paper built on critical engagement with the secondary literature. It's the first half of a paired sequence covering the classical age, so it sets the institutional baseline you need before tackling the transformations and crises that the later course takes up.