Sources of Ottoman Social and Economic History II

Building on the first-semester survey, this graduate seminar trains you to actually read the Ottoman archive — the fiscal, judicial, and administrative paperwork that the empire ran on — and to use those documents as evidence rather than illustration. You will work through avariz, mukataa, temettüat, mühimme, and sicil registers week by week, learning what each genre can and cannot tell us about land tenure, taxation, households, and Muslim–nonmuslim relations, and producing an original research essay grounded in the sources themselves. It is essentially the methodological core for anyone planning to write a thesis in Ottoman social or economic history, since secondary literature only gets you so far before you need to confront the defters directly.