Ali Yaycioglu

Ali Yaycioglu is a historian of the Ottoman Empire. His research centers on the economic, political, and legal institutions, ideas, and practices; forms of accumulating and losing power and wealth; spatial organization of the empire; and the transformation of the social-religious order in the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. He also has a research agenda on how people imagined, represented and recorded property, territory, and nature in the early modern era and how we can use digital tools to understand, visualize and conceptualize these imaginations, representations, and recordings. Dr. Yaycioglu teaches courses on the Middle East and the Balkans during the Ottoman rule; history of the Muslim world from medieval to modern times; empires, markets, and networks in the early modern world; economic history and history of Modern Turkey. Ali Yaycioglu's first book, Partners of the Empire: Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford University Press, 2016) offers a rethinking of the Ottoman Empire within the global context of the revolutionary age in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Currently, Dr. Yaycioglu is working on a book project, entitled The Order Debt: State, Wealth and Death in the Ottoman Empire analyzing transformations in property, finance, and statehood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book focuses on episodes of economic violence during the political and economic transformation from the Early Modern era to the Modern times through fiscal records, probate inventories, debt and credit registers, confiscation, and auction documents. Dr. Yaycioglu's other project—tentatively entitled Ottoman Topologies: Managing, Knowing and Recording Nature—examines the symbiotic relationship between the managerial, intellectual, and scribal organization of the Ottoman Empire and various eco-orders, such as mountains, forests, valleys, steppes, river and lakesides, coastal areas, islands, and deserts.