Dispossession and Its Legacies: Comparisons, Intersections, and Connections | Panel 1

Dispossession and Its Legacies: Comparisons, Intersections, and Connections: Panel 1 | Displacement and Dispossession in the Late Ottoman Empire Recorded on February 10 and 11, 2022. Opening Remarks: Matthew Ghazarian, University of Michigan Nora Barakat, Stanford University, “Building an Ottoman National Economy: Land, Religious Identity and Capital Expansion in the Syrian Interior, 1850-1915” Ella Fratantuono, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, “Failing Upward: Critique, Contestation, and State Consolidation through Ottoman Immigrant Settlement” Matthew Ghazarian, University of Michigan, “Precarities of Plenty: Famine and Sovereign Debt in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1881-94” Discussant: Robert Nichols, University of Minnesota Description: This workshop focuses on the historical instances and aesthetic representations of dispossession, its violence, and its persisting legacies in the former Ottoman Empire and its diasporas. The organizers hope to bring Ottoman, Middle Eastern, and Armenian studies into conversation with settler colonial studies, critical Indigenous studies, and global histories of colonialism and capitalism. Invoking dispossession as a point of comparison and the framework for the discussion, the workshop joins recent work in Armenian studies and Ottoman studies, which has begun to explore chains of displacement and dispossession under conditions of what some have called internal colonization (Üngör and Polatel; Bloxham). The aim is to put these works into conversation with the distinct yet inseparable fields of settler colonial and Indigenous studies, and ask how they might inform, learn from, and complicate understandings of territorial removal, the settler/native binary, and Indigenous transnationalisms. The first panel, “Displacement and Dispossession in the Late Ottoman Empire,” explores waves of displacement and the creation and seizure of property. It takes up the influx of Muslim refugees into Ottoman domains, the connected dispossessions of the Hamidian Massacres and Armenian Genocide, shifting property regimes in the Ottoman Mashriq, and famine and dispossession in the Ottoman East.