Zoe Griffith ââåcalligraphy and the Art of Statecraft in the Late Ottoman Empire and Modern

Zoe Griffith is a Doctoral Candidate in the Brown History Department. Her dissertation work has been supported by an International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Scientific discipline Research Quango, and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Away (DDRA) fellowship. Showtime in Jan of 2015, she volition be a swain at the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), where she will keep her archival work in Cairo.  Zoe graciously agreed to answer a few questions about her enquiry.

1. What are you working on for your dissertation, and how did y'all settle on the topic you lot chose?

My dissertation revisits the position of Arab republic of egypt inside the Ottoman Empire in the 2d half of the eighteenth century, from the perspective of Egypt'south Mediterranean port cities. The project draws extensively on records from the Islamic law courts of the port cities of Rosetta and Damietta and from the Ottoman majestic archives, as well as from French commercial and consular records in Paris and Marseille. Rosetta and Damietta were two of Egypt's largest and about important commercial centers in the early on mod menses, before the rise of Alexandria as a colonial port in the mid-nineteenth century. Egypt's ports take never been studied inside the context of Ottoman economic or administrative history, fifty-fifty though Arab republic of egypt was the richest and nigh agriculturally productive province in the empire throughout the early modern catamenia. I am looking specifically at landowners, merchants, and maritime traders involved in rice tillage in the Egyptian Delta to highlight the role of Muslim-controlled upper-case letter in Arab republic of egypt's late-eighteenth-century political economy. By budgeted this topic through multiple archives and in a Mediterranean regional context, I hope to complicate tropes and assumptions left over both from nationalist historiographical traditions and from Eurocentric views of the global transition to the mod age.

2. What methods and approaches take been most influential to your enquiry and writing?

At its center, this project has a lot in common with earlier generations of history writing that emphasized political economy and social history. I am very interested in understanding how economic and administrative activities structured relationships of ability, negotiation, and resistance in Ottoman Egypt. Sometimes I call back this sounds terribly old fashioned. Just these remain large, central questions for which we have very few answers. At the same fourth dimension, the projection is informed by many approaches that expand its scope beyond what one might associate with traditional social history; past bringing together locally-produced records from Arab republic of egypt with imperial-level records from Istanbul, I promise to analyze social organisation in Egypt's ports within the context of Ottoman royal country-building and administrative reform. The scholarship that has been near influential during my graduate school career has come up mainly from historical sociology and from literature in Chinese and South Asian history. The city of Rosetta, one of the cities at the heart of my study, has an incredible historic quarter of merchants' houses preserved from the eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. Architecturally, they are dissimilar anything I or any of my architectural historian friends have always seen, and completely unlike whatever other celebrated buildings in Egypt. It was seeing those houses for the showtime time, in 2008, that inspired this project and I had always intended to include a fabric cultural component in the dissertation. However, the events of the past iv years have made it hard to visit Rosetta to do this kind of piece of work.

3. You accept received several fellowships to support your research in the Egyptian National Archives in Cairo during a very turbulent menses in its history. What challenges have you faced both in terms of gaining access to archives and documents, and in your daily life? How have these challenges shaped the fashion yous have approached your research?

My early on relationship with Egypt was formed when I lived and studied here for two years, from 2006-08. I am incredibly lucky to have been able to spend so much fourth dimension here, including multiple trips over the by 4 years. We are no dubiousness living and witnessing something historic, and what more could a historian ask for? At the aforementioned time, the turmoil that the Egyptian people take lived since 2011 has indeed presented challenges to the logistics of research. I've had to plead with armed services bureaucrats at the Ministry building of Defence force to grant my research permit for the athenaeum, and I was forced to evacuate only over a month afterward arriving for my major dissertation enquiry trip in the wake of the insurrection in 2013. I waited for things to calm down while conducting research in Istanbul instead. In the early on stages of the uprising, in 2011-12, these challenges came along with a commonage sense of enormous promise and greater possibility, which was inspiring and energizing. Maybe the greatest claiming at this stage is the collective sense of despair and trauma that has settled over the public sphere with the return of the quondam condition quo and the increasing ruthlessness of the war machine regime. This tin be hard to deal with, psychologically, even while the stability of the by year is conducive to archival research. I would say that my experiences here have taught me to exist much, much more flexible in my attitude toward my research. At several points, my research has been express or shaped by factors that were quite simply out of my control, and out of my control in a manner that made my research feel completely insignificant. At the same fourth dimension, I think that persevering in this projection and returning to Arab republic of egypt equally events continue to unfold has made me recollect more than deeply about what I hope to accomplish with this project, and what I can contribute through my scholarship and writing.

four. How practise you recall your research experiences in Istanbul, Egypt, and France will influence your instruction?

Even though all of the sources I've been looking at deal with merchandise and politics in the same Egyptian cities during the same fourth dimension menstruum, it often feels like these different archives are describing completely different systems. This archival reality has shaped the way I think virtually teaching in two means: firstly, I retrieve the greatest skill historians can offer students coming to History from any subject area and in any field is the ability to bargain critically with master sources. In my feel, undergraduate courses in non-Western history fields often shortchange students on primary sources - peradventure this is because the sources often seem particularly "foreign" and hard to deal with, and because instructors find it overwhelming enough to introduce students to the "History of the Middle East" or the "History of Africa" in xiii weeks. Secondly, I have started to think much more in terms of thematic courses, as these seem increasingly relevant for students and mayhap more satisfying for instructors. While I remain committed to the value of teaching students well-nigh the unique regional history of the Middle E or the Ottoman Empire, these days I find it harder to call up nigh Arab republic of egypt and the Ottomans outside the context of early modern Mediterranean or global developments, for instance in commercialization, land-building, foodways and patterns of consumption.

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Source: https://www.brown.edu/academics/history/doctoral-candidate-zoe-griffith

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