Book Talk | The Forgotten Intimacies of Empire in the Middle East | Mostafa Minawi

About the EventThis talk draws on Prof. Mostafa Minawi’s latest book, Losing Istanbul: Arab-Ottoman Imperialist and the End of Empire(Stanford University Press), which offers an intimate history of the empire following the rise and fall of a generation of Arab-Ottoman imperialists living in Istanbul. He shows how these men and women negotiated their loyalties and guarded their privileges through a microhistorical study of the changing social, political, and cultural currents between 1878 and the First World War. He invites us to reconsider current tragedies in the Middle East and the massive population displacement in Syria, Turkey, and Palestine in the context of a long multi-cultural history of intimacies amongst the regions’ populations who converged in the former imperial capital, Istanbul.Drawing on archival records, newspaper articles, travelogues, personal letters, diaries, photos, and interviews,Losing Istanbulshows how the loyalties of these imperialists were questioned and their ethnic identification weaponized. As the once diverse empire comes to an end, they are forced to give up their home in the imperial capital. An alternative history of the last four decades of the Ottoman Empire,Losing Istanbulframes global pivotal events through the experiences of Arab-Ottoman imperial loyalists who called Istanbul home, on the eve of a vanishing imperial world order.About the SpeakerMostafa Minawi is an associate professor of history and the director of Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies at Cornell University. His first book, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy from the Sahara to the Hijaz (Stanford University Press, 2016), was translated into Turkish and Arabic, and his latest, Losing Istanbul, was the co-winner of the Albert Hourani Book Prize in 2023 and was translated to Turkish and is currently being translated to Arabic. He works on questions of imperialism, race, and belonging in Ottoman spaces from Istanbul to the Horn of Africa. He is currently a fellow at the National Humanities Center, working on his latest project on Ottoman-Ethiopian relations in the context of intensified inter-imperial competition in the Horn of Africa.Host and moderator:Faiz Ahmed (https://history.brown.edu/people/faiz-ahmed) is the Joukowsky Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Brown University. He specializes in the late Ottoman Empire, legal and constitutional history, and the historical interconnectivity of modernworld regions, from the Middle East and South Asia to the Americas.Jennifer Johnson is an Associate Professor of History at Brown University. Her research and teaching focus on the Maghreb, decolonization, state building, public health, gender and modern African History.CosponsorsDepartment of History (https://history.brown.edu/)Made Possible by the Peter Green Lectureship Fund on the Modern Middle East