- Mapping Piracy and Captivity in the Ottoman Mediterranean

Catalog description

This course will examine the early modern (16th to 18th century) Ottoman Mediterranean world as one historical landscape with a focus on the issues of identity, conversion, and captivity in the context of sea-based piracy, slavery, and migration. We will ask: What part did loyalty, economic incentives, religious conviction, and coercion play in the decisions that communities, captives, sailors, and commanders made in their pursuit of their interests? By taking a wider view of these historical phenomena and studying them as forms of economic, cultural, and violent exchange, we will have the opportunity to look at the Mediterranean world as a place of both interaction and conflict. This class will have a digital humanities component. As a result, one of the central focuses of this class is using visualizations of historical information as an analytical tool to gain insights about the past and communicating those insights in clear and innovative ways.