Empire Falls: Ottomans, Europe, and Making the Middle East

Catalog description

This course examines the last century of the Ottoman Empire, one of history's longest-lasting, and its eventual fragmentation into new countries and polities across South-Eastern Europe and the Middle East. In doing so, the course encourages students to think critically about the "decline" of empires, and will help them better understand the foundations of the Middle East in the 20th Century. Exploring the domestic obstacles and external pressure of Europe's great imperial powers that increasingly hampered the Ottoman government, the course will survey Ottoman efforts to reform, adapt, and modernize. It will look at the constitutional structure of the late empire, examine its borderlands, compare the Balkan and Arab provinces, and how the empire tried to manage new challenges from refugees, nomads, and emerging nationalist movements. The course will outline the transition from empire to nation-state in the case of the Turkish Republic and the European Balkan states, and from empire to European mandates in the case of the Arab provinces. After discussing the violence of imperial collapse during World War I, the course will look at the legacies of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Arab provinces.