Chaire sécable de l’IISMM-EHESS 25-26 | Professeur invité : Ramazan Hakkı Öztan (Trinity College Dublin)
Ramazan Hakkı Öztan
Dr. Ramazan Hakkı Öztan is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Trinity College Dublin. Before joining TCD, he served as an assistant professor at the Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul (2020 to 2023) and as a postdoctoral research fellow in an ERC project at the University of Neuchâtel (2017 to 2020). His scholarship focuses on the political and economic history of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and the twentieth-century Middle East. More broadly, his research explores the intersection of revolution, empire, globalization, and capitalism. The first axis of his research examines the politics of revolutionary radicalism in the late Ottoman Balkans (1878-1908), while the second focuses on the political economy of the Turkish-Syrian border (1919-1939).
For more information: https://www.tcd.ie/history/staff/oztan.php
Logistics of Revolution: Towards A Global History of Late Ottoman Revolutionaries
Historians have long seen new technologies of warfare as central to imperial expansion and the consolidation of centralized states. I argue that they also transformed armed resistance. Focusing on the European territories of the Ottoman Empire, this talk will demonstrate how revolutionary organizations navigated a world increasingly resource-rich by the late nineteenth century. Yet globalization was what revolutionaries and states had made of it. Access to the means of revolution was therefore contingent, shaping leadership struggles, the timing of violence, and the contours of state repression. In this talk, we will trace arms dealers, smugglers, and informers active in the late Ottoman economy of revolution, situating their connected histories across time and space, while also reflecting upon the implications of their contentious repertoires.
Discussion : Defne Özözer
Dans le cadre du séminaire « Sociologie politique de la Turquie contemporaine » animé par Gabrielle Angey, Lucie Drechselová, Élise Massicard, Emmanuel Szurek et Claire Visier.
- Lundi 11 mai 2026 de 8h30 à 11h30 – Salle A602, EHESS, Campus Condorcet, Aubervilliers
Frontiers of Intelligence: Globalization and Information Panics in the Late Ottoman Empire
In the late nineteenth-century Ottoman world, revolutionaries travelled apace, weapons were stashed ever deeper, and explosives became miniaturized, while imperial bureaucrats competed to uncover grand conspiracies. This growing connectedness, coupled with expanding technological possibilities, produced a rupture in colonial knowledge, blurring the line between fantasy and reality. This talk reconstructs this growing crisis in the empire’s hierarchy of knowledge by focusing on two cases. The first is the story of an Ottoman amateur scientist whose quest for state patronage and technological innovations saw him arrested and ultimately exiled in the early Hamidian years. The second focuses on the curious relationship between an Ottoman diplomat and an informant who thrived by telling Istanbul what it wanted to hear—two episodes that reveal the growing anxieties of governance at the center of the empire and in its margins.
Dans le cadre du séminaire “Expériences de l’espace, espaces de l’expérience dans les sociétés (post-)ottomanes” animé par Nathalie Clayer et Andreas Guidi
- Mardi 12 mai de 10h30 à 12h30 – Salle A602, EHESS, Campus Condorcet, Aubervilliers
Political Economy of Turkish-Syrian Border, 1919-1939
The Turkish-Syrian border—before it became one—was an infrastructure of transportation and communication. Known as the Baghdad Railway, a project originally devised to connect the incongruent parts of the empire to one another, the railroad ironically turned out to be the very site of the empire’s dismemberment in the post-World War I period, turning into a double line in the sand. This talk is a reflection on the expected functions of this border when it was first conceived in early 1921, as well as its implications once it took shape, reflective of broader continuities in wartime imperial visions. As Ottoman imperialists transitioned into anti-colonial leaders—and successful ones at that, the border regime between Turkey and French Syria was re-negotiated in ways that made it both more palatable to Ankara and more reflective of newly emerging power dynamics. As the border emerged as an infrastructure of power, it developed an irony of its own, too. True to its nature as an infrastructure, it began to generate circulations of its own, re-making sovereignties on either side.
Dans le cadre du séminaire de master et doctorat « Histoire du Maghreb et du Moyen-Orient » Université Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne, animé par Philipe Pétriat
- Mercredi 13 mai 2026 de 14h à 16h – Salle D621, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Weapons of the Strong: Counterinsurgency and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Macedonia, 1903
Revolution loomed large in the Ottoman Balkans at the turn of the century. This was when armed bands of guerillas roaming around the highland villages had become a common sight, as had their pursuit by Ottoman flying columns across the Macedonian countryside. These encounters often left behind trails of destruction, with villages sacked and at times entirely burnt to the ground by Ottoman troops. This talk focuses on one such village—Smerdesh (Krystallopigi in modern Greece)—which was subjected to repeated episodes of state violence in the spring of 1903. Interested in unpacking the materiality of modern violence, this talk will explore how the availability of new means of warfare transformed both revolution and state violence, technologically as well as discursively.
Dans le cadre du séminaire “Autorité et culture politique en Iran qajar et dans l’Empire ottoman (ca. 1780-1920)” animé par Charles Ganier, Denis Hermann et Erdal Kaynar
- Mardi 2 juin 2026 de 10h à 12h – Salle B3-18, IISMM, EHESS, 54 bd Raspail, Paris
À retrouver sur le site de l’IISMM
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Chargé de diffusion scientifique (17 avril 2026). Chaire sécable de l’IISMM-EHESS 25-26 | Professeur invité : Ramazan Hakkı Öztan (Trinity College Dublin). IISMM. Consulté le 19 mai 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/1634e


