The Economy Without Economics

Murat Bozluolcay is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East whose primary research interests lie at the intersection of political economy, economic history, and intellectual history. What drives his research is a preoccupation with the question of how a historically and geographically specific way of talking about the economy, which occupied itself with notions such as “commercial society” and “capitalism,” both transformed historical political formations and hegemonized the conceptual frameworks developed to study them. Relying mainly on Middle Eastern historical archives, Bozluolcay focuses on the nineteenth-century Ottoman context and looks at the political and administrative transformations that allowed setting up the economy as an object of study as pertaining to markets, the private sphere, and “the economic.” His current work builds on his doctoral research, in which he focused on prevalent political economic themes in Ottoman Syrian history—provincial financing, revenue extraction, and the “opening up” of Syria to European economic interests—to investigate the changing relationship between the Ottoman imperial center and its provincial government in Damascus throughout the nineteenth century.

Bozluolcay received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2023 with a dissertation titled “Coalescence of the Empire: Administration of the Provincial Economy in Ottoman Damascus, 1820-1860.” Before coming to the United States from Istanbul, he completed MA-level coursework in modern Turkish history at Boğaziçi University and received his BA in Sociology and BS in Computer Science from Koç University.