Papers by David Gutman
El-Haj attended the Friends School in Ramallah. Moving to the United States in the aftermath of t... more El-Haj attended the Friends School in Ramallah. Moving to the United States in the aftermath of the Nakba and the creation of the State of Israel, he pursued a PhD at Princeton University under the direction of Lewis V. Thomas, completing his degree in 1963. Norman Itzkowitz, another prominent Ottoman historian of his generation, was a graduate school colleague. After several years of teaching at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY, Abou-El-Haj assumed a permanent position at California State-Long Beach in 1964. It is while at Long Beach that he began to make what would be an indelible mark on the study of Ottoman history. To compensate for the lack of graduate students at what was a primarily undergraduate teaching institution, Abou-El-Haj began organizing weekly reading and discussion groups with graduate students and other young scholars in the Los Angeles area. One regular at these discussion groups, Donald Quataert, would later recruit Abou-El-Haj to Binghamton University (SUNY) in 1992, a move made easier by the fact that Abou-El-Haj's wife, Barbara, a rising scholar in the field of Art History, had been ATIF | CITATION
This article investigates efforts by the Hamidian-era Ottoman state to rely
on its document-based... more This article investigates efforts by the Hamidian-era Ottoman state to rely
on its document-based internal mobility control regime, the mürûr tezkeresi system, to prevent overseas mobility from Mount Lebanon on the Levantine coast and the province of Mamuretülaziz in eastern Anatolia. It also contrasts Hamidian-era mobility control efforts with those of the Ottoman state following the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, revealing points of both convergence and divergence. It asserts that these efforts reveal many of the broader contradictions and tensions of the Ottoman modernization
process of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and argues for
understanding the Ottoman case as part of the broader global story of mobility and migration control.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
This article is based on a case file examining the allegedly corrupt behavior of the district gov... more This article is based on a case file examining the allegedly corrupt behavior of the district governor (kaymakam) of Eregli, located in the Black Sea coal district of the Ottoman Empire, before the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. It paints a vivid picture of the cronyism, greed, and demands for justice that abound in the testimonies and petitions of a diverse array of local actors that were included in the case file. These documents provide the opportunity to shed light on, among other things, the growing nexus between state power and capital in the late Ottoman Empire within a little-studied peripheral context. As the article shows, prospects of control over the region's burgeoning coal economy led to abuses among officials at various levels of the local and imperial bureaucracy, the impacts of which were felt (to varying degrees) by a wide cross-section of Eregli society. The behavior of the district governor and his allies, along with the final decision made in the case, reveals much about power, wealth, and justice in the final years of the Abdülhamit regime.
Books by David Gutman
A preview of my book, The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America: Sojourners, Smugglers,... more A preview of my book, The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America: Sojourners, Smugglers, and Dubious Citizens (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
Book Reviews by David Gutman
Podcasts by David Gutman
Book Chapters by David Gutman
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Papers by David Gutman
on its document-based internal mobility control regime, the mürûr tezkeresi system, to prevent overseas mobility from Mount Lebanon on the Levantine coast and the province of Mamuretülaziz in eastern Anatolia. It also contrasts Hamidian-era mobility control efforts with those of the Ottoman state following the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, revealing points of both convergence and divergence. It asserts that these efforts reveal many of the broader contradictions and tensions of the Ottoman modernization
process of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and argues for
understanding the Ottoman case as part of the broader global story of mobility and migration control.
Books by David Gutman
Book Reviews by David Gutman
Podcasts by David Gutman
Book Chapters by David Gutman
on its document-based internal mobility control regime, the mürûr tezkeresi system, to prevent overseas mobility from Mount Lebanon on the Levantine coast and the province of Mamuretülaziz in eastern Anatolia. It also contrasts Hamidian-era mobility control efforts with those of the Ottoman state following the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, revealing points of both convergence and divergence. It asserts that these efforts reveal many of the broader contradictions and tensions of the Ottoman modernization
process of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and argues for
understanding the Ottoman case as part of the broader global story of mobility and migration control.