2025 Theses Doctoral

Captives of Freedom: The Paradoxical World of Critique, Political Economy, and Emancipation in the Ottoman Age of Capital

Uğurlu, Ali M.

This dissertation charts the proliferation of freedom imaginaries in Ottoman-Turkish and Arabic intellectual history between the 1860s and the 1910s––a period corresponding to the twilight of empire and the birth of the nation-state in the Middle East and beyond.

The dissertation begins from the premise that a sea-change in Ottoman intellectuals’ conceptualisation of freedom occurred in the nineteenth century and furthers two main claims. First, that Ottoman intellectuals increasingly adopted the discourse of political economy (via their own translations) to promulgate institutions and practices that were part and parcel of capitalist society in their utopic visions for individual and communal freedom.

Second, and conversely, that the same treatises indexed a critique of a society-in-becoming that was being shaped by a novel private property regime, widespread dispossession stemming from new articulations of debt-relations, and the increasing commodification of labor and everyday life. Each chapter of the dissertation articulates this very contradiction located at the heart of modern life in fin-de-siècle Ottoman society–how, that is, capitalist social practices promised both unprecedented emancipatory possibility and led to new forms of suffering and unfreedom.