2021 Theses Doctoral

Bloodless Battles: Contested Sovereignty between the Ottomans, the Qajars, and the British in Ottoman Iraq (1831-1908)

Azarbadegan, Zeinab Alsadat

Bloodless Battles argues for multiplicity of claims to imperial sovereignty contested by the empires of the Ottomans, the Qajars (in Iran), and the British in the space of Ottoman Iraq in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It considers the imperial assertion of sovereignty on space in the dialectic relationship between knowledge production and law. It focuses on how the space of Ottoman Iraq was contested through knowledge production in the four different disciplines of geography, archaeology, history, and medicine beyond the border as a marker of the beginning and end of territorial sovereignty. Through comparative analysis of sources from the Ottoman, Iranian, and British archives, I examine how the whole space was mapped, photographed, and written about in order to understand the discourses shaping law and jurisdiction over specific corridors and enclaves of imperial sovereignty within Ottoman Iraq. In this way Bloodless Battles contributes to histories of empire, international relations, science and technology, Ottoman Empire, Qajar Empire, British Empire, and Iraq.