Presenter: Ali Yaycıoğlu, Associate Professor of History, Stanford University

Ali Yaycıoğlu is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. His research centers on the economic, political, and legal institutions, ideas and practices; forms of accumulating and losing power and wealth; spatial organization of the Ottoman empire and Turkey; and the transformation of the social-religious order from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries.

The talk examines the relationship between death, debt and redistribution in the Ottoman World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It investigates how obligations and liabilities were restructured; assets were redistributed; and objects changed their owners when people died. Focusing on case studies of postmortem settlements under the light of probate inventories, the talk will re-conceptualize the Ottoman political-economic order through uncertainties, risks and opportunities after death.