Privileges and Nobility in Ottoman Kurdistan | Nilay Özok-Gündoğan

E550 | As the Ottoman state expanded in the sixteenth century, it extended a number of privileges to elite families in Kurdistan. In this episode, Nilay Özok-Gündoğan discusses her new book The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire, which explains how these hereditary privileges—unique in the empire—developed and changed in the region of Palu between this moment and the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman state attempted to rescind such autonomy. Writing against scholarship that either ignores such families or understands them only in nationalist terms, Özok-Gündoğan attends to property, labor, and mineral extraction and how they ultimately all shaped the nature of the unprecedented violence at the end of empire. She also discusses her own journey writing this book, including her time teaching in Mardin and eventually being forced to leave Turkey. More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/09/ozok.html Nilay Özok-Gündoğan is an Associate Professor of Ottoman and Middle East history at Florida State University. Her research centers on modern state-making, elite formation, property regimes, and intercommunal conflict and coexistence in the Ottoman Empire. Her work stands at the junction of interconnected Ottoman, Kurdish, Armenian, and Turkish histroies. She also writes about the question of methodology in Kurdish studies. She is the author of The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire: Loyalty, Autonomy, and Privilege. Sam Dolbee is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches classes on environment, disease, and the modern Middle East. His book Locusts of Power is out now with Cambridge University Press. CREDITS Episode No. 550 Release Date: 20 September 2023 Recording location: Nashville, TN / Tallahassee, FL Sound production by Sam Dolbee Music: Zé Trigueiros, "Big Road of Burravoe," "Chiaroscuro" Bibliography courtesy of Nilay Özok-Gündoğan available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2023/09/ozok.html