Charting the Ottoman Empire: Wealth, Power and Death, 1750–1850

Charting the Ottoman Empire (COE) is a digital humanities project that reconstructs the economic, political, and financial networks of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by digitizing and analyzing previously untapped fiscal archives. Housed at Stanford University’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) and developed in collaboration with Bahçeşehir University’s Center for Ottoman Studies (BAU-OTAM), COE brings together an interdisciplinary team of historians, economists, political scientists, digital humanists, archivists, and data scientists from institutions in the United States, Turkey, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Greece. At the core of the project are Ottoman fiscal codices—dense accounting registers that record chains of debt and credit, transfers of wealth, and administrative decisions linking individuals, state offices, and financial agents across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. A particular focus is fenn-i siyāqat: the Ottoman “fiscal sciences” and specialized archival text technologies—scripts, formats, and information-processing techniques—through which the fiscal administration gathered, standardized, and mobilized financial knowledge. By decoding fenn-i siyāqat and converting unstructured archival entries into a relational SQL database, COE combines archival expertise with network analysis, visualization, and AI-assisted text processing to map how wealth, debt, and state power moved through the empire on the eve of the Tanzimat. In doing so, the project also intervenes in broader debates about global economic change between 1750 and 1850—shifting the comparative lens toward the Ottoman world—and is building an open-access digital platform that will allow scholars and students to explore these fiscal networks through structured datasets, interactive visualizations, and analytical tools.

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Lunch will begin at 11:45 a.m. for in-person attendees.

About the Speaker

Dr. Ali Yaycıoğlu is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey whose work explores political, economic, and legal institutions, as well as the social and cultural dynamics of the Ottoman world from the sixteenth century to the present. He teaches widely on the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, the Age of Revolutions, empires and markets, histories of democracy and capitalism, and digital humanities, and he is especially interested in how digital methods can help conceptualize and visualize historical change. His first book, Partners of the Empire: Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Stanford University Press, 2016), rethinks the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ottoman world through the interactions of imperial reforms, regional politics, and popular mobilization. He is currently completing The Order of Debt: Power, Wealth, and Death in the Ottoman Empire, which examines property, finance, and statehood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is supported by his CESTA-based digital initiative Charting the Empire (including work on Ottoman fiscal codices and accounting techniques). He has co-edited the Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies special issue on Ottoman Digital Humanities (2023) and Crafting History: Essays on the Ottoman World and Beyond in Honor of Cemal Kafadar (2023), and his essays on democracy, capitalism, and populism in Turkey appear in Uncertain Past Time: Empire, Republic, and Politics (Istanbul, 2024, in Turkish). Born and raised in Ankara, he earned degrees from METU and Bilkent, pursued further study at McGill, completed his PhD at Harvard (2008), held postdoctoral positions at Harvard and Princeton, and joined Stanford’s History Department in 2011; he also writes public commentary for Gazete Oksijen and maintains a parallel practice in visual arts under the name “Critical Imagination” through the Atölye20 platform.