David Gutman is Assistant Professor of History at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York. He is the author of several journal articles and book chapters, and is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Armenian Sojourners and the Ottoman State: Mobility, Sovereignty, and Citizenship in an Age of Global Migration.

The talk tells the story of Artin Harputlian and the efforts of powerful rivals to destroy his banking and smuggling empire in the Anatolian provincial town of Harput-Mezre. This case, stretching from the last years of the Hamidian era into the period immediately following the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, provides unique insight into the dynamics that drove local and regional politics in the pre-genocide Ottoman east.

Sponsored by the Ottoman Studies Lecture Series