Ariel Salzmann
Associate Professor
PhD (History), Columbia University
Watson Hall 101
Queen's University
Department of History
My intellectual interests span world regions, disciplines, past and present.
After a year of study in Iran and Afghanistan, I pursued graduate course work in literature, sociology and history, completing a Ph.D. on the history of the Middle East. An article that traces the roots of neoliberalism, "An Ancien Régime Revisted: Privatization and Political Economy in the 18th Century Ottoman Empire," (Politics & Society 1993) won the Turkish Studies Association’s Ömer Lutfi Barkan Article Prize and remains one of the most widely cited articles in the field.
Theories of state formation, histories of Mediterranean communities and Muslim societies, the transformation of market systems and the making of global capitalism are topics addressed by my research. A new book-length project, a historical sociology of ethno-religious exclusion before the nation-state, is under contract. These projects have been supported by international and national grants (the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the American Council of Learned Societies, ֱ's S.A.R.C., the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey).
I currently teach seminars and lectures on the following subjects: consumerism (HIST 241), the historiography of the Ottoman Empire (HIST 337), and the origins of modern capitalism (HIST 808). In 2016-17, Prof. Husain and I will co-teach a new lecture, “Islamophobia: From the Crusaders to Donald J. Trump.”
- 2015 Lecture. ”Why Economic History Matters: Credit, Alterity and Intermediation in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean.” Mediterranean Crossings Workshop, Yale University.
- 2013 Article. “Migrants in Chains: On the Enslavement of Muslims in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe.”(Special Issue: Islam, Immigration, and Identity) Religions.
- 2011 Book. Osmanlı Ancien Régime’i: Modern Devlet Yeniden Düşünmek. (Istanbul: Iletişm Yayinevi) (revised, translation of Tocqueville in the Ottoman Empire [Brill, 2004]).
- 2011 Chapter. "Cosmopolis, Islampolis: Ottoman Urbanity between Myth, Memory and Post-Modernity." in Cosmopolitanisms in Muslim Contexts ed. Derryl N. MacLean (University of Edinburgh Press).
- 2010 Article. "Is there a Moral Economy of State Formation? Religious Minorities and Repertoires of Regime Integration in the Middle East and Western Europe, 600-1614." Theory & Society.
- 2007 Chapter. "A Travelogue Manqué? The Accidental Itinerary of a Maltese Priest in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean." A Faithful Sea, The Religious Culture of the Mediterranean, 1200-1700 ed. Adnan A. Husain and K. E. Fleming (One World).
- 2000 Chapter. "The Age of Tulips: Confluence and Conflict in Early Modern Consumer Culture (1500-1730)." in Consumption Studies and the History of the Ottoman Empire ed. Donald Quataert (State University of New York Press).
- 1999 Chapter. "Citizens in Search of a State: The Limits of Political Participation in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1808-1914." in Extending Citizenship, Reconfiguring States ed. Michael Hanagan and Charles Tilly (Rowman and Littlefield).
