Dr Ramazan Hakkı Öztan

Assistant Professor in Modern History

I am a scholar specializing in the political and economic history of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and the twentieth-century Middle East. Thematically, my focus lies in the intersection of revolution, empire, globalization, and capitalism. The first axis of my research explores the politics of revolutionary radicalism in the late Ottoman Balkans (1878-1908). I am particularly interested in tracing the ways in which the newly available technologies of violence transformed the fin-de-siecle revolutionary organizations and imperial governance. The second axis of my research focuses on the political economy of the Turkish-Syrian border. I am especially intrigued by the question of how the Ottoman imperial economy transitioned into the interwar period, which led me to carry out research on the politics of tariffs, black markets, and other types of cross-border flows in the region.

Select Publications

Books

Economy of Revolution: Globalization, Violence and Security in Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in the summer of 2026).

Edited Volumes:

Regimes of Mobility: Borders and State Formation in the Middle East, 1918-1946, co-edited with Jordi Tejel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
Age of Rogues: Rebels, Revolutionaries and Racketeers at the Frontiers of Empires, co-edited with Alp Yenen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021).

Special Issues:

“Forced Migration and Refugeedom in the Modern Middle East,” special issue co-edited with Jordi Tejel, Journal of Migration History, 6 (Feb 2020).

Journal Articles

“Tools of Revolution: Global Military Surplus, Arms Dealers, and Smugglers in the Late Ottoman Balkans, 1878-1908,” Past & Present, 237 (November 2017) pp. 167-95.
“Point of No Return? Prospects of Empire after the Ottoman Defeat in the Balkan Wars (1912-1913),” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 50 (Feb 2018) pp. 65-84.
“Settlement Law of 1934: Turkish Nationalism in the Age of Revisionism,” Journal of Migration History, 6 (Feb 2020) pp. 82-103.
“Towards Connected Histories of Refugeedom in the Middle East,” co-authored with Jordi Tejel, Journal of Migration History, 6 (Feb 2020) pp. 1-15.
“The Great Depression and the Making of Turkish-Syrian Border, 1921-1939,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 52:2 (May 2020) pp. 311-26.
“Republic of Conspiracies: Cross-Border Plots and the Making of Modern Turkey,” Journal of Contemporary History, 56:1 (Apr 2021) pp. 55-76.
“The Bulgarian Connection: The Young Turks in Exile and the Making of Radicalism in Ottoman Europe, 1895-1897,” in New Perspectives on Turkey, 70 (2024) pp. 12-31.
“When Emmanuel Carasso Turned Italian: A Biography of Extraterritoriality and Questions of Nationality in the Ottoman Empire,” in Osmanlı Araştırmaları: Journal of Ottoman Studies, 63 (2024) pp. 309-40.
“Navigating Futures Past: Property, Resistance, and the Making of Post-Ottoman Kilis, 1919-1926,” in Contemporary Levant, 9:2 (2024) pp. 111-27.

Book Chapters:

“Nationalism in Function: ‘Rebellions’ in the Ottoman Empire and Narratives in its Absence,” in War and Collapse: World War I and the Ottoman State, ed. H. Yavuz and Feroz Ahmad (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016) 161-202.
“Transgressive Politics at the Frontiers of Empires,” co-authored with Alp Yenen, in Age of Rogues: Rebels, Revolutionaries and Racketeers at the Frontiers of Empires (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021) 3-52.
“Chemistry of Revolution: Naum Tyufekchiev and the Trajectories of Revolutionary Violence in Late Ottoman Europe,” in Age of Rogues: Rebels, Revolutionaries and Racketeers at the Frontiers of Empires (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021) 261-301.
“Regimes of Mobility and Middle Eastern Borderlands, 1918-1946,” co-authored with Jordi Tejel, Regimes of Mobility: Borders and State Formation in the Middle East, 1918-1946 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022) 1-25.
“The Last Ottoman Merchants: Regional Trade and Politics of Tariffs in Aleppo’s Hinterland, 1921-1929,” Regimes of Mobility: Borders and State Formation in the Middle East, 1918-1946 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022) 80-108.
“Borders of Mobility? Crime and Punishment in the Turkish-Syrian Border, 1921-1939,” co-authored with Jordi Tejel, in Middle Eastern and Balkan Mobilities in the Interwar Period, 1918-1939, eds. Kate Fleet and Ebru Boyar (Leiden: Brill, 2023) 20-24.

Teaching and Supervision

Over the years, I have developed a diverse research agenda that connects different regions and themes to one another, which also informs the types of modules that I teach. For the senior fresh modules, I teach “Empire, Oil, and Revolution The Middle East in the 20th Century.” I also offer “British & French Colonialism in the Middle East” as a List I module and “Rebels and Reformers: The Modern Middle East in Upheaval” as a List II. At postgraduate level, I contribute to the department’s M.Phil. programme in International History and teach “Comparative Borderlands” as a postgraduate seminar.

I am happy to supervise postgraduate students interested in various historical aspects of the late Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, and the modern Middle East. To date, I have supervised several BA, MA, and PhD students, while also serving in multiple examination committees in different countries.