Ali Uğurlu: Captives of Freedom: The Paradoxical World of Critique, Political Economy, and Emancipation in the Ottoman Age of Capital

Lecture
7.1.26, 19.00
Orient-Institut Istanbul

Language: English
Moderator: Christoph K. Neumann

Freedom is one of the central political concepts in modern life. Most intellectual historians and historians of political thought, however, argue for a Western provenance of freedom as a political or philosophical concept and conceive of its reception in the extra-European world as a mere derivative in the modern period. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, Ottoman intellectuals’ understanding of freedom did undergo a sea change, and hürriyet/hurriyya became the linchpin of a political vocabulary that arose in parallel with constitutionalism and revolutionary fervor. Yet Ali Uğurlu contends in this talk that this was no derivative discourse: the sea-change in notions of freedom in the Ottoman nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries had to do with the emergence of capitalist social practices that became objects of inquiry for Ottoman intellectuals writing in Turkish and Arabic. By drawing on the relationship between hürriyet and Ottoman political economy translations, he argues that freedom’s proliferation as a motif of Ottoman intellectual production provides us with glimpses into modernity’s central paradox: how capitalist social practices promise both unprecedented emancipatory possibility and lead to new forms of unfreedom.

Ali M. Ugurlu is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Historical and Middle Eastern Studies at Bard College. His research focuses on the relationship between political concepts (their formation, translation, and reconfiguration) and capitalist social transformation in the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. His recently completed dissertation at Columbia University is an intellectual history of freedom with a focus on intellectuals who wrote in  Ottoman-Turkish and Arabic (and sometimes both)at the historical junction of imperial-dissolution and nation-making (1860s-1910s), when a sea-change in Ottoman freedom imaginaries prompted a concern with a central paradox of modern life: capitalism as bearer of both novel emancipatory possibility and boundless suffering. At Bard, he offers courses on Ottoman history, the history of the modern Middle East, Islam, secularism, revolution, and capitalist social transformation in the Middle East and beyond.

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