Brittany Delores White

The historiography of African slavery in the Ottoman Empire and its legacy has made great strides over the last few decades. However, despite calls by some scholars to take seriously the voices and experiences of the enslaved and their descendants, the field has yet to see a comprehensive history of the Ottoman Empire using race as a critical framework through which we can understand the making of the modern Middle East. Using the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange as a historical pivot, “A Black History of the Late Ottoman Empire,” reveals how we cannot understand the late Ottoman world without first understanding the experience of the African diaspora, and how constructions of race undergird the modern identities and the institutions of the empire’s successor states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.