This course approaches more than six hundred years history of the Ottoman Empire from a world historical perspective. World history until the mid-20th century was a history of various empires and the relationship among them. What kind of empire was the Ottoman Empire in relation to its contemporaries as well as its predecessors? How did it evolve and transform itself, in the face of significant changes in world history from the 14th  to the 20th centuries? What was the legacy of the Ottoman Empire  in the formation of not only various regions such as Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, but also the international order more generally?

This course will deal with the history of the interactions between the societies of he broader Middle Eastern region and Europe since the Crusaders in the 12th century. While offering a transnational-global history approach to some of the most controversial questions about this period, the course will introduce students to competing historiographies and theoretical perspectives. It will especially focus on the reasons behind the origins and persistence of the narrative of an eternal Islam-West conflict in changing political contexts, even though both ideas of Europe and the Middle East were co-constituted during the last centuries. We will also reflect on the viability of alternative scholarly approaches and paradigms that will overcome the binaries of the Middle East/Islam versus Europe/the West.

The course is about the crucial historical events, processes, and transformations in the modern world over the past century. It will focus on diverse experiences of the 20th century for people in different parts of the world, and thematically discuss following important developments of the modern history: 1) the history of war, genocide and violence. 2) the process of decolonization and the transition from an imperial world order to the current international system of nation states. 3) the persistence and growth of macro-regional identities (such as European, African, Muslim, Asian), and transnational links and ideologies concurrent with globalization. 4) uneven distribution of the benefits of 20th century economic globalization such as welfare, health care, rising living standards, and attention to rights of human beings. At the end of the course, we will discuss the question of the competing historical memories and narratives about the meaning of the 20th century, and ask students to reflect on the possibility of a shared global memory of the modern world.

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