Prof. Keith Brown:The Ottoman-American gun trade as intercultural encounter

Professor Keith Brown (Arizona State University) will give a presentation on ‘Instruments of violence, vehicles of value: The Ottoman-American gun trade as intercultural encounter’ at this seminar organised by the UCL SSEES South-East European Studies Seminar Series.

In the early 1870s, the Providence Tool Company produced 600,000 rifles for the Ottoman Turkish army, which were used by regular troops against the Russian army at the Battle of Plevna, before being transferred for use by reservists and militia in counter-insurgency operations within the Empire. The economic and social lives of these rifles provide a window into the complex flows and networks of late nineteenth-century globalization.  This paper draws on recent developments in microhistory and science and technology studies to focus on the entanglements that these rifles created among and between European designers, American manufacturers, Armenian middlemen, Turkish officials and officers, and Macedonian revolutionaries; and to explore the potential for object-oriented history to deepen our understanding of the symbolic politics of Orientalism.

All Welcome! No registration required.