In-person lecture.

Also Live-streamed at https://bit.ly/armenianstudiesyoutube

The Rise of the Western Armenian Diaspora in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire traces how Armenian migrants changed the demographic and cultural landscape of Istanbul and Western Anatolia in the course of the 17th century. In subsequent centuries, Ottoman Armenian merchants, financiers (sarrafs), authors, musicians, translators, printers and bureaucrats would play key roles in Ottoman trade, art and even governance – that is, in most spheres of the empire’s economic and cultural life. Using both Ottoman Turkish and little-known Armenian sources, Henry Shapiro provides the first systematic study of the Armenian population movements that resulted in the cosmopolitan remaking of Istanbul.

Henry R. Shapiro holds a PhD in History from Princeton University and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Polonsky Academy for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences. His research focuses on the place of non-Muslims in the early modern Islamic World. He works mainly on the Ottoman Empire, with a secondary interest in Safavid Iran. Previously he had earned degrees from Brown University (BA in Classics), Harvard University (Master of Divinity), and Sabancı University in Istanbul, Turkey (MA in History). In 2017, Shapiro was awarded the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, the Princeton Graduate School’s top honor.