Location BIAA, Atatürk Bulvarı 154/1 and online
Date and time
Thursday 5 March 2026
14:30 - 16:00 (London GMT)
17:30 - 19:00 (Ankara UTC+3)
Speakers
Ayşe Ozil
Sabancı University
The development of global commerce during the late 19th and early 20th centuries reshaped the management of urban property in the major commercial hubs of the Ottoman Empire.
The intensification of commerce and the introduction of new types of businesses both brought new ownership claims over land and required new spaces to facilitate trade. This talk traces the transformation in urban property in one of the major global commercial centers of the empire, the port of Galata. Focusing on the rise of modern business buildings, it explores the ways in which commercial actors engaged with land and property and contributed to changing patterns of ownership against the background of global business in the late Ottoman period.
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Ayşe Ozil is an Associate Professor of History at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabancı University. Before joining Sabancı University, she was a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University and holds a PhD from the University of London, Birkbeck College. She works on the social history of the late Ottoman Empire with a focus on ethno-religious community making, social networks, and urbanization. She is the author of Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire: A Study of Communal Relations in Anatolia (Routledge). She is currently working on two research projects, one on law and ethno-religious community and the other on commerce and property in late Ottoman Istanbul.