Course Descriptions - Details

“Ottoman Africa” examines the entangled histories of empire, religion, and commerce that joined the Ottoman Mediterranean, sub-Saharan corridors, and the emerging Atlantic world. The course pursues two complementary aims. The first aim of the course is to develop a new perspective on Africa, foregrounding a largely neglected yet essential dimension of its past: Africa under Ottoman rule and influence from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, when Ottoman provinces such as Egypt, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli formed vital links between the Mediterranean, the Sahara, and the wider Indian Ocean and Atlantic worlds. Students explore how the provinces of Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Egypt functioned as centers of imperial administration, religious learning, and maritime exchange. They encounter Africa not as a periphery but as a dynamic participant in global early modernity. The second aim of the course is to provide a new perspective on the early United States, reframing the so-called Barbary Wars as the young republic’s first encounters with the Ottoman Empire. These episodes mark the birth of the Navy and United States’ earliest overseas military campaigns, the birth of its national literature through captivity narratives set in Ottoman North Africa, and the origins of its dominance in global commerce. Drawing on the writings of the Founding Fathers—including Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton and Madison—and through historical accounts, memoirs, chronicles, epistolary and travel writings, plays and works of fiction, students learn that the foundations of U.S. foreign policy, economic expansion, and cultural imagination were forged in dialogue with the Ottoman world. There are no prerequisites or language proficiencies required for enrollment.