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Lecture series

Consultative mechanisms and institutions in late Ottoman Jeddah

Lecture by Ulrike Freitag

Registration: https://forms.gle/A8AJDvdaQyUiG5qD8

This presentation reflects on different types of consultation in late Ottoman Jeddah, the major port of the province of the Hijaz. The presentation will not only engage with the question of how Ottoman reforms at the urban, provincial and imperial levels were implemented and who were the beneficiaries of these reforms, which provided for particular portions of elected members in various bodies. It will also point to less conspicuous forms of consultative and elective mechanisms, namely when it came to the organisation of the urban quarters, but also within bodies such as the guilds. An interesting issue is the afterlife, and temporary revivals, of some of these practices in Saudi Arabia.

Given the scarcity of accessible sources, as well as their variety, the presentation will stress the types of materials consulted, as these point to the necessity for historians to cast their nets very widely.

Ulrike Freitag is the director of Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin and Professor at Freie Universität Berlin. She is director of Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient and professor for Middle Eastern History at Freie Universität Berlin since 2002. After finishing her PhD on Historiography in Syria in the 20th century, she has held lecturerships at FernUniversität Hagen and SOAS. Her more recent work has engaged with translocal connections in the Indian Ocean world (Indian Ocean Migrants and State Formation in Hadhramaut, Leiden 2003) and urban history with a focus on the Arabian Peninsula (A History of Jeddah, Cambridge 2020).

This event is part of the lecture series:
Lecture series in the academic year 2021/22
The Historicity of Democracy Seminar

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