Francesco Anselmetti is a candidate in the joint Ph.D. program in history and Middle Eastern studies at Harvard University. Broady, his research focuses on the history of the Ottoman Mediterranean, specifically northern Greece and coastal Syria from the late 17th to the early 19th centuries. More specifically, he is interested in the relative autonomy both provinces experienced from the Ottoman central state during this period, and its implications for the development of capitalism and the formation of modern nation states in the broader region.
Through this intra-regional comparison, Anselmetti hopes to investigate points of convergence and divergence in the consolidation of a Greek and Arab mercantile bourgeoisie in the Ottoman peripheries, the production of urban space in the cities they inhabited, and the changing relationship between these urban-commercial centers and the rural hinterlands on which they depended. An ambition of the project is to show the merits of comparison for a more robust, plural account of post-Ottoman modernity and capitalist transition, and the recovery of historical connections between neighboring regions from the influence of methodological nationalism.
