Mehmet Polatel is the academy coordinator for the Minority Rights Academy Project at the Hrant Dink Foundation based in Istanbul. He received his Ph.D. degree from Bogazici University in Istanbul and he won the Distinguished Dissertation Award of the Society for Armenian Studies.

Why did the Ottoman Empire enter the First World War in late October 1914, months after the war's devastations had become clear? Were its leaders 'simple-minded,' 'below-average' individuals, as the doyen of Turkish diplomatic history has argued? Or, as others have claimed, did the Ottomans enter the war because War Minister Enver Pasha, dictating Ottoman decisions, was in thra...(展开全部)

Did you know that many of the greatest and most colourful Ottoman statesmen and literary figures from the 15th to the early 20th century considered plague as a grave threat to their empire? And did you know that many Ottomans applauded the establishment of a quarantine against the disease in 1838 as a tool to resist British and French political and commercial penetration? Or th...(展开全部)

Using Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources drawn from three genres of legal text, this book is the first full-length study in decades to investigate the evolution of Ottoman land law from its “classical” articulation in the sixteenth century to its reformulation in the 1858 Land Code. The book demonstrates that well before the nineteenth century the tradition of Ottoman land tenu...(展开全部)

Using Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources drawn from three genres of legal text, this book is the first full-length study in decades to investigate the evolution of Ottoman land law from its “classical” articulation in the sixteenth century to its reformulation in the 1858 Land Code. The book demonstrates that well before the nineteenth century the tradition of Ottoman land tenu...(展开全部)

In the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman government sought to fill landscapes they legally defined as "empty." Both land and people were incorporated into territorially bounded grids of administrative law. Bedouin Bureaucrats examines how tent-dwelling, seasonally migrating Bedouin engaged in these processes of Ottoman state transformation on local, imperial, and global scal...(展开全部)

In the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman government sought to fill landscapes they legally defined as "empty." Both land and people were incorporated into territorially bounded grids of administrative law. Bedouin Bureaucrats examines how tent-dwelling, seasonally migrating Bedouin engaged in these processes of Ottoman state transformation on local, imperial, and global scal...(展开全部)

Winner of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association Book Prize 2023 Studies the making and unmaking of the Ottoman Empire’s Kurdish nobility Challenges a long-standing spatial-geographical bias in Ottoman-Middle East history by bringing Kurdish and Armenian histories back into the Ottoman imperial framework Presents the first study to use the framework of hereditary nobility ...(展开全部)

Winner of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association Book Prize 2023 Studies the making and unmaking of the Ottoman Empire’s Kurdish nobility Challenges a long-standing spatial-geographical bias in Ottoman-Middle East history by bringing Kurdish and Armenian histories back into the Ottoman imperial framework Presents the first study to use the framework of hereditary nobility ...(展开全部)