Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Netherlands
fellow
Houssine Alloul
Home institution
University of Amsterdam
Country of origin (home institution)
Netherlands
Discipline(s)
Colonial and postcolonial history
Contemporary history
Political Sciences
Social and economic history
Theme(s)
Cultural Studies
Globalization
Identity
Post-colonialism
Regional Studies
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Houssine Alloul is an Assistant Professor of Modern Global History at the University of Amsterdam. He specializes in international history with a focus on Modern Europe and the Late Ottoman Empire.
He is currently working on a monograph, tentatively entitled The Business of Diplomacy: The Ottoman Empire and Belgium in the Age of Capital. The book retraces the extensive but forgotten histories of intense interaction between the Kingdom of Belgium and the Ottoman Empire, from the 1800s up to 1923. It looks in particular at how small power diplomacy, the global circulation of capital, and transnational sociabilities interlaced. (For a recent interview on this book project, see here.)
His latest research project, funded by NWO, is a comparative cultural and social history of Ottoman resident envoys in Europe in the period 1834-1914. Paying specific attention to the ways in which these multireligious diplomats (and their families) sustained their social network and sought to integrate themselves in local elite milieus, the project revisits conventional historical narratives of the development of ‘European’ diplomacy (as practice, culture, and institution) at a time of Western colonial expansion and increasing military and technological dominance.
He is also preparing, together with Jan Vandersmissen (Ghent University) and Michael Auwers (CegeSoma), an annotated English translation and critical edition of the future king Leopold II’s 1864-65 diaries of his voyage through British-occupied India, Penang, Singapore and Hong Kong. He is, in addition, working on an article-length study of Leopold’s lifetime ‘fixation’ (speculative/Orientalist/imperialist) with the Ottoman lands.
Prior to coming to UvA, he was an FWO visiting fellow at Boğaziçi University, a Fulbright visiting scholar at Columbia University, and a junior research fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz. He obtained his PhD in History from the University of Antwerp and did undergraduate work at the Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice.
Research Project
Ottoman Envoys to Europe: Negotiating Difference in the Diplomatic World, 1832-1914
While the presence of Ottoman diplomats in Europe was self-evident to their Western contemporaries, they are conspicuous today by their absence in the historical literature on modern European diplomacy. This is remarkable as, for nearly a century between 1832 and 1914, Ottoman envoys continually represented their empire in the capitals of Europe. In fact, Ottoman participation to the post-1814 ‘Vienna system’ amply antedates that of other non-Western polities.
Houssine Alloul’s project seeks to write Ottoman diplomats back into European history. It investigates their habitus and social networks in different European capitals and pays particular attention to the formation of ‘intercultural’ bonds of amity and how various Western racialisms thwarted or complicated such relationships. Moving this multi-religious group of Ottoman officials center stage again, the project corrects conventional narratives that often paint the world of diplomats as a singularly Western European one in which non-Western actors played no active part.
Research Interests:
New History of Capitalism; consular history; (post-)Ottoman diasporas in Western Europe; Netherlandish travel literature on the Islamicate Mediterranean; vernacular Orientalism(s); the Congo Free State; Belgian history; modern-day legacies of European colonialism; and European and Ottoman encounters with the Maghreb (after 1700).