Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Battles of Cradles: Abandoned Babies in the Late Ottoman Empire
2014-02-10 00:00 (America/Denver) | CA
AbstractThe nineteenth century developments on the issue of child abandonment and provisions for them reveal significant traits of the political
agenda, specifically regarding national identity, citizenship, and demographic politics. In the late Ottoman Empire, multi-lingual and multi-religious urban centers shared certain aspects of a cosmopolitan lifestyle. In addition, there was a rather politicized and sensitive concern for strengthening the solidarity and integrity of communities, which felt themselves under the threat of losing their members’ identity, language and religion. The sentiment of dissolution was triggered by reforms for the modernization and centralization of the state. These gave way to many tendencies of a nation-state and threatened the relative autonomy of the communities. Under these circumstances, religion, nationality, and citizenship of abandoned children became a contested terrain, over which arduous efforts were spent by local authorities, missionaries, non-Muslim communities, and the central state. In an unexpected manner, these infants occupied a major role in politics of demography, conversion and national rivalry.

Faculty Panel on the Big Burn
2014-02-12 00:00
A panel of UCSB faculty from multiple disciplines will discuss the UCSB Reads selection, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America. Panelists are Peter S. Alagona (History) Karen Lunsford (Writing Program); and Dar Roberts (Geography).

Bare Needs: Palestinian Capitalists and British Colonial Rule
2014-02-14 00:00
Abstract:
In British-ruled Palestine, Palestinian elites and British colonial officials attempted to define and regulate basic needs with varying consequences for economic thought and practices. In the 1930s, against the backdrop of armed rebellion and the Great Depression, Palestinian capitalists distinguished between needs and luxuries in order to shape a pan-Arab utopia as well as emerging forms of gendered subjectivities. As the decade wore on and World War II came to Palestine, these capitalists, with their emphasis on growth and capital accumulation, confronted a landscape of commercial paralysis and a crisis of supply. The scarcity of basic goods such as wheat, rice, and flour and the specter of political disorder also inspired the British colonial government to innovate new modes of economic management. Through institutions such as the Middle East Supply Center, British colonial rule shaped ideal territories. In Palestine, an ambitious rationing regime relied on new indices such as the “calorie” and the “cost of living” to determine each person’s “bare minimum,” assure “food for all,” and assess colonial rule. By tracing these instances of defining and regulating individual needs, this paper explores the commonalities and differences in Palestinian and British visions of progress, territory, and economic development. It reveals divergent but overlapping attempts to shape and develop the economy as an object of knowledge and a site of social management.
