The Armenian community in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire: Social transformation and the Düzoğlu Family

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2756103_(Table of contents)

This thesis is a study of the group of leading Armenian moneylenders and officials of the Ottoman state in Istanbul. These prominent individuals, as intermediaries between the Armenian community and the Ottoman state, played crucial roles in the political, social, and economic spheres of the Armenian community and the Ottoman state over the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Also known as the Amiras, they wielded significant power in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Their power began to be challenged in various moments of the nineteenth century and throughout the century they began to disperse among different professions. Approaching these changes from the perspective of transformation rather than a story of rise and fall, is the primary focus of this thesis. In doing so, this transformation is observed through one of these Amira families, the Düzoğlu family. The Düzoğlus, who worked in the Imperial Mint between 1762-1850 and acted as officials in leading Ottoman administrative councils of the second half of the nineteenth century, serves in this thesis as a case study to display the socio-economic transformation of the Amiras in the nineteenth century