Linda Darling

Professor, Department of History

Linda Darling received her PhD in History from the University of Chicago with the eminent Ottoman historian Professor Halil Inalcık.  She is the author of Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy: Tax Collection and Finance Administration in the Ottoman Empire, 1560-1660 (1996), based on research on tax documents and petitions in the Prime Minister’s Ottoman Archives (Basbakanlik), and A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle East: The Circle of Justice from Mesopotamia to Globalization (2013), drawing on political texts and the literature of advice (nasihat).  She has also written on taxation issues, early Ottoman administration, the question of holy war (gaza), crime, and East-West relations.  Her next project evaluates Ottoman works of advice against data from salary and promotion registers to study elite competition in the seventeenth-century empire.  She is Immediate Past Secretary and Member of the Board of Directors of the American Research Institute in Turkey, Executive Secretary and Member of the Executive Board of the International Association of Ottoman Social and Economic History, and President-Elect of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association.

Dr. Darling’s courses related to Ottoman or Turkish history include: “Ottoman Empire to 1800″ “Women and Gender in Islam” “The Mediterranean as a Borderland” “Ottoman Historical Readings” “Religion and State in Islam” “History of Sufism”