Transformations Beyond Empires: Race, Slavery, and Geopolitics in the Ottoman Red Sea Basin (1839-1885)
Transformations Beyond Empires: Race, Slavery, and Geopolitics in the Ottoman
Red Sea Basin (1839-1885)
By: Osman Alp Cibikli, PhD student at History Department, Cornell University
I traveled to Addis Ababa for dissertation research. My dissertation project is about the nineteenth-century history of the Red Sea and, more specifically, how slavery, imperial rivalry, and abolition reshaped mobility and racial classification in the nineteenth-century Red Sea world.
With support from the CFEE Fieldwork Grant 2025, I conducted fieldwork in Addis Ababa from 19 to 29 November 2025 at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and the Ethiopian National Archives. This research was necessary because Abyssinian polities play a significant role in the project. Regardless of what I expected to find, I needed to check the major archives in Ethiopia to determine whether there were materials I could use. Otherwise, I would be relying on sources external to Ethiopia to convey the East African side of the project.
I arrived in Ethiopia on the morning of 21 November. That day, I visited the Addis Ababa University campus. I then spent the weekend doing additional research to refine my research plan in Ethiopia. Starting on Monday morning, I began my research. On each weekday, I generally arrived at the archives around 9:00 AM and left at closing time.
On Monday morning, I went to the Addis Ababa University Institute of Ethiopian Studies and obtained the necessary permits. My research began in the Foreign Language Collections Library by examining the catalogue for books, dissertations, and other materials that I cannot easily access elsewhere. I then went to the Foreign Language Manuscript Collections. That day, I only had time to review the catalogue for materials in English and French before starting to examine the Arabic manuscript collections.
On Tuesday, I went to the Ethiopian National Archives. I was told that their main collections begin in the 1930s, which limits their usefulness for research focused on the nineteenth century. However, archive staff told me that there is a separate collection that includes some materials relevant to my period: the Ambassador Zewde Gabre Selassie Collection Inventory. This collection includes various documents from European archives and research notes gathered from different archives and research occasions. Most of the materials I saw there consisted of documents from the French Diplomatic Archives and British National Archives, as well as his research notes and certain publications and dissertations. I took photographs of the materials that could be useful for my project. One item in the Gabre Selassie materials was a document written in Ottoman Turkish, which was the most interesting item in that group.
From Wednesday through Friday, I spent most of my time in the Foreign Language Manuscript section and focused on Arabic manuscripts. Photography was not permitted, which forced me to catalogue the manuscripts myself to get a sense of what they are about within a limited amount of time. To identify items quickly, I generally read the first few and last few pages to determine the content, the author, and the scribe who copied the text and added comments.
On Friday, I returned to the Foreign Language Collections Library and ordered books and dissertations that are difficult to access elsewhere. In this section, photography was permitted, and I took 990 photographs of pages from various studies.
By the end of the visit, I identified, recorded, or copied a total of 22 books and manuscripts that are not easily accessible elsewhere. I also photographed relevant materials from the Gabre Selassie Collection, totaling 270 images, as well as the 990 images taken at Addis Ababa University.
I am very grateful to the Centre Français des Études Éthiopiennes for supporting this research through the CFEE Fieldwork Grant 2025.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Secrétaire Scientifique (18 février 2026). Transformations Beyond Empires: Race, Slavery, and Geopolitics in the Ottoman Red Sea Basin (1839-1885). UN ŒIL SUR LA CORNE / AN EYE ON THE HORN. Consulté le 5 mars 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/15pvd





