Kate Fleet
After studying Middle Eastern History with Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University, I returned for several years to New Zealand, where I was born and spent part of my childhood. After several years there, I then came back to the UK and to SOAS where I studied Turkish and did a Ph.D. on the commercial relations between the Turks and the Genoese, 1300-1453. I was appointed to the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Newnham College, in 1991 and became Director in 2000. I was Newton Trust Lecturer in Ottoman History in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and the History Faculty from 2001 to 2011.
I would welcome enquiries from prospective students wishing to work on the social and economic history of the Ottoman empire and early Turkish Republic, on Ottoman-European relations and on European, in particularly British, French or Italian, relations with the early Turkish republic.
Contact
Tags & Themes
Cambridge
Key Publications
Making a Living in Ottoman Anatolia, ed. with Ebru Boyar (Brill: Leiden, 2021).
“Chapter 4: Turkish-Genoese trade in northern Anatolia c. 1300-1461”, in Making a Living in Ottoman Anatolia, ed. with Ebru Boyar (Brill: Leiden, 2021), pp. 78-111.
“Chapter 1: an overview of economic life in Ottoman Anatolia”, with Ebru Boyar in Making a Living in Ottoman Anatolia, ed. with Ebru Boyar (Brill: Leiden, 2021), pp. 1-20.
“The absence of the Ottoman empire in European historiography”, in Imagined, Embodied and Actual Turks in Early Modern Europe, ed. Bent Holm and Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen (Vienna: Hollitzer Verlag 2020), pp. 27-46.
“A shared world of economic knowledge: the Ottoman empire and Europe in the early modern era”, in Les ottomans et l’histoire du monde, ed. Elisabetta Borromeo, Frédéric Hitzel and Benjamin Lellouch (Leuven: Peeters, 2021), pp. 627-42.
“Great Britain and ‘a small and poor peasant state’: Turkey, Britain and the 1930 Anglo-Turkish Treaty of Commerce and Navigation”, with Ebru Boyar, Middle Eastern Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00263206.2021.1898386
Entertainment Among the Ottomans, ed. with Ebru Boyar (Brill: Leiden, 2019).
“Chapter 1: Ottoman society through the lens of entertainment” (with Ebru Boyar), in Entertainment Among the Ottomans (Brill: Leiden, 2019), pp. 1-21.
Middle Eastern and North African Societies in the Interwar Period, ed. with Ebru Boyar (Brill: Leiden, 2018).
“Chapter 9: the provision of water to Istanbul from Terkos: continuities and change from empire to republic”, in Middle Eastern and North African Societies in the Interwar Period (Brill: Leiden, 2018), pp. 212-38.
Ottoman Women in Public Space, ed. with Ebru Boyar (Brill: Leiden, 2016).
“Chapter 4: the powerful public presence of the Ottoman female consumer”, in Ottoman Women in Public Space (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 91-127.
“Chapter 5: the extremes of visibility: slave women in Ottoman public space”, in Ottoman Women in Public Space (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 128-49.
“Geç Osmanlı-Erken Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Döneminde Yabancılara Verilen Ekonomik İmtiyazlar”, in Uygur Kocabaşoğlu’na Armağan, special issue of Kebikeç, 39 (spring 2015), 343-62.
Ottoman Economic Practices in Periods of Transformation: The Cases of Crete and Bulgaria, with Svetla Ianeva (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 2014).
The Cambridge History of Turkey vol. II The Ottoman Empire as a World Power, 1453-1603, ed. with Suraiya Faroqhi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Translated into Turkish: Türkiye Tarihi 1453-1603, Bülent Üçpunar (trans.) (İstanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2016).
A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul, with Ebru Boyar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Translated into Turkish: Osmanlı İstanbul’unun Toplumsal Tarihi, Serpil Çağlayan (trans.) (İstanbul: İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2014).
The Cambridge History of Turkey vol. I Byzantium to Turkey 1071-1453 (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Translated into Turkish: Türkiye Tarihi 1071-1453 : Bizans’tan Türkiye’ye, Ali Özdamar (trans.) (İstanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2012).
Chapter 13: “Turks, Mamluks and Latin merchants: commerce, conflict and co-operation in the eastern Mediterranean”, in Byzantines, Latins and Turks in the Eastern Mediterranean World after 1150, ed. Jonathan Harris, Catherine Holmes and Eugenia Russell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 327-44.
“Money and politics: the fate of British business in the new Turkish Republic”, Turkish Historical Review, 2/1 (2011), 18-38.
“A dangerous axis: the “Bulgarian Müftü”, the Turkish opposition and the Ankara government, 1928-1936”, Middle Eastern Studies, 44/5 (2008), 775-89, with Ebru Boyar.
“Mak[ing] Turkey and the Turkish Revolution known to the Foreign Nations without any expenses”: propaganda films in the early Turkish Republic”, Oriente Moderno, 24/1 (2005), 117-132, with Ebru Boyar.
European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Translated into Arabic: al-tajira baina Urubba wa al-buldan al-Islamiya fi zill al-dawlah al-Uthmaniya (Riyadh: al-‘Ubikan, 2004); translated into Turkish: Erken Osmanlı Döneminde Türk Ceneviz Ticareti, Özkan Akpınar (trans.) (İstanbul: İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2009).
“Italian perceptions of the Turks in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries”, Journal of Mediterranean Studies 5/2 (1995), 159-72.
“Ottoman grain exports from western Anatolia at the end of the fourteenth century”, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 40/3 (1997), 283-93.
“The treaty of 1387 between Murad I and the Genoese”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 56/1 (1993), 13-33.
Other publications
“Ottoman commercial history”, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian Commercial History, ed. David Ludden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
“The Ottoman economy, c.1300-c.1585”, History Compass, 12/5 (2014), 455–64.
“Florence and the Ottoman empire in the second half of the fifteenth century”, in Otekilerin Peşinde Ahmet Yaşar Ocak Armağanı, ed. Mehmet Öz and Fatih Yeşil (Timaş Yayınları, 2015), pp. 781-94.
The Ottomans and Trade (ed.) with Ebru Boyar (Oriente Moderno XXV/1 2006) (Rome, 2006).
“Fickle deceivers: Iranians viewed from the Porte at the end of the 19th century”, in Scritti in onore di Giovanni M. D'Erme, ed. Michele Bernardini and Natalia L. Tornesello, 2 vols. (Naples, 2005), vol. I, pp. 327-40.
The Ottoman Capitulations: Text and Context (ed.) with Maurits H. van den Boogert (Oriente Moderno XXII/3 2003) (Rome, 2003).
The Ottomans and the Sea (ed.) (Oriente Moderno XX/1 2001) (Rome, 2001).
“Turks, Italians and intelligence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries”, in The Balance of Truth. Essays in Honour of Professor Geoffrey Lewis, ed. Çiğdem Balım-Harding and Colin Imber (Istanbul: Isis, 2000), pp. 99-112.
The Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century (ed.) (Oriente Moderno XVIII/1 1999) (Rome, 1999).
“Early Turkish naval activities'”, in The Ottomans and the Sea, ed. Kate Fleet (Oriente Moderno XX/1 1001) (Rome, 2001), pp. 129-138.
“Caffa, Turkey and the slave trade: the case of Battista Macio”, in Europa e Islam tra i Secoli XIV e XVI. Europe and Islam between 14th and 16th Centuries, ed. Michele Bernardini, Clara Borrelli, Anna Cerbo and Encarnación Sánchez Garcia (Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale. Collana “Matteo Ripa” XVIII, 2002), pp. 373-89.
“Early Ottoman self definition”, in Essays in Honour of Barbara Flemming , ed. Jan Schmidt (Journal of Turkish Studies, 26/I 2002), 229-38.
“The invisible Ottomans: the missing part of Mediterranean history in the late medieval and early modern period”, in The Turks vol III Ottomans, ed. Güzel, Hasan Celal, C. Cem Oğuz and Osman Karatay (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye Publications, 2002), pp. 40-5.
“Corruption and justice the case of Ettore di Flisco and Ottobono Giustiano”, in Porphyrogenita. Essays on the History and Literature of Byzantium and the Latin East in Honour of Julian Chrysostomides, ed. Dendrinos, Charalambos, Jonathan Harris, Eirene Harvalia-Crook, Judith Herrin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 275-90.
“Appalto and gabella: farmed tax or monopoly?”, Eurasian Studies, 2/1 (2003), 31-42.
“Tax-farming in the early Ottoman state”, The Medieval History Journal, 6/2 (2003), 249-58.
“Turkish-Latin relations at the end of the fourteenth century”, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientarum Hungaricae, 49/1-2 (1996), 131-7.