Max Weber Fellow
Department of History
Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies
Contact info
bayan.abubakr@eui.eu
Bayan Abubakr is a historian of Ottoman Sudan. She recently received her Ph.D. from Yale University’s Department of History. Her dissertation, “The Marketplace of Empire: Frontier Reform and the Making of Ottoman Sudan, 1840-1924,” centers Sudan in trans-Saharan and Ottoman histories of slavery, circuits of capital, and political histories of imperialism. She reads Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and English sources to situate Sudan at the confluence of Ottoman reform, the global abolition movement, and the competition over territory in Africa. "The Marketplace of Empire” examines Sudan as a key political economy in the late Ottoman Empire. It traces four arenas of struggle: the fiscal politics of merchant elites in Suakin; international efforts to suppress the trade of enslaved peoples; the frontier expansion of merchant-warlords along Sudan’s western borderlands; and the transformation of military institutions and colonial knowledge production under Anglo-Egyptian rule. Abubakr argues that throughout the long nineteenth century, Sudan’s political geographies emerged from enduring contestation between local elites, imperial bureaucrats, and corporate networks. At the EUI. Bayan will be working on transforming her dissertation into a book manuscript and laying the foundation for her second book on the history of the Sudanese army.