Shii News – Zoom: ‘Extraterritoriality and International Crisis in Ottoman Karbala 1843’ – Z Azarbadegan (6.1.26, 10-12 am Paris time)

ISMM Seminar 2025-2026

Autority and Political Culture in Qajar Iran and the Ottoman Empire (ca. 1780-1920)

Autorité et culture politique en Iran qajar et dans l’Empire ottoman (ca. 1780-1920)

Conveners :
Charles Ganier, Université Paris-Cité, CESSMA
Denis Hermann, CNRS HDR, CeRMI
Erdal Kaynar, MCF, Université de Strasbourg

Tuesday, 6 January 2026

10-12 (Paris time)

Zeinab Azarbadegan (Yale University)

Mapping a Massacre: Extraterritoriality and International Crisis in Ottoman Karbala 1843

In 1843, Necib Pasha, the Ottoman Governor of Baghdad attached the autonomous city of Karbala after the months-long siege on the city. Occupants of the city, claiming Iranian and Russian subjecthood, reported mass looting, massacre, and desecration of the shrines in the city. Soon, the matter turned into an international crisis for the Ottoman Porte, sending a commission from Istanbul to investigate the event. Concurrently, a British-Russian commission arrived in Karbala to investigate how the non-Ottoman subjects resident in Karbala were affected. These commissions mapped the city and its affected population. The local histories, the nationalist historiographies in Arabic, Turkish, and Persian, and the historiography of the Babi/Bahai movement have all tried to get to the truth of the matter in what happened in Karbala in 1843, projecting the grievances around the event onto their own ideological framings. This paper aims to map these historiographies against the international context within which the commission reports were written. It argues that the commissions and the claims within them could only be made in the context of new conceptions of imperial subjecthood and extraterritoriality, where empires claimed protection of their subjects beyond their borders. It was only then that a matter of Ottoman internal rebellion could be magnified into an international crisis with Iranian, Russian and British governments mapping and claiming populations resident in Ottoman Empire.

To attend the seminar via zoom :
https://ehess-fr.zoom.us/j/98558979025?pwd=1EOFoBWcE9No6JJTZb9fixfu9VamZe.1
Meeting ID: 985 5897 9025
Passcode : 345891

For the full seminar programme :
https://iismm.hypotheses.org/128394

For any enquiries, please contact :
Denis Hermann – dnshermann@gmail.com