Halil Inalcik
| Halil İnalcık | |
|---|---|
| Born |
26 May 1916 Istanbul, Ottoman Empire |
| Died | 25 July 2016 (aged 100) Ankara, Turkey |
| Nationality | Turkish |
| Alma mater |
Ankara University University of Chicago Bilkent University University of London |
| Occupation | Historian |
| Years active | 1940–2016 |
Halil İnalcık (26 May 1916 – 25 July 2016) was a Turkish historian of the Ottoman Empire. His highly influential research centred on social and economic approaches to the empire. His academic career started at Ankara University, where he completed his PhD and worked between 1940 and 1972. Between 1972 and 1986 he taught Ottoman history at the University of Chicago. From 1994 on he taught at Bilkent University, where he founded the history department. He was a founding member of Eurasian Academy.
He was born in Istanbul on 26 May 1916 to a Crimean Tatar family that left Crimea for the city in 1905. He attended Balıkesir Teacher Training School, and then Ankara University, Faculty of Language, History and Geography, Department of History, from which he graduated in 1940. His work on Timur drew the attention of Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, who facilitated his entry as an assistant to the Modern Age Department of the university. He completed his PhD in 1942 in the same department. His PhD thesis was on the Bulgarian question in the late Ottoman Empire, specifically during tanzimat, and constituted one of the first socioeconomic approaches in Turkish historiography. In December 1943, he became assistant professor and his research interest became focused on the social and economic aspects of the Ottoman Empire. He worked on the Ottoman judicial records of Bursa and in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul. He became a member of the Turkish Historical Society in 1947.
In 1949, he was sent by the university to London, where he worked on Ottoman and Turkic inscriptions in the British Museum and attended seminars by Paul Wittek at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Here, he met other influential historians such as Bernard Lewis. He attended a congress in Paris in 1950, where he met Fernand Braudel, whose work greatly influenced him. He returned to Turkey in 1951 and became a professor in the same department in 1952. He lectured as a visiting professor in Columbia University in 1953–54 and worked and studied as a research fellow at Harvard University in 1956–57. Upon his return to Turkey, he lectured on Ottoman, European and American history as well as administrative organisation and Atatürk's reforms. In 1967, he lectured as a visiting professor in Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the International Association of Southeastern European Studies (French: Association Internationale des Etudes du Sud-Est Européen) in 1966 and held the presidency of this institution between 1971 and 1974.
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