Invited Talk at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media Data Working Group, George Mason University
For the Ottoman military-administrative elite in imperial provinces, alliances were essential to garnering respect and support among Algerian notables, legitimizing their authority and solidifying their positions of power. This talk explores how descriptive statistics and hypothesis testing open new windows into Ottoman governors’ experiences in early modern Algeria. Using quantitative descriptive statistics, it calls into question historians’ assumption that Ottoman Sultans actually followed their stated practice of moving governors every three years and suggests a new periodization for Constantine’s history, deepening our understanding of the social, political, and environmental forces at work in this region over time. Furthermore, through hypothesis testing, we uncover local perceptions of Ottoman officials’ ethnicity and the extent of local elites’ influence in provincial political careers.