Joshua M. White

About Fellow

Joshua M. White is associate professor at the University of Virginia where his research explores the social, legal, and diplomatic history of the premodern Ottoman Empire and Mediterranean world. His first book, Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean (Stanford University Press, 2017), examined the impact of and Ottoman response to rising maritime violence in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the National Humanities Center, White is working on his second book, a study of Ottoman slavery from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries which tells the stories of illegally enslaved women and men who sued for their freedom in Ottoman courts from Albania to Anatolia and across the Mediterranean.

Selected Publications

• White, Joshua M. Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017.
• White, Joshua M. “Slavery, Freedom Suits, and Legal Praxis in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1590–1710.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 65, no. 3 (2023): 526–556.
• White, Joshua M. “Slavery, Manumission, and Freedom Suits in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire.” In Slaves and Slave Agency in the Ottoman Empire, edited by Stephan Conermann and Gül Şen, 283–318. Göttingen: V&R Unipress for Bonn University Press, 2020.
• White, Joshua M. “Litigating Disputes over Ships and Cargo in Early Modern Ottoman Courts.” Quaderni Storici 51, no. 3 (2016): 701–25.
• White, Joshua M. “Fetva Diplomacy: The Ottoman Şeyhülislam as Trans-Imperial Intermediary.” Journal of Early Modern History 19, no. 2–3 (2015): 199–221.