Mostafa Minawi (NHC Fellow, 2024–25)

Mostafa Minawi is an associate professor of history at Cornell University. He researches late nineteenth-century imperialism and the long shadow it casts into the present. He does that by focusing on Ottoman imperialism along the empire’s southern frontiers, its provinces in North Africa and Southwest Asia, and the Ottoman metropole, Istanbul. His work brings together microhistory, global history, and diplomatic history to examine how global events were experienced in the day-to-day lives of people adapting to the large-scale transitions to American and Western European global hegemony and the rise of the age of the nation-state in the late and early twentieth century.

His first book, titled The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy from the Sahara to the Hijaz, was published by Stanford University Press in 2016 and has since been translated into Turkish and Arabic. His latest book, Losing Istanbul: Arab-Ottoman Imperialists and the End of Empire, was published by Stanford University Press in 2022 and was the co-winner of the Albert Hourani Book Award given by the Middle East Studies Association in North America. The book was translated into Turkish in 2023 and is currently being translated into Arabic.

In addition to his academic writing, Professor Minawi writes and produces content about the history and contemporary politics of the Middle East for news and educational outlets like Aljazeera English and TedED to reach a wider audience. He hopes to reorient the history of the Middle East and Northeast Africa to focus on the lives of local inhabitants in what is too often treated as an abstract arena of Western geopolitical interests and counter-interests.

Selected Publications

• Minawi, Mostafa. Losing Istanbul: Arab-Ottoman Imperialists and the End of Empire. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022.
• Minawi, Mostafa. “International Law and the Precarity of Ottoman Sovereignty in Africa at the End of the 19th Century.” The International History Review 43, no. 5 (2020): 1098–121.
• Minawi, Mostafa. The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016.
• Minawi, Mostafa. “Telegraphs and Territoriality in Ottoman Africa and Arabia During the Age of High Imperialism.” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 18 (2016): 576–87.
• Minawi, Mostafa. “Beyond Rhetoric: Reassessing Bedouin-Ottoman Relations Along the Route of the Hijaz Telegraph Line at the End of the Nineteenth Century.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 58, no. 1-2 (2015): 75–104.