Kate Fleet
BA (SOAS), MA (Cantab), PhD (SOAS)
College roles
Fellow (A), Postgraduate Tutor, Deputy Senior Tutor, Director of the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Assistant Tutor (Postgraduates), Postgraduate Mentor
Biography
Dr. Kate Fleet was educated at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where she did her B.A. in Middle Eastern History and Arabic and her Ph.D. on the commercial relations between the Turks and the Genoese 1300-1453. She was appointed to the Skilliter Centre in 1991 and became Director in 2000. She is Postgraduate Tutor at Newnham College where she is a Fellow.
Kate Fleet has taught Ottoman history at SOAS, and Ottoman history, Middle Eastern history, modern Turkish history and Ottoman and modern Turkish at Cambridge, where she was the Newton Trust Lecturer in Ottoman History in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and the History Faculty from 2001 to 2011. She was Co-Editor of Eurasian Studies from 2002 to 2006, Editor-in-Chief of Turkish Historical Review from 2008-2018 and has been an Executive Editor of the Encyclopaedia of Islam Three since 2012.
Research Interests
Her current research interests include the ways in which non-Muslim merchants operated in the Ottoman empire and late Ottoman/early Republican social and diplomatic history.
Her books include European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchants of Genoa and Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), co-authored with Ebru Boyar; and Ottoman Economic Practices in Periods of Transformation: The Cases of Crete and Bulgaria (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2014), co-authored with Svetla Ianeva. She is editor of volume I of The Cambridge History of Turkey: Byzantium-Turkey, 1071-1453 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and, together with Suraiya Faroqhi, of volume II, The Ottoman Empire as a World Power, 1453-1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
She has also edited various volumes together with Ebru Boyar: Ottoman Women in Public Space (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Middle Eastern and North African Societies (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Entertainment Among the Ottomans (Brill: Leiden, 2019); Making a Living in Ottoman Anatolia (Brill: Leiden, 2021); and Borders, Boundaries and Belonging in Post-Ottoman Space in the Interwar Period (Leiden: Brill, 2023).
Recent publications include “The absence of the Ottoman empire in European historiography”, in Imagined, Embodied and Actual Turks in Early Modern Europe, ed. Bent Holm and Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen (Vienna: Hollitzer Verlag 2020), pp. 27-46; “A shared world of economic knowledge: the Ottoman empire and Europe in the early modern era”, in Les ottomans et l’histoire du monde, ed. Elisabetta Borromeo, Frédéric Hitzel and Benjamin Lellouch (Leuven: Peeters, 2021), pp. 627-42; “Ottoman commercial history”, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian Commercial History, ed. David Ludden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); “Taxation in the early Ottoman state, fourteenth to sixteenth centuries”, in The Routledge Handbook of Public Taxation in Medieval Europe, ed. Denis Manjot, Mathieu Caesar, Florent Garnier and Pere Verdés Pijun (London: Routledge, 2023), pp. 419-26; and, with Ebru Boyar, “‘Great Britain and a small and poor peasant state’: Turkey, Britain and the 1930 Anglo-Turkish Treaty of Commerce and Navigation”, Middle Eastern Studies, 57/6 (2021), 904-19, republished in From Enemies to Allies Turkey and Britain, 1918–1960, ed. Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal, Dilek Barlas and William Hale (London: Routledge, 2023).