Histories of constitutionalism in the Ottoman and Qajar Empires

Interest in the history of constitutionalism has grown sharply in recent years. The wider region of the Balkans and the Near and Middle East is not an exception to this case.
While current political developments worldwide have sparked new attention to the history of parliamentary systems and constitutionalist movements, research has already for the last decades taken an interest in the historic experience of constitutionalism in this area. Studies on the Near and Middle East, in particular, move away from repetitive debates on prospects of democracy in Muslim countries to underline the importance of constitutionalism in the history of the region. After all, the Iranian and Ottoman revolutions in 1906 and 1908 respectively put most parts of the Near and Middle East at least nominally under parliamentary rule. These revolutions were themselves part of a global wave of constitutionalist revolutions which affected one-quarter of the entire world population at the beginning of the 20th century. But apart from this global conjuncture, different regional contexts also played a decisive role in the development of constitutionalism. The constitutionalist experience fed from different yet interconnected regional traditions. The conference aims to address these intraregional exchanges of constitutionalism in the Qajar and Ottoman Empires in the period of roughly 1840 to 1911.