Anil Askin

Anil Askin completed his PhD in History at Brown University in 2025 and holds an MA in History from Bogazici University, where he studied Economics and History as a double major. Before joining Wadham, Anil was an Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Anil’s research has been supported by fellowships from the American Research Institute in Turkey and the Research Centre for Anatolian Civilizations, among others, and recognized with a paper prize from the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. He has also taught courses in the global history of capitalism, with particular attention to labour, science, and technology, as well as environmental history and the histories of the early modern and modern Middle East and Imperial and Soviet Russia.

Anil's research focuses on the economic and social history of the 17th and 18th-century Ottoman Empire, with a broader comparative interest in early modern economic and imperial history. He studies military production and expenditure as forces of large-scale economic organization, tracing the relations they generated from mineral and resource extraction to processing, contracting, taxation, finance, and exchange. Drawing extensively on court records and other legal archives alongside the account books of military and extractive enterprises, Anil reconstructs both the scale and the local workings of these political economies, from cities and towns to villages and rural communities. In doing so, his work uses the Ottoman case to explore broader questions about war, state formation, resource extraction, economic change, and sovereignty in the early modern world.

At Wadham, Anil is completing his first book manuscript, The Order of Extraction. Alongside forthcoming work and articles under review, his research has appeared in Turkish Historical Review and an edited volume on animal histories, and he has contributed book reviews to New Perspectives on Turkey and Review of Middle East Studies.