Kaleb Herman Adney is a historian of the modern Middle East with a particular focus on capitalism in the late Ottoman Empire. His research interests and teaching incorporate commercial histories which connected the Eastern Mediterranean to global markets and to neighboring regions including the Balkans and Central Europe as well as Egypt, Sudan, and the Horn of Africa. While the Middle East and North Africa constitute the core of his pedagogy and research, his classes explore the broader geography of Afro-Eurasia as well. He is currently developing a website that will host resources (including blogs, interviews, and podcasts) on the diverse Mediterranean communities that have made Kansas City home through migration and resettlement over the past century.
He is also writing a book that explores the tobacco industry of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ottoman Empire and the commercial networks that connected Macedonia and Thrace to Egypt and Palestine to the south and to Austria and Germany to the north. In Mediterranean parlance of the time, this project analyzes the ways that "Oriental tobacco" was tied up in the broader political issues surrounding the "Eastern Question," which threatened to tear apart the imperial unity of the Ottoman domains. He has published recently on this in Turkish Historical Review and in Toplumsal Tarih Dergisi (in Turkish). He has published on capitalism and social history in the modern Middle East for Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History and New Perspectives on Turkey. He has forthcoming articles on Arabic-speaking migrants in Argentina who pursued agricultural labor at the behest of the Ottoman consulate and on the civilizational discursive apparatus of Greek-speaking migrants to Ethiopia in the 1920s.
Online Publications and Engagement:
Academia.edu page: https://ucla.academia.edu/KALEBADNEY
Undergraduate:
Graduate: