Draft:Nora Elizabeth Barakat

Nora Elizabeth Barakat (Born in 1979) is an American historian and an Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. She specializes in the social, economic, and legal history of the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East, with a particular focus on property, governance, and state-building processes in desert environments.

Education

Barakat completed her Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her doctoral work focused on issues of property, law, and governance in desert regions of the Ottoman Empire.

Career

After earning her Ph.D., Barakat held a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley, where she expanded her research on legal frameworks and historical governance structures in the Middle East. She subsequently served as a visiting assistant professor at New York University Abu Dhabi, teaching courses on Middle Eastern history and the Ottoman Empire.

Barakat later joined the Department of History at Stanford University as an Assistant Professor. At Stanford, she teaches courses on the history of the Ottoman Empire, the modern Middle East, legal regimes, economic transformation, and the roles of state and non-state actors in shaping social structures. She is also affiliated with various interdisciplinary centers and working groups at Stanford, including programs focused on Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.

Research and Scholarship

Barakat’s research examines how economic, legal, and administrative practices evolved in peripheral and desert regions of the Ottoman Empire and how these developments influenced broader state-building processes in the Middle East. Key themes in her work include:

Property and Law: Exploring land ownership, legal reforms, and administrative policies affecting Bedouin and tribal communities.

Economic History: Analyzing the role of trade routes, resource extraction, and state interventions on local and regional economies.

State Formation: Investigating negotiations between Ottoman authorities and local leaders, particularly in desert environments where nomadic populations played significant roles in governance and fiscal policies. Her research uses archival sources in multiple languages and has been published in various peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.

Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire

Barakat's book Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire examines how Bedouin communities in the interior regions of the Eastern Mediterranean actively participated in Ottoman governance and capitalist expansion between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, challenging earlier depictions of Bedouin as mere threats to settled agriculture. These communities, which ranged from camel herders to part-time farmers, assumed roles in taxation and property administration, thus embedding themselves in the evolving infrastructure of the modern state. Barakat's long-term perspective shows how Ottoman officials, initially reliant on Bedouin to oversee pilgrimage routes, later sought to dispossess them by labeling interior lands as “empty,” even as Bedouin individuals resisted through bureaucratic involvement, political leverage, and at times force. By framing this Ottoman experience alongside other “nationalizing empires” such as the United States in the American West and Russia in Central Asia, Barakat underscores how the Ottomans’ view of Bedouin as potentially loyal Muslim subjects provided more opportunities to retain land than Indigenous peoples elsewhere, though it still fostered exclusionary policies that culminated in extreme violence such as the Armenian genocide. These processes left enduring legacies, including the use of “tribe” as an administrative category and ongoing conflicts over state domain land, which continue to shape post-Ottoman struggles for resources and power.

Honors

• Awarded Fellowship from The National Endowment for the Humanities (2021)

• Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in Women's Studies (2018)