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Assistant Professor
Office Hours: Wednesday 1:30-3:00, Friday 8:30-10:00 in PMH 454
mbosull@unc.edu

Education

BA History, Santa Clara University

Visiting Student Programme, Mansfield College, Oxford University

MPHIL Early Modern History, University of Cambridge

PhD, University of California, Los Angeles

Research Interests

Mike O’Sullivan is a historian of South Asia and its connections with the wider world in the early modern and modern periods. After completing his PhD at UCLA, he held fellowships at Yale Law School and the Center for History and Economics at Harvard. He joined the Department of History at UNC Chapel Hill in Fall 2024. To date, his publications have dealt with the religious and economic history of Muslim communities in South Asia and adjacent regions. In late 2023 his first book on the history of Gujarati Muslim business communities was published by Harvard University Press. His current project on the modern history of private Muslim banking in North Africa and Eurasia is also under contract with Harvard University Press.

In addition to his role as assistant professor of South Asian history, O’Sullivan is Senior Research Fellow for CAPASIA, a multi-year project funded by the European Research Council and based at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. CAPASIA examines the activities of more than 150 European ‘factories’ established in the Indian Ocean between 1500-1800. It operates under the direction of Professor Giorgio Riello (EUI/Warwick). The project website can be found here: https://www.capasia.eu/

Some Notable Publications

No Birds of Passage: A History of Gujarati Muslim Business Communities, 1800–1975
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023).

“A Hungarian Josephinist, Orientalist, and Bibliophile: Count Karl Reviczky, 1737-1793,” Austrian History Yearbook, 45 (2014), 61-88.

“‘The Little Brother of the Ottoman State’: Ottoman technocrats in Kabul and visions of Afghanistan's future in the Ottoman imagination, 1908-23,” Modern Asian Studies 50:6 (2016): 1846–1887.

“Pan-Islamic Bonds and Interest: Ottoman Debentures, Red Crescent Remittances, and the Limits of Indian Muslim Capital, 1877-1923,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 55:2, (2018): 183-220.

“Paper Currency, Banking, and Islamic Legal Debates in Late Ottoman and Early Saudi Arabia,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 63 (2020): 243-285.

“Interest, Usury, and the Transition from ‘Muslim’ to ‘Islamic’ Banks, 1908-1958,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 52 (2020): 261–287.

“Vernacular Capitalism and Intellectual History in a Gujarati Account of China, 1860-1868,” Journal of Asian Studies 80/2 (2020): 267–292.

“‘Indian Money’, Intra-Shīʿī Polemics, and the Bohra and Khoja Pilgrimage Infrastructure in Iraq's Shrine Cities, 1897-1932,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (2022) 32/1: 213-250.

“The Indian Muslim Salariat, Usury Laws, and the Moral Economy of Interest Transactions, 1855-1914,” Past and Present (Advanced Access, 2023).

“The Multiple Registers of Arabic in the Daudi Bohra Daʿwa and South Asian Public Life, c. 1880–1920,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 55/1 (2023): 1-7.

“Turkstroi: Soviet-Turkish Industrial Cooperation and the Dialectics of Divergence and Convergence in Interwar Statism, 1931-1941,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 67/1-2 (2024): 83-132.

with Kaleb Herman Adney, “Capitalism. Capitalism, Growth, and Social Relations in the Middle East: 1869-1945,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (2023)

with Giorgio Riello, “Where is Asia in Global Histories of Early Modern Capitalism?,” EUI HEC Working Paper 2023/03

‘As Dictated By Friendship’: Ottoman Facilitation of Habsburg Maritime Ventures in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, 1718-1792” (under revision)

“Ottoman Shipping in the Indian Ocean, 1700-1900,” (in progress)

“A Portuguese Factory in Basra and the Predicaments of Ottoman-Portuguese Joint Vassalage, 1622-1722,” (under review)

“From the Seventh Clime to the Jewel Mine: Ottoman Visions of Sri Lanka from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries,” (Forthcoming)

Courses Taught (as schedule allows)

For current information about course offerings, click here.

HIST 136. History of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh: South Asia since 1750
HIST 270. Mughal India