Hatice Yildiz

University of Cambridge

A comparative history of gender and factory labour in Ottoman Bursa and Colonial Bombay, c.1850-1910

Thanks to the generous EHS bursary, I have completed my doctoral project on gender and textile manufacturing in the late nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and British India. My thesis examines the ways in which gendered notions of skill, waged work, domesticity and technology shaped labour processes and class hierarchies in Bombay cotton spinning and Bursa silk reeling factories. It offers a fresh critique of the presumed relationship between male labour and formal employment, replacing it with a broader view that links factory production to gender relations at home and in the rural sphere. In addition to editing my thesis chapters, the grant enabled me to submit an article to the Journal of Social History and apply for postdoctoral positions in UK universities.