Institute for Mediterranean Studies

Dimitrios Stergiopoulos

Ph.D. candidate
Department of History, University of California San Diego
Department of Mediterranean and Global Economic and Social History

B.A. in Turkish and Modern Asian Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, 2013
M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies, Leiden University, Netherlands, 2015
PhD Candidate in History, University of California San Diego (in progress).

My research interests are centered on the transformation of Southeastern Europe and the Middle East from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries due to the incorporation of the region in the capitalist world economy of Western Europe. In my PhD, I am focusing on the economic and political role of the bankers and merchants in Athens and Istanbul from the end of the Crimean War until the war of 1897 between Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Specifically, I investigate how these strata navigated the turbulent conjuncture of the 1870s and they were able to consolidate their position as social and economic elites. For my research, I am mainly using primary sources from non-state historical actors, such as newspapers, pamphlets, ego-documents, biographies, memoirs and private correspondence in Greek, Ottoman Turkish, English and French.