Talk by Alan Mikhail (Chace Family Professor of History, Yale University)

At the turn of the seventeenth century, a Dutch privateer is captured by Muslim pirates and taken to Morocco. To win his freedom, he converts to Islam and begins plying the waters off the Atlantic coast for prizes and booty. He marries a Muslim woman, and they have a son they name Anthony. Anthony enters the family business, raiding ships traveling in and out of the Mediterranean. He ends up in Amsterdam after one of his adventures and there marries a German barmaid and sometimes sex worker named Grietje. They travel to New Netherland, a recent Dutch acquisition, a place that in a few decades will be known as New York. This is the standard—and seductive—story of New Netherland’s purported single Muslim resident, Anthony the Turk, as he is usually known. As with so many good stories, this one is more myth than fact. This talk traces the life of Anthony—as best we can know it—from the Mediterranean to Amsterdam and then New Netherland to question many of the accepted tenets of his biography. In so doing, it points to the place of Islam in the early modern world and interrogates several conventional narratives about colonial America and the Atlantic world.

Alan Mikhail is the author of five books and editor of another. His work has helped to establish the field of Middle East environmental history, positioned the Ottoman Empire at the center of global early modern history, and creatively scrutinized the place of the archive in the making of past and present. He is currently working on the intertwined histories of Islam and colonial America. His most recent book, My Egypt Archive, received the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. His previous book God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World won the Gold Medal in World History from the Independent Publisher Book Awards, was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award, was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and was named a book of the year by the Times Literary Supplement, History Today, Publishers Weekly, and Glamour. Before that, Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History received the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association Book Prize and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An Environmental History won the Roger Owen Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association. Both it and The Animal in Ottoman Egypt won Yale’s Gustav Ranis International Book Prize. Mikhail’s articles in the American Historical Review, Environmental History, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies received prizes as well. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Literary Hub, and Time.