Michael O'Sullivan is a historian of modern South Asia and the Middle East. He received his PhD in History from UCLA in 2019 and was a Research Fellow in Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School during the 2019-2020 academic year. His research interests center mainly on the economic and legal history of Muslim communities stretching from the Balkans to Bengal over the past three centuries. To date, his publications have examined the emergence of the first Muslim banks, paper currency debates in early Saudi Arabia, and Ottoman efforts to float treasury bonds in India before the First World War. Works in progress include a piece on Indian mercantile activity in the South China Sea in the mid-nineteenth century and several articles on Gujarati Muslim commercial and religious rivalries in the Indian Ocean.

 

Peer-Reviewed Publications:

 

"Vernacular Capitalism and Intellectual History in a Gujarati Account of China, 1860–68," The Journal of Asian Studies, 1-26.

"‘Indian Money’, Intra-Shī ͑ī Polemics, and the Bohra and Khoja Pilgrimage Infrastructure in Iraq's Shrine Cities, 1897–1932," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1-38.

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

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

“Pan-Islamic Bonds and Interest: Ottoman Bonds, Red Crescent Remittances, and the Limits of Indian Muslim Capital, 1877-1924,” 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’ Banks to ‘Islamic’ Banks,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 52 (2020): 261-287.