Ellen Nye is currently an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. Her current book project, Empires of Obligation: Monetary Governance in a Globalizing World, examines the relationship between interstate private credit and domestic public finance in early modern England and the Ottoman Empire. Guided by archival research in Ottoman Turkish and several European languages across fifteen archives in five countries, Empires of Obligation integrates an assertive Ottoman response to the quickening pace of interstate commerce into the core of debates in global history. At the same time, Empires of Obligation exposes how interactions beyond England, including within the often-overlooked Ottoman Empire, England’s largest market for its prized woolen cloth exports, shaped key British financial infrastructure. Instead of isolated, nationally bound narratives about financial revolution, state formation, and capitalism, Empires of Obligation allows us to appreciate different, intersecting responses to the problems posed by increasingly global trade.

Nye’s research has been generously supported by the Fulbright Commission, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and the American Research Institute in Turkey, among others. Nye received her PhD at Yale with distinction in 2022 and received the Hans Gatzke Prize for the best dissertation in European History. During the 2022-23 academic year Nye served as a faculty fellow at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center and a participant in the affiliated seminar on “Capitalism’s Hardwiring: Money, Credit, and Finance in a Globalizing World, 1620-2020.” Nye has taught undergraduate and graduate students, including as a lead instructor at the Yale Prison Education Initiative.