Ellen Nye
Ellen Nye is an Assistant Professor of Economic History at Purdue University specializing in the history of political economy, globalization, and empire. She earned her PhD in History from Yale University, an MPhil in Social and Economic History from the University of Cambridge, and an AB in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Dartmouth College. Before starting as an assistant professor at Purdue, she served as faculty fellow at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center and a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.
Her current book project, Empires of Obligation: Monetary Governance between Early Modern England and the Ottoman Empire 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 revises nationally bound narratives about financial revolution, state formation, and capitalism to appreciate different, intersecting responses to the problems posed by increasingly global trade. Her dissertation on which the book is based won the Business History Conference’s Krooss Prize for the best dissertation in business history, Yale’s Hans Gatzke Prize for the best dissertation in European history, and honorable mention for the World History Association Dissertation Prize.
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. During the 2024-25 academic year, she was awarded the History of Capitalism Fellowship at Harvard Business School. Her writing has appeared in the Journal for Early Modern History, Enterprise & Society, Critical Historical Studies, EH.net, and The Economist’s 1843 Magazine. During the 2025-26 academic year, she will be a fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. Please get in touch at emnye@purdue.edu.
Service to the BHC
Prizes and Grants from the BHC
Recent Conference Participation
| 2026 BHC Meeting:
Chair, "The Spice Must Flow:" Legal and Illegal Market-Making in the Early Modern World Discussant, The Business of Co-Creation in the Early Modern World |
| 2025 BHC meeting:
Presenter, "Fraud on the Nile: Resisting an Imperial Currency Union in Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Egypt"
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| 2024 BHC Meeting:
Presenter, "Merchants and Financial Revolution: Interstate Trade, the Great Recoinage, and Shifting Scales of Money"
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| 2024 BHC Meeting:
Presenter, "Empires of Obligation: Law, Money, and Debt between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1670-1720"
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| 2022 BHC Meeting :
Presenter, "A Commerce in Coins: The Early Modern Ottoman Empire as an Arena for Competing Theories of Money’s Value"
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