Anwar Haneef

Anwar Haneef is a PhD student specializing in the political economy of the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire, the Arabian Peninsula, and South India. He examines how legal and fiscal infrastructures, commercial networks, and the circulation of capital and commodities shaped the organization of power, production, and exchange across these regions.

His current project examines the relationship between the Ottoman and Omani Empires, exploring how customs institutions became sites for negotiating political authority and fiscal jurisdiction in the late eighteenth century. He is also expanding this research to examine how shared fiscal and infrastructural arrangements between the Ottoman Empire and Indian Ocean polities shaped their interactions with European political and economic networks across the Indian Ocean.

Before joining Stanford, Anwar earned an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from Freie Universität Berlin and a B.A. in History (South Asia) from the University of Calicut. He is an affiliated graduate student at the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). He has also worked on the Ruqʿa Reader Project, transcribing eighteenth-century Arabic Ottoman court records to train a handwritten text recognition (HTR) model. For the 2026–27 academic year, he serves as Graduate Co-Chair of the Eurasian Empires Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center.