Stories of Survival is a five-year research project funded by the European Research Council (2015-20), directed by Dr John-Paul Ghobrial, and based at the University of Oxford.

The project investigates the history of Eastern Christianity from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.  From Lebanese immigrants in Argentina to Iraqi refugees in Sweden, Eastern Christians can be found today scattered across the entire world.  Too often, however, this global migration has been seen purely as a modern development, one arising from contemporary political and confessional events in the Middle East, while in fact this phenomenon had its roots in the early modern period.  From the sixteenth century onwards, Christians from the Ottoman Empire set out for distant worlds and foreign lands, travelling as far as Europe, India, Russia, and even the Americas and leaving traces of themselves in countless European and Middle Eastern archives, chanceries, and libraries.  

Stretching across three continents, ten languages, and dozens of archives, Stories of Survival gathers all of these disparate sources into a single analytical frame to uncover, for the first time, the global and connected histories of Eastern Christianity in the early modern world.

This website showcases the ongoing research of our team of researchers based at Oxford.  We encourage you to discover more about our work using the links above.

Towards a New History of Eastern Christianity

This project begins with the assumption that the history of Eastern Christianity must be studied in the context of wider European and global developments in the early modern period. Recent attempts to recast early modern history have shown in poignant ways how our understanding of the period is radically changed by a consideration of Eastern Christianity.  Placing Eastern Christianity at the forefront of European, Islamic, and global history requires a structured programme of dissemination, and the project team will be expected to play a key role in making the team’s research intelligible and relevant to the widest audience of historians.  As such, the team will target the findings of its research in articles that reach three main audiences: specialists in Eastern Christianity, scholars in Middle Eastern history and Islamic studies, and ‘mainstream’ history journals aimed at wider circles of early modern historians.  In addition, the team will disseminate its findings at several international conferences and smaller workshops.  In this way, the Stories of Survival project seeks to place Eastern Christianity at the forefront of European, Islamic, and global history in the early modern period.