Donald Quataert was, in narrow terms, an Ottoman labour historian and in wider terms, an economic historian of the late Ottoman Empire. The articles in this book are distributed across topics that Quataert worked on throughout his academic life. An article takes up the topic of his thesis on "Famine in Turkey" that he prepared whilst still a master's student at Harvard University under the guidance of Stanford J. Shaw, another contribution responds to his final work on Zonguldak mine workers. Most, however, have some relationship to the 19th century Ottoman economy, Quataert's particular field of expertise. Of the 33 authors who have contributed the 32 academic articles that make up this book, 17 were students at Binghamton. Eleven of them wrote their theses under Donald Quataert. There are 10 memorial pieces in this book. Quataert's work fell squarely within the research agenda of history from below, and the people he worked on were, in Hobsbawm's words, "the sort of people whose names are usually unknown to anyone except their family and neighbours," and as a result, the title of this book is History from Below.