Syrian Christians, the Rags-to-Riches Story, and Free Enterprise

1970 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 358-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald M. Reid
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Free Enterprise ◽  
Considerable Influence ◽  
Success Stories ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Horatio Alger ◽  
The Military

In the late nineteenth century, when American boys were devouring the success stories of Horatio Alger and cultivating the prescribed virtues of thrift and industry in hopes of jumping from rags to riches overnight, boys on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean were dreaming similar dreams. The Christian boy of the Levant was particularly drawn to such success stories. His decision for a business career was not entirely of his own choosing, for as members of a Christian minority in a Muslim land his ancestors had long been excluded from the most prestigious official careers of the Ottoman Empire–the bureaucracy, the military, and the Muslim religious profession. Since these choice callings were reserved for Muslims, thedhimmî subjects of the Sultan had no choice but to concentrate their energies on banking and trading, shopkeeping and shipping. Making the best of the situation, the indigenous Christian of the Ottoman Empire threw himself into these business careers and sometimes amassed such a fortune that he came to occupy unofficial positions of considerable influence. Often his position as agent and protégé of a European shipping house gave him a decided advantage over Muslim merchants. Increasing the toehold given to it by the Capitulations agreements, Europe made its power increasingly felt in the Middle East during the nineteenth century, and the protégé of a European power could no longer be treated arbitrarily by Ottoman authorities.

Juridical Pan-Islam at the Height of Empire

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-257
Author(s):  
Nurfadzilah Yahaya
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Abstract Located at the intersection of four regions, the Middle East, East Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia, Afghanistan is a country whose legal history is sure to be diverse and exciting at the confluence of multiple legal currents. In the book Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires, Faiz Ahmed shows how Afghanistan could be regarded as a pivot for Islamic intellectual currents from the late nineteenth century onward, especially between the Ottoman Empire and South Asia. Afghanistan Rising makes us aware of our own assumptions of the study of Islamic law that has been artificially carved out during the rise of area studies, including Islamic studies. Ahmed provides a good paradigm for a legal history of a country that was attentive to foreign influences without being overwhelmed by them. While pan-Islamism is often portrayed as a defensive ideology that developed in the closing decades of the nineteenth century in reaction to high colonialism, the plotting of Afghanistan's juridical Pan-Islam in Ahmed's book is a robust and powerful maneuver out of this well-trodden path, as the country escaped being “landlocked” mainly by cultivating regional connections in law.

The Military Resources of the Empire

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David G. Morgan-Owen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Military Leadership ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Army ◽  
Naval Power ◽  
Differences Of Opinion ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Strategic Thought ◽  
The Military

Historians have argued that the British Army was afflicted with an insular focus on home defence in the late nineteenth century and that this preoccupation was evidence of the paucity of military strategic thought and the lack of co-operation and dialogue between the two services. This chapter challenges that viewpoint and argues that the military leadership was, in fact, consistently much more interested in preparing for operations overseas than it was in planning to prevent an invasion. The military authorities were only deflected from this aim by differences of opinion with the Admiralty on the application of naval power and on the Navy’s inability to commit to the safe passage of troops by sea, disagreements which obliged the War Office to limit the scope of its strategic discourse. This had significant implications for both military and imperial policy, particularly the defence of India.

The Coal Heavers of Port Sa'id: State-Making and Worker Protest, 1869–1914

2001 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 110-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Chalcraft
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
Indigenous Group ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Automatic Product

The coal heavers of Port Sa'id hold a distinctive place in Middle Eastern labor historiography as the first indigenous group of Egyptian workers to go on strike for higher wages (in 1882 and later). Existing accounts understand these protests in a somewhat objectivist and materialist way as the more or less inevitable outcome of the penetration of an otherwise rather passive Middle East by capitalist relations of production. This article revisits the protests of the coal heavers of Port Sa'id in the light of a rare glimpse of two documents authored by the coal heavers themselves. These documents show that coal heavers' protests were arguably linked to state-making, and were not simply the automatic product of capitalist development. The arrival of “guild” elections, intervention on taxation, regulative change, and reforming discourse operated in part to constitute worker grievance in Port Sa'id by providing a language in which to appeal, a “progressive” code against which to measure unjust contractors and employers, and a newly interventionist referee before which to make claims. Grievance formation was defined and constituted not just within economically defined “relations of production,” but also within a broader context of state-making and reform in late nineteenth-century Egypt.

Mapping the ‘Sports Nahda’

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-40
Author(s):  
Murat C. Yıldız
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Sports Clubs ◽  
Sports Club ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter traces the formation of a “sports awakening” in the Middle East during the late nineteenth century until the interwar period. This sports awakening consisted of government and private schools, fashionable sports clubs, a bustling multilingual sports press, and popular football matches and gymnastics exhibitions. The institutional and discursive trajectory of sports was not confined to a specific nation state; rather, it was a regional phenomenon. Educators, sports club administrators, students, club members, editors, columnists, and government officials helped turn sports into a regular fixture of the urban landscape of cities across the Middle East. These developments reveal the profound intellectual and ethnoreligious diversity of the individuals and institutions that shaped the defining contours of sports throughout the Middle East.

Making “Tribes” in the Late Ottoman Empire

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 482-487
Author(s):  
Nora Elizabeth Barakat
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Standard Term ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Early Republican ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman

Oymak. Al. Boy. Cemaat. Taife. Aşiret. These are the terms Ottoman officials used in imperial orders (mühimme) to describe diverse human communities linked by their mobility and externality to village administration in Ottoman Anatolia between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1924, Turkish historian Ahmet Refik compiled Ottoman imperial orders concerning such communities into a volume he titled Anadolu'da Türk Aşiretleri, 966–1200 (Turkish Tribes in Anatolia, 1560–1786). His use of the term aşiret (tribe) in the title is striking, because this term was only used in 9% of the orders in his volume (23 out of 244 total). However, by the late nineteenth century and in Refik's early Republican context, aşiret had become the standard term for these rural, extra-village, mobile human communities, which he understood as similar enough to include in his painstaking effort of compilation.

Conveying Ćeif: Three Croatian Folklore and Folklife Writings on Bosniak Coffee Culture

Folklorica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Dorian Jurić
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
First Time ◽  
By Products

This article presents three short passages describing coffee and coffeehouse culture among Bosnian and Herzegovinian Muslims in the late nineteenth century. These texts are drawn from manuscripts collected by lay, Croatian folklore and folklife collectors who submitted them to two early collecting projects in Zagreb. The pieces are translated here for the first time into English and placed into historical and cultural context regarding the history of coffee culture in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the wider Ottoman Empire as well as the politics of folklore collection at the time. By using the Pan-Ottoman concept of ćeif as a theoretical lens, I argue that these early folklorists produced impressive folklife accounts of Bosniak foodways, but that these depictions inevitably enfolded both genuine interest and negative by-products of the wider politics of their era.

scholarly journals Mass petitions as a way to evaluate ‘public opinion’ in the late nineteenth-century Ottoman empire? The case of internal strife among Gaza’s elite

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuval Ben-Bassat
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Free Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Political Alignments ◽  
Key Questions

This article evaluates collective petitions (arz-ı mahzars) sent to Istanbul from Gaza at the end of the nineteenth century as a way of assessing the political mood of the elite in Ottoman provincial towns. Gaza was the theatre of considerable tension, cleavages, and rivalry among its elite. One of the key questions in this context is the implications of sending collective petitions from towns such as Gaza to the imperial centre given the political censorship and the absence of free press at a time when there was nonetheless greater communication between the centre and the provinces, and an altered relationship between the state and its subjects. Thus more than ever before collective petitions represented local political alignments and what could be very cautiously defined as ‘public opinion’ among the elite in provincial Ottoman towns such as Gaza.

“Civilizing Mission” in the Late Ottoman Discourse: The Case of Gypsies

2013 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 577-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faika Çelik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Ottoman Balkans ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
Imperial State

Abstract Historians of the Ottoman Empire have up until now written extensively not only on the polyethnic and multireligious nature of the Ottoman Empire, but also on the specific ethnic and religious groups that made up this plurality. Yet, although the Gypsies were a part of this pluralistic society, they have not received sufficient critical attention from Ottomanists whether in Turkey or abroad. While a few important studies have recently been published on the Ottoman Gypsies, this scholarship, though indeed very useful as a guide to the rich materials available on the subject, are weakened by two competing arguments. The first of these arguments is that the Gypsies of the Ottoman Balkans provide a salient example of a group marginalized through stigmatization, segregation and exclusion, whereas the second maintains that Gypsies were benignly tolerated by the Ottoman state. These analyses however fail to take into account that the legal, social and economic status of the Roma people in the Ottoman Empire seems to have been, at different times and in different places, much more complicated than simple marginalization or toleration. The question in fact needs to be problematized through a consideration of regional, local and temporal differences. My previous readings of the kanunnames and the mühimme registers of the second half of the sixteenth century substantiate this view and demonstrate that the marginality of the Gypsies in the Ottoman Balkans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was neither absolute and unchanging nor inflexible and complete. The interaction of the Gypsies both with the state and with Ottoman society at large was both hostile and symbiotic. Thus, the purpose of this study is to delve further into this topic and analyze how the Ottoman Imperial state dealt with what I call “community in motion” at various levels in the late nineteenth century. Through close reading of a layiha (memorandum) written by Muallim Sa’di Efendi, a college professor in the city of Siroz (Serres) in communication with other archival sources located in Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi in Istanbul, the paper attempts not only to understand the ways and techniques through which the late Ottoman state produced and governed the Empire’s subjects but also to show how Gypsies interacted with and were received by the local population in Serres, including Muslims and Orthodox Christians. My argument is that during the sixteenth century, the imperial state adopts residential and religious mobility of the Gypsies, albeit with certain restrictions. Yet, by the late nineteenth century, one of the most significant concerns of the late Ottoman state was to “reform” (ıslah) the Gypsies. Constants attempts were being made to deconstruct, normalize and eliminate differences of Gypsies, for instance, appointing imams to the Gypsy neighborhoods to “correct” their faith or opening new schools to “save” them from ignorance and poverty that lived in.

An Aspiring Buffer State: Anglo-Persian Relations in the Third Coalition, 1804–1807

1973 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 509-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Near East ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Weak States ◽  
The Third ◽  
British Policy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Weak states can control strong states, provided the weak can persuade the strong to admit, that they are vitally interested in their integrity and independence. In the late nineteentli century everybody understood the influence of the Ottoman Empire upon British policy, and the influence of Austria-Hungary upon Imperial German policy in the near east. In the heyday of the Great Powers of Europe it was not expected tliat orientals should aspire to similar influence: their futures would be decided by Europeans. Until the work of Robinson and Gallagher revealed the extent to which the khedive of Egypt controlled Lord Cromer, the history of late nineteenth century imperialism was written from this assumption.

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