Clothing Laws, State, and Society in the Ottoman Empire, 1720–1829

1997 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald Quataert

In 1826, Sultan Mahmud II orchestrated the slaughter of 6,000–7,000 janissaries and, in order to incinerate any janissary remnants that had taken refuge there, burned the Belgrade Forest outside Istanbul. During his reign (1808–39), the sultan attacked many of the other bases of the ancien régime, such as the timar system, the lifetime tax farms, and the political autonomy of provincial notables. He also centralized the pious foundations, brought them under a special ministry, and expropriated their revenues. Such stories of Sultan Mahmud's dramatic and violent policies, as well as their 18th-century origins and their 19th-century legacies, are familiar ones in Ottoman and Middle Eastern history. It is a commonplace that Sultan Mahmud aimed to dismantle the power of the military and religious classes in favor of a new bureaucracy of administrators and scribes. And it is also known that his efforts had a major impact on the subsequent evolution of the Tanzimat reform programs during the later 19th century.

Author(s):  
Pawel Maciejko

Ya‘akov (Jakub) ben Yehudah Leib Frank (b. 1726–d. 1791) was the founder of Frankism, a Jewish religious movement that spread in East-Central Europe in the second half of the 18th century. Ya‘akov ben Leyb, later known as Frank or Frenk, was born in Podolia, the east-southernmost Palatinate of the Polish-Lihuanian Commonwealth in a family of known Sabbatians. When he was only a few months old, his family left Poland and moved to the Ottoman Empire. In Salonika, he established contacts with the most radical branch of the Dönmeh, founded by Berukhiah Russo (d. 1720), who was considered by his followers to be the next manifestation of the soul of Shabetai Tsevi. In 1755, Frank returned to Poland where he presented himself as an emissary of the Dönmeh and a famous kabbalist. He managed to unify splintered Sabbatian groups and attracted many followers throughout Podolia. Arrested by the rabbinic authorities, Frank and his followers demanded permission to hold a public disputation against the rabbis. Two disputations were held, the first one in Kamieniec Podolski in 1757 and the other one in Lviv in 1759. It the wake of the second disputation Frank and several thousands of his followers converted to Roman Catholicism. Shortly after the conversion, Frank was arrested again, this time by the Christians. He spent thirteen years in the prison-monastery in Częstowchowa. Therein, he developed a set of highly original theological doctrines focusing on the concept of the female messiah. Freed in 1772 by the Russians, he settled in Brno in Moravia. Frank died in 1791 in Offenbach am Main. The movement founded by him continued, in various forms, at least till the mid-19th century.


1953 ◽  
Vol 43 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 30-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. S. Staveley

Livy preserves two explanations of the Senatorial decision of 445 B.C. to suspend the election of consuls and to confer imperium consulare upon tribuni militum. One, which he himself accepts, is that it was a political compromise designed to appease agitation for plebeian representation in the consulship. The other is that the military situation demanded the appointment of at least three holders of imperium. Until some forty years ago the majority of scholars, even if ready to admit that the reform had military advantages, joined with Livy in laying the chief emphasis on the political motive. More recently, however, the tendency has been to disown the connection between the innovation and the struggle for office. The change is explained as necessitated wholly by growing military commitments or administrative needs. My purpose here is merely to defend once again the traditional account that the decision of 445 B.C. marked an important stage in the Struggle of the Orders and to remove the major difficulties which have discouraged its acceptance.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (10) ◽  
pp. 75
Author(s):  
EkramBadr El-din ◽  
Mohamed Dit Dah Ould Cheikh

The current study tries to examine the military coups that have occurred in Turkey and Mauritania. These coups differ from the other coups that occurred in the surrounding countries in the phase of democratization as these coups served as a hindrance to the process of democratization in Turkey and Mauritania. The problem of the study revolves around the analysis of the coups that happened in Turkey and Mauritania in the phase of democratic transition. The research is designed to answer the following question: what are the reasons that prompted the military establishment to intervene in political life in the shadow of the process of democratization in Turkey and Mauritania? The study aims at understanding reasons that pushed the military establishment to intervene in the political life. To discuss this phenomenon and achieve the required results, the analytical descriptive approach is adopted for concluding key results that may contribute to understand reasons that pushed the military establishment to intervene in the political life in Turkey and Mauritania in the aftermath democratization occurred in the two countries. The study concluded that the military establishment in both countries engaged in the political action and became ready to militarily intervene in the case of harming its interests and acquisitions. 


1993 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Zaverucha

The state of civil–military relations in the world, especially in the Third World, is very well summed up by Mosca's statement that civilian control over the military ‘is a most fortunate exception in human history’.All over the globe, the armed forces have frequently preserved their autonomous power vis-à-vis civilians. They have also succeeded in maintaining their tutelage over some of the political regimes that have arisen from the process of transition from military to democratic governments, as in Argentina and Brazil. Spain is a remarkable exception. Today, Spain, despite its authoritarian legacy, is a democratic country. The constituted civil hierarchy has been institutionalised, military áutonomy weakened, and civilian control over the military has emerged. Spain's newly founded democracy now appears quite similar to the older European democracies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-127
Author(s):  
Leah Bornstein-Makovetsky

This article discusses the biographies and economic and public activities of the Ḥatim family in Istanbul in the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century. Most of the attention is focused on R. Shlomo Ḥatim and his son Yitsḥak, who were members of the Jewish elite in Istanbul and settled in Jerusalem at the ends of their lives. R. Shlomo, who is said to have served the Ottoman authorities in Istanbul, settled in Jerusalem more than ten years before the leaders of the Jewish economic elite in Istanbul were executed in the 1820s. His son, surviving this purge, followed much later, immigrating to Israel in 1846, but died immediately thereafter. This article provides insights into the business activities of the Ḥatim family, as well as the activities of Yitsḥak Ḥatim as an Ottoman official in Istanbul. I also discuss two more generations of this family, considered an elite, privileged one, and that was highly esteemed among well-known rabbis in the Ottoman Empire. I also discuss the ties that developed between the communities of Istanbul and Jerusalem in the first half of the 19th century as a result of initiatives of officials in Istanbul and of immigration from Istanbul to Jerusalem.


2018 ◽  
pp. 226-262
Author(s):  
Muhammad Qasim Zaman

This chapter focuses on religio-political violence, whose widespread incidence—after Pakistan's realignment in the US-led War on Terror in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent rise of a new, Pakistani Taliban—has threatened the very fabric of state and society. It examines the violence in question from two broad and intertwined perspectives, one relating to the state, and the other to Islam and those speaking in its terms. Part of the concern in this chapter is to contribute to an understanding of how the governing elite and the military have often fostered the conditions in which the resort to religiously inflected violence has been justified. It also suggests that the nonstate actors—ideologues and militants—have had an agency of their own, which is not reducible to the machinations of the state. Their resort to relevant facets of the Islamic tradition also needs to be taken seriously in order to properly understand their view of the world and such appeal as they have had in particular circles.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Galves

Abstract This article introduces the Tycho Brahe Corpus (TBC), a parsed corpus of Historical Portuguese built on the model of the Penn-York Corpora of English. As an illustration of the usefulness of the TBC, the article presents research on the evolution of the position and interpretation of subjects in Portuguese from the 16th to the 19th century. Two main claims emerge, in response to questions that have largely remained unanswered until now, due to the paucity of available data. One is that the texts of the classical period instantiate verb-movement to Comp in matrix clauses, reflecting a V2 grammar. The other is that quantitative and qualitative changes appearing in the texts of the authors born from the beginning of the 18th century on indicate that, at this period, verb-movement to Comp was lost and the modern SVO grammar emerged.


Author(s):  
Mónica Ricketts

The final chapter discusses in parallel the political histories of Spain and Peru in the final years of imperial rule in South America. Peru did not experience a long national struggle and lacked large elites committed to independence. As in the old metropolis, a constant and violent struggle between men of letters and military officers dominated. After decades of military reform and war, army officers with experience in command and government felt entitled to rule. Old subjects and new citizens were also accustomed to seeing them lead. Men of letters, on the other hand, found limited opportunities to exercise their new authority despite their ambitions. Additionally, both in Spain and Peru, liberal men of letters failed to create a new institutional order in which the military would be subjected to civilian rule. It would take decades for both parts of the former Spanish monarchy to accomplish that goal and allow for peace.


Author(s):  
Adrian Brisku

Four-centuries-long encounters between the Ottoman Empire and the Grand Duchy of Muscovy/Russian Empire point to complex relations that have been triggered and defined mostly by territorial, trade disputes, and wars, and maintained by diplomatic rivalry and occasional military alliances. Starting as friendly encounters during Sultan Bayezid II reign at the beginning of the 16th century, these relations, essentially and persistently asymmetrical, reveal an initial and long Ottoman dominance over the Muscovy/Russian side; one that lasted from the early 16th to the late 18th century—whereby the two sides shared no direct borders, traded and did not fight each other until the late 17th century—followed by a late 18th-century and mid-19th-century Russian ascendency. This ascendency was achieved largely thanks to the military reform that Tsar/Emperor Peter the Great undertook, namely, the establishment of a standing and professional army and consequentially due to the many wars that Russia won throughout the 19th century; the decisive ones being those fought during the reign of Empress Catherine the Great. The mid-19th century and the early 20th century—which witnessed the implosion of the Russian Empire due to the Bolshevik Revolution and the break-up of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France—was a long period that saw few and brief military alliances, contested trade relations and yet continued wars. It was ultimately marred by an Ottoman drive to counterbalance Russia’s dominance, while the latter sought to preserve it, by involving other European powers (British and French)—the most crucial moment being the British, French, and Ottoman armies defeating the Russian one in the Crimean War (1853–1856)—transforming their bilateral interactions into multilateral but unsustainable relations.


Author(s):  
Oren Barak

Since Lebanon’s independence in the mid-1940s, its military—the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF)—has played a pivotal role in the country’s politics. The political role of the LAF in Lebanon might seem surprising since the Lebanese state did not militarize, and its political leaders have continuously managed to keep their military relatively weak and small. Indeed, in this respect Lebanon has been markedly different from its close neighbors (Syria and Israel), but also from several other Middle Eastern states (especially Egypt and Iraq), where the military, which was large and powerful, was continuously involved in politics. Additionally, both Lebanon and the LAF have persistently striven to distance themselves from regional conflicts since 1949, particularly in relation to the Palestinian issue, albeit not always successfully. Still, and despite these ostensibly unfavorable factors for the military’s involvement in politics in Lebanon, the LAF has played an important political role in the state since its independence. This role, which has been marked by elements of continuity and change over the years, included mediation and arbitration between rival political factions (in 1945–1958, 2008, 2011, and 2019); attempts to dominate the political system (in 1958–1970 and 1988–1990); intervention in the Lebanese civil war (in 1975–1976 and 1982–1984); attempts to regain its balancing role in politics (in 1979–1982 and 1984–1988); and facilitating the state’s postwar reconstruction (since 1991). The political role of the military in Lebanon can be explained by several factors. First, the weakness of Lebanon’s political system and its inability to resolve crises between its members. Second, Lebanon’s divided society and its members’ general distrust towards its civilian politicians. Third, the basic characteristics of Lebanon’s military, which, in most periods, enjoyed broad public support that cuts across the lines of community, region, and family, and found appeal among domestic and external audiences, which, in their turn, acquiesced to its political role in the state.


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