Ottoman travelers' perceptions of Africa in the Late Ottoman Empire (1860-1922): A discussion of civilization, colonialism and race

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 187-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mustafa Serdar Palabıyık
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
African People ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The One ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman

AbstractThe Ottoman encounter with European colonialism over their African territories during the nineteenth century contributed to a renewed interest in Africa and its inhabitants. This resulted in several official and non-official travels to this continent at the end of which the travelers published their memoirs. This article intends to analyze Ottoman perceptions of Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by drawing upon Ottoman travelogues. It concludes that the travelers established paradoxical accounts regarding the implications of European colonialism for Africa and the ethnic taxonomy of the African people. They perceived European colonialism as a civilizing mechanism on the one hand, and treated it as the most significant reason of African “backwardness” on the other. Similarly, while they criticized the European colonial discourse based on the superiority of the white race over others, they established similar ethnic taxonomies establishing hierarchies among African tribes.

State, Family and Anticorruption Practices in the Late Ottoman Empire

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iris Agmon
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
The Family ◽  
Global Nature ◽  
The Government ◽  
The One ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman

This chapter employs the nexus of state and family as a lens for examining the question of anticorruption in the later Ottoman Empire. More specifically, the chapter focuses on how the government sought to prevent corruption in the department that handled property inherited by orphans—thereby shining a light on the involvement of the state in the private sphere of the family. While stressing the global nature of the modernization undergone by the Ottoman state in the nineteenth century, the author also demonstrates the unique features of a political culture that shaped these processes as well. On the one hand, she emphasizes how the reforms transformed the empire into a modern centralized state and that preventing corruption was a major issue on the reformers’ agenda; but, on the other hand, she claims that anticorruption measures were also an important matter in earlier periods, albeit embedded in different historical circumstances.

A “YOUNG TURK” ISLAMIC INTELLECTUAL: FILIBELI AHMED HILMI AND THE DIVERSE INTELLECTUAL LEGACIES OF THE LATE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 625a-625a
Author(s):  
Amit Bein
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Religious Revival ◽  
Islamic Movements ◽  
Modern Turkey ◽  
Political Works ◽  
The One ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman

Ahmed Hilmi (1865–1914) was a prominent figure among the late Ottoman thinkers and writers who laid the foundations of intellectual life in modern Turkey. His oeuvre includes dozens of historical, philosophical, and political works, as well as novels and poems. The overtly modernist underpinnings of his works on the one hand, and his Sufi piety and firm rejection of materialism and positivism on the other hand, have earned him recognition as an early exponent of a kind of modernist, nonliteralist Islamic agenda that has been conspicuous in a variety of Turkish Islamic movements in recent decades. His untimely death, later attributed to a Freemason–Zionist conspiracy, added further to his mystique in some Islamic circles. Modernist yet deeply devout, Islamist yet uninterested in scripturalist paths of religious revival, Ahmed Hilmi stands out as a representative of an important intellectual trend that has often been overlooked in studies of the late Ottoman period.

National Struggle in Foreign Market

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 179-204
Author(s):  
Giampaolo Conte
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Foreign Market ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Italian Government ◽  
National Market ◽  
Historical Archives ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman

This paper aims at highlighting the twofold role played by the Italian government in the attempt of supporting and motivating the growth of Italian banking activities in the Ottoman Empire, especially in its capital at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. The activities of Banco di Roma and Società Commerciale d’Oriente will be analysed within a context of disloyal competition, envies and low blows. The paper will also underline the links existing among these institutions and the Italian government, which will remain their reference point in the Ottoman capital and will demonstrate how Italian banking activities in Constantinople, which depended on the bankers’ good relationships with the Italian political circles rather than on their real financial possibilities, were hindered by recurring conflicts and enmities in the national market. The article also aims to fill the historiographical void on the Italian banking activities in the late Ottoman Empire with the results of the research conducted in the historical archives of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Bank of Italy and Banco di Roma.

The Study of the Armenian Crisis of the late Ottoman Empire, or, “Seizing the Document by the Throat”

2002 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 35-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Selim Deringil
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Basic Problem ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
Second World

For a Turkish historian of the Ottoman Empire of the late nineteenth century, venturing into the Armenian crisis is like venturing into a minefield. It is fraught with dangers, the least of which is to be labeled a traitor by one's countrymen, and the worst of which is to be accused of being a “denialist” by one's Armenian colleagues. Even “balanced” analysis seems to have become politically incorrect of late, at least in some circles. The basic problem in the Armenian-Turkish polemic is that the sides do not actually address each other. They seize upon various capsule phrases, clichés and assumed political positions to heap opprobrium and abuse upon one another, to the point where we are confronted by something resembling a blood-feud. Thus Richard Hovanissian's obsession is to have the “Turkish side” admit, in a great ceremony of mea culpa, the claim of Genocide. On the other hand, Turkish historians and their like-minded foreign colleagues, at best, do contortionist acts to show that what happened to the Armenian people in 1915 does not fit the UN definition of genocide, which was fashioned after the Second World War to account for the Jewish Holocaust.

Part 4 Constitutionalism and Separation of Powers, 4.1 The Separation of Powers in Muslim Countries: Historical and Comparative Perspectives

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Röder Tilmann J
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Separation Of Powers ◽  
Islamic State ◽  
Short Discussion ◽  
Early Modern History ◽  
Muslim Countries ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman

This chapter examines the separation of powers in the late Ottoman Empire—the largest and most powerful Islamic state in early modern history—and its neighbor, the Iranian Empire. Both empires' constitutional legacies presumably influenced the developments in many countries of the Islamic world. It addresses questions such as: Does the separation of powers have roots in the ancient world? And how far did the separation of powers develop in the Islamic empires at the dawn of the twentieth century? The historical observations are followed by a short discussion of the question of which models—historical or contemporary, domestic or foreign—have shaped the constitutional systems of the existing Islamic countries.

SETTLERS, THE STATE AND COLONIAL POWER: THE COLONIZATION OF QUEEN ADELAIDE PROVINCE, 1834–37

1998 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALAN LESTER
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Large Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Cape ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Direct Control ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The One ◽  
Colonial Government

Queen Adelaide Province consisted of some 7,000 square miles of Rarabe Xhosa territory annexed by the British Cape colonial government in May 1835 during the Sixth Frontier War. The province was held only until the end of 1836 when it was abandoned under pressure from the imperial government, but it represented the first British attempt to extend direct control over a large body of formerly independent Africans. No such ambitious scheme had ever been attempted before in the Cape, and no such scheme was to be attempted elsewhere in Africa until the late nineteenth century.Given its short-lived nature, Queen Adelaide Province has not been extensively analysed in any of the prominent histories of the eastern Cape. However, while the treatment is brief, its significance has been widely recognized. This early, temporary colonization of Xhosa territory has served as a lens through which to view colonial extension in the eastern Cape as a whole. In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century settler histories of George Cory and George McCall Theal, the annexation of Queen Adelaide Province represents a temporary advance within a much broader colonial progress. One episode in the epic attempt to extend colonial civilization across ‘Kaffraria’, expansion within the province was unfortunately thwarted by misguided Cape and metropolitan philanthropy. In W. M. Macmillan's liberal critique of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the disputes over the province between the land-hungry settlers, the strategically-minded Governor D'Urban and the humanitarian Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, are again viewed as part of a much broader struggle. But rather than Cory's struggle between civilization and savagery, this is seen as a contest between malicious and benign conceptions of colonialism. The province represents an early collision between, on the one hand, evangelical and humanitarian versions of cultural colonization that guaranteed Xhosa access to their land (a kind of trusteeship that Macmillan advocated for his own times) and, on the other hand, the practice of colonization founded upon settler-led conquest and dispossession.

Modernity, Print Media, and the Middle Class in Colonial East Africa

2019 ◽  
pp. 105-122
Author(s):  
Emma Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
East Africa ◽  
The Other ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Colonial Economy ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The One ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

This chapter takes a look at colonial East Africa. On the one hand, the chapter shows that the colonial economy and racial hierarchies of East Africa offered little potential for the growth of an African bourgeoisie. On the other hand, it demonstrates that in the cultural rather than the economic sphere, a slightly different picture emerges. Looking at the Swahili-language government and the mission newspapers of colonial Zanzibar and Tanganyika between the 1880s and the 1930s, the chapter reveals the ways in which a small but growing literate elite in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century East Africa used the medium of print in order to allow them to create “a space in which new collectivities could be imagined and identities constructed.” The particular space offered by newspapers and periodicals thus provided a possibility for African middle classes to create a distinct public sphere and to assert their distinctiveness by rhetorically identifying with, and making a claim of belonging to, an imagined global bourgeoisie.

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.

“As Brave as Armenak Efendi”

2021 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-428
Author(s):  
Yaşar Tolga Cora
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Great War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Individual Self ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Late Ottoman

This article examines the different ways in which masculinity and ethnicity were mu- tually constructed during the Great War and the Armenian Genocide by analyzing the memoirs of Armenak Melikyan, an Armenian cavalry officer in the Ottoman Army. It discusses why Melikyan emphasized in his memoirs certain values, such as dutiful- ness, resourcefulness, and hard work, which were all firmly associated with the he- gemonic masculine model of citizen-soldiers in the late Ottoman Empire. The article further examines the emphasis Melikyan laid on the public recognition he received for his qualities as an officer from Muslim/Turkish superiors, thus reflecting both ethnic and gendered hierarchies in the army. The article argues that many Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army performed according to hegemonic masculine models in order to defend their precarious masculinity against physical and psychological challenges. This allowed them to remasculinize themselves in the context of the Great War and the Genocide. The article contributes to the study of military memoirs in the late Ottoman Empire by underlining the relation between social and cultural norms and expecta- tions on the one hand and the individual self-perception of military experiences on the other, in the context of the war and ethnic violence.

Education and Change in the Late Ottoman Empire and Turkey

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-62
Author(s):  
Benjamin C. Fortna
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Republic Of Turkey ◽  
Late Ottoman

This article addresses the interrelated changes taking place in education during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which schools altered their approach to space, time, and economic priorities in order to align themselves with the shifting conditions of the period. It proceeds by examining a series of tensions between the desiderata of state and society, the collective and the individual, the secular and the religious, the national and the supranational, before assessing the diverse range of responses they elicited.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document