AFRICAN LIBERALISM IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE? HASSUNA D’GHIES AND LIBERAL CONSTITUTIONALISM IN NORTH AFRICA, 1822–1835

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 529-553 ◽  
Author(s):  
IAN COLLER
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World Order ◽  
Its Region ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Individual Property ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
Liberal Constitutionalism ◽  
European Policies

Although in most accounts of liberalism Africans appear only as passive victims or beneficiaries of European policies, in the early nineteenth century many Africans shared liberal aspirations for the “good society” based on free trade, constitutional government and individual property. However, African liberalism was articulated in the context of an existential crisis provoked by the new European world order. Hassuna D’Ghies, educated in Tripoli and Europe, articulated an overtly “African” liberal response to this crisis of adaptation through his writings and political activity in London in the 1820s. By the end of the decade, D’Ghies had abandoned this project and returned to North Africa to take up a more authoritarian model of reform that ultimately led to the reabsorption of Tripoli and its region into the Ottoman Empire. D’Ghies's turn toward an “imperial liberalism” underwritten by Islamic legitimacy suggests the impossibility of reconciling African autonomy with European liberal claims to universality, and the ways in which African political thought was fragmented by imperial globalization.

Diplomacy from Below or Cross-Confessional Loyalty? The “Christians of Algiers” between the Lord of Kuko and the King of Spain in the Early 1600s

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 153-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natividad Planas
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Communication System ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Its Region ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Core

Usually seen as actors with limited political agency, captives and slaves are, in this essay, at the core of complex diplomatic negotiations between two political authorities in a cross-confessional context. The case study presents a group of enslaved Christians in Algiers at the beginning of the seventeenth century working to restore a disrupted communication system between Spain and a rebel Muslim lord at war with the Ottomans. This lord, called Amar ben Amar bel Cadi, ruled the tiny city of Kuko and its region in the Djurdjura range (in present-day Kabylia). The goal of the Spanish military collaboration with him was to take Algiers and weaken the Ottoman Empire in North Africa. The paper argues that the captives’ initiative must be understood both as diplomacy “from below” and as a cross-confessional model of loyalty. Furthermore, it compels us to re-think the agency of actors in imperial encounters and to reject the topos—often implicit in contemporary historical essays—that religious affiliation conditioned political loyalty.

Sovereignty, Governance, and Political Community in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa

2018 ◽  
pp. 127-152
Author(s):  
James McDougall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Cultures ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Early modern Ottoman and European political cultures had more in common than is conventionally admitted. It was the dissolution of their shared world that produced accounts of the rise of democracy as an exclusively European story. In fact, through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the pattern of commonalities and differences remained complex, as contests over sovereignty, representation, popular movements, and forms of rule played out in uneven, changing, but still entangled worlds. Baki Tezcan’s model of a relatively participatory early modern empire provides a suggestive framework for understanding developments through the early nineteenth century. The fraying of authority and diverse reform attempts after 1780 prompted struggles over more and less accountable ways of ‘reviving’ the empire, and produced new forms of popular politics. Though in the 1860s Young Ottomans began to develop a vision of an Ottoman ‘democratic’ future, ultimately, from the 1880s, a top-down, dirigiste approach triumphed.

Book Reviews

Journeys ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-153
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Cultural Exchanges ◽  
Orhan Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City Fiona SmythGerald MacLean (ed.), Re-Orienting the Renaissance. Cultural Exchanges with the East Clifford Edmund Bosworth, An Intrepid Scot. William Lithgow of Lanark’s Travels in the Ottoman Lands, North Africa and Central Europe, 1609–21 Alex Drace-FrancisDaniel Carey (ed.), Asian Travel in the Renaissance John E. Wills, Jr.Gerald M. MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 Felipe Fernández-ArmestoDebbie Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing Benjamin J. MullerBassam Tayara, Le Japon et les Arabes. La vision du Monde Arabe au Japon, des époques anciennes jusqu’au tournant de Meiji Elisabeth AllèsAlain Roussillon, Identité et Modernité – Les voyageurs égyptiens au Japon Bassam TayaraBenoit de L’Estoile, Federico Neiburg, and Lygia Sigaud (eds.), Empires, Nations, and Natives: Anthropology and State-Making Talal Asad

Феномен «путешествия в поисках знания» в османской культуре

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
N.R. Krayushkin
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
Cultural Experience ◽  
Cultural Centers ◽  
Arab Muslim ◽  
Direct Spread ◽  
Spiritual Tradition ◽  
Basic Characteristics

Abstract In the 16th and 17th centuries Ottoman Turks conquered most countries of the Middle East and North Africa and reached Vienna. As а result, the power of Istanbul was established in the heterogeneous spaces of the Mediterranean. The seized territories in Europe became part of Dar al-Islam, increasing the area of direct spread of the Arab-Muslim spiritual tradition. In this context, the journey in search for knowledge (rihla) acquired special significance it contributed to the intensification of cultural and intellectual life of the Ottoman society and establishment of its ideological unity. The author examines the materials from the treatises of Medina theologian Muhammad Kibrit, Istanbul explorer Evliya Celebi and Damascus Sufi Abd al-Ghani al-Nablusi, who travelled through the territory of the Ottoman Empire in the 17th century, to explore the main pilgrimage routes and cultural centers of the region. The goal of this article is to analyze the content of civilizational exchange and to identify basic characteristics of new Ottoman cultural experience.

Going Abroad: Transnational Solicitation and Contention by Ethnopolitical Organizations

2014 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 945-978 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Asal ◽  
Justin Conrad ◽  
Peter White
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Organizational Behavior ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Organization Level ◽  
Foreign State ◽  
Level Data ◽  
Minorities At Risk

AbstractExisting literature on contentious political movements has generally focused on domestic political activity. Using the new Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior–Middle East data set (MAROB-ME), which contains organization-level data for 104 ethnopolitical organizations in the Middle East and North Africa, we analyze the decision of both violent and nonviolent organizations to engage in political activity transnationally. Among the results, we find that diaspora support is associated with transnational nonviolent protest, whereas foreign state support and domestic repression increase the use of transnational violence. The most robust finding, however, is that participation in the domestic electoral process consistently reduces the likelihood that an organization will engage in any political activity abroad.

“As if she were Jerusalem”: Placemaking in Sephardic Salonica

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-169
Author(s):  
Peter Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Demographic Shift ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Broad Array ◽  
Specific Concept ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Groups ◽  
The City

No Mediterranean city witnessed as dramatic a demographic shift as Salonica following the expulsion of the Jews from Iberia in 1492. This article explores the specific concept of placemaking in the context of this transformation, examining how the industries, devotional spaces, mythology, and material traditions of Iberian Jews tactically engaged with extant forms of Ottoman multicultural governance and social systems. Drawing upon a broad array of visual and textual information, this article argues that under the evolving mechanics of the millet and dhimmi systems, the nimbler aspects of material culture–color, fabric, dress, spoliation–proved to be the most effective in articulating and developing diasporic Sephardic identity within both the city and the empire. This article further analyzes the ways in which this identity was capable of, if not inclined to, the delimiting of regional, class, and gender groups, ultimately contouring and challenging notions of a monolithic minority culture within the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth century.

Paths of Prayers in Ottoman North Africa

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 295-341
Author(s):  
Deniz Beyazit
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
North African ◽  
The North ◽  
Local Traditions ◽  
First Time ◽  
Visual Apparatus

Abstract This article discusses The Met’s unpublished Dalāʾil al-khayrāt—2017.301—(MS New York, TMMA 2017.301), together with a group of comparable manuscripts. The earliest known dated manuscript within the corpus, it introduces several iconographic elements that are new to the Dalāʾil, and which compare with the traditions developing in the Mashriq and the Ottoman world in particular. The article discusses Dalāʾil production in seventeenth-century North Africa and its development in the Ottoman provinces, Tunisia, and/or Algeria. The manuscripts illustrate how an Ottoman visual apparatus—among which the theme of the holy sanctuaries at Mecca and Medina, appearing for the first time in MS New York, TMMA 2017.301—is established for Muhammadan devotion in Maghribī Dalāʾils. The manuscripts belong to the broader historic, social, and artistic contexts of Ottoman North Africa. Our analysis captures the complex dynamics of Ottomanization of the North African provinces of the Ottoman Empire, remaining strongly rooted in their local traditions, while engaging with Ottoman visual idioms.

Indian Labour and the Geographies of the Great War

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-42
Author(s):  
Radhika Singha
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
World Order ◽  
International Order ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Global War ◽  
The Great War

This chapter assesses the key role of the non-combatant or follower ranks in the history of sub-imperial drives exerted across the land and sea frontiers of India. The reliance of the War Office upon combatant and non-combatant detachments from the Indian Army, used in combination with units of the British Army, left an imprint upon the first consolidated Indian Army Act of 1911. From 1914 the inter-regional contests of the Government of India for territory and influence, such as those running along the Arabian frontiers of the Ottoman empire, folded into global war. Nevertheless the despatch of an Indian Expeditionary Force to Europe in August 1914 disrupted raced imaginaries of the world order. The second less publicized exercise was the sending of Indian Labor Corps and of humble horse and mule drivers to France in 1917-18. The colour bar imposed by the Dominions on Indian settlers had begun to complicate the utilisation of Indian labor and Indian troops on behalf of empire. Over 1919-21, as global conflict segued back into imperial militarism, a strong critique emerged in India against the unilateral deployment of Indian troops and military labor, on fiscal grounds, in protest against their use to suppress political life in India and to condemn the international order which their use sustained.

Liberal Constitutionalism as Administrative Reform: The Baden Constitution of 1818

1975 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Loyd E. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Administrative Reform ◽  
Public Justification ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Constitutional Development ◽  
Constituent Assembly ◽  
Liberal Constitutionalism

Constitution-Reading is a stony road to travel.This is doubly true of early nineteenth-century German constitutions. Working in camera, their authors provided little public justification of their efforts, and consequently historians lack even the great recorded debates of a constituent assembly on which to base their interpretations. And because these constitutions were oktroyierte Verfassungen, handed down, as it were, by gracious princes, interpretations of their provisions rest on the observer's views concerning the fortunes of German constitutional development as a whole.

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