scholarly journals In the Shadow of Empire: States in an Ottoman System

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 811-834
Author(s):  
Jonathan Endelman

What is the origin of the Middle Eastern state? Although social scientists have traditionally emphasized the role of the European colonial experience, especially the British and French mandates following World War I, the late Ottoman era from the Edict of Gülhane in 1839 that inaugurated the Tanzimat reforms until World War I represents a period at least as critical to understanding origins of the state in the region. Certain Ottoman provinces known as Eyalet-i Mümtaze or exceptional/special provinces developed under the aegis of the Ottoman Empire that acquired many statelike attributes without becoming independent polities. Moreover, the nature of the Ottoman Imperial center changed to become more similar to that of a territorially delimited state as opposed to the classic multifaceted polity that had been the earlier norm. These developments resulted in a blurring of lines that had traditionally defined state and empire during the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. To illustrate this change, economic, administrative, and political examples are presented from Egypt and Turkey. This comparative analysis will identify ways the evolution of the two states was similar as well as critical differences such as the extent of foreign intervention and the role played by representative assemblies. The formation of imperial states within the empire as well as the transformation of the empire to become more statelike resulted in strong state institutions in places such as Egypt and Turkey that long preceded the main European colonial intervention in the region after World War I.

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 383-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hakan Özoğlu

The era culminating in World War I saw a transition from multinational empires to nation-states. Large empires such as the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman searched for ways to cope with the decline of their political control, while peoples in these empires shifted their political loyalties to nation-states. The Ottoman Empire offers a favorable canvas for studying new nationalisms that resulted in many successful and unsuccessful attempts to form nation-states. As an example of successful attempts, Arab nationalism has received the attention that it deserves in the field of Middle Eastern studies.1 Students have engaged in many complex debates on different aspects of Arab nationalism, enjoying a wealth of hard data. Studies on Kurdish nationalism, however, are still in their infancy. Only a very few scholars have addressed the issue in a scholarly manner.2 We still have an inadequate understanding of the nature of early Kurdish nationalism and its consequences for the Middle East in general and Turkish studies in particular. Partly because of the subject's political sensitivity, many scholars shy away from it. However, a consideration of Kurdish nationalism as an example of unsuccessful attempts to form a nation-state can contribute greatly to the study of nationalism in the Middle East.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-50
Author(s):  
Asmat Naz ◽  
Sohail Akhtar ◽  
Saliha Hameed Ullah

Islam is a universal religion and it influenced all over the world with its dispensation. After the migration from Makkah to Madinah, the Holy prophet PBUH constituted a new welfare state. In 8th Hijri after the conquest of Makkah Islam became the dominant religion in Arabia. It provided a great power and Muslims challenged the strong and powerful state of Iran and Rome. Especially, during the pious caliphate from 632-661 A.D Islam spread rapidly and Muslims had become a strong nation of the world. They became powerful ruler of a state which was established in three continents Asia, Europe and Africa during Umayyad, Abbasid and Ottoman time respectively. This strong state was thought indeclinable till 18th century. But the start of 19th century changed this approach as the great Mughal state which was lasting its breath faced debacle in 1857. While the strong Ottoman Empire scattered in to several parts and was occupied by Great Britain, France, Italy and USSR after world War-I. The condition of the Muslim became miserable and they lost all the past glory. This paper highlights the basic causes of Muslim's decline in 20th century.


Author(s):  
S. S. Shchevelev

The article examines the initial period of the mandate administration of Iraq by Great Britain, the anti-British uprising of 1920. The chronological framework covers the period from May 1916 to October 1921 and includes an analysis of events in the Middle East from May 1916, when the secret agreement on the division of the territories of the Ottoman Empire after the end of World War I (the Sykes-Picot agreement) was concluded before the proclamation of Faisal as king of Iraq and from the formation of the country՚s government. This period is a key one in the Iraqi-British relations at the turn of the 10-20s of the ХХ century. The author focuses on the Anglo-French negotiations during the First World War, on the eve and during the Paris Peace Conference on the division of the territory of the Ottoman Empire and the ownership of the territories in the Arab zone. During these negotiations, it was decided to transfer the mandates for Syria (with Lebanon) to the France, and Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq) to Great Britain. The British in Iraq immediately faced strong opposition from both Sunnis and Shiites, resulting in an anti-English uprising in 1920. The author describes the causes, course and consequences of this uprising.


Author(s):  
Geoffrey P. Nash

This chapter examines the development of Arab British fiction. It begins with an overview of the making of Arab British fiction, citing anti-colonialism, Orientalism, and hybridization as the main elements of Anglophone Arab writing up to the close of the twentieth century. It then considers British novels about Egypt in which paternalistic “genuine love” for, and “wise understanding” of, the politics of Egypt overlaid colonial attitudes. It also analyzes Arab British fiction in relation to the colonial experience Arabs received from British domination in Arab lands, which lasted from the end of World War I to the early 1950s. Finally, it discusses postcolonial crosscurrents in the works of Arab British women, along with the predicament of exile and Diasporic consciousness in male Arab British fiction.


2013 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 955-985
Author(s):  
Anna M. Mirkova

AbstractThis article explores the migrations of Turkish Muslims after the 1878 Peace Treaty of Berlin, which severed much of the Balkans from the Ottoman Empire as fully independent nation-states or as nominally dependent polities in the borderlands of the empire. I focus on one such polity—the administratively autonomous Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia—which, in wrestling to reconcile liberal principles of equality and political representation understood in ethno-religious terms, prompted emigration of Turkish Muslims while enabling Bulgarian Christian hegemony. Scholars have studied Muslim emigration from the Balkans as the Ottoman Empire gradually lost hold of the region, emphasizing deleterious effects of nationalism and aggressive state-building in the region. Here I look at migration at empire's end, and more specifically at the management of migration as constitutive of sovereignty. The Ottoman government asserted its suzerainty by claiming to protect the rights of Eastern Rumelia's Muslims. The Bulgarian dominated administration of Eastern Rumelia claimed not only administrative but also political autonomy by trying to contain the grievances of Turkish Muslims as a domestic issue abused by ill-meaning outsiders, all the while insisting that the province protected the rights of all subjects. Ultimately, a “corporatist” model of subjecthood obtained in Eastern Rumelia, which fused the traditional religious categorization of Ottoman subjects with an ethnic one under the umbrella of representative government. The tension between group belonging and individual politicization that began unfolding in Eastern Rumelia became a major dilemma of the post-Ottoman world and other post-imperial societies after World War I.


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-218
Author(s):  
Akram Khater ◽  
Jeffrey Culang

This issue opens with two articles that explore “Ottoman Belonging” during two significant moments bookending the Ottoman past. The first of these moments is the Ottoman Empire's incorporation of Arab lands after its defeat of the Mamluk Sultanate in 1515–17; the second is the emergence of Ottoman imperial citizenship in the period between the 1908 Constitutional Revolution and World War I, which precipitated the empire's collapse. Helen Pfeifer's article, “Encounter after the Conquest: Scholarly Gatherings in 16th-Century Ottoman Damascus,” traces the intellectual component of the Ottoman Empire's absorption of formerly Mamluk subjects after rapidly conquering an immense territory stretching from Damascus to Cairo to Mecca. As Western European states expanded to control new territories and peoples, the Turkish-speaking Ottomans from the central lands (Rumis) had new encounters of their own—with the Arabic-speaking inhabitants of Egypt, Greater Syria, and the Hijaz. The conquest transferred the seat of political power in the Islamicate world from Cairo to Istanbul. Yet, as Pfeifer discusses, the Ottomans understood that their newly acquired political power had no parallel in cultural and religious domains, where prestige belonged predominantly to Arab scholars. Focusing on majālis (sing. majlis), or scholarly gatherings, in Damascus, Pfeifer traces “one of the greatest instances of knowledge transmission and cultural encounter in the history of the Ottoman Empire,” through which this asymmetry was overcome. By facilitating the circulation of books and ideas, she argues, scholarly gatherings—two depictions of which are featured on the issue’s cover—gave rise to an “empire-wide learned culture as binding as any political or administrative ingredient of the Ottoman imperial glue.”


2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 169-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Zeynep Bulutgil

According to the extant literature, state leaders pursue mass ethnic violence against minority groups in wartime if they believe that those groups are collaborating with an enemy. Treating the wartime leadership of a combatant state as a coherent unit, however, is misleading. Even in war, leaders differ in the degree to which they prioritize goals such as maintaining or expanding the territory of the state, and on whether they believe that minority collaboration with the enemy influences their ability to achieve those goals. Also, how leaders react to wartime threats from minority groups depends largely on the role that political organizations based on non-ethnic cleavages play in society. Depending on those cleavages, wartime minority collaboration may result in limited deportations and killings, ethnic cleansing, or minimal violence. A comparison of the policies of three multinational empires toward ethnic minority collaborators during World War I—the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italians, the Ottoman Empire and Armenians, and the Russian Empire and Muslims in the South Caucasus—illustrates this finding.


1991 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 549-576 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vahakn N. Dadrian

The deportation of the majority of the Armenian population from the Ottoman Empire during World War I and the massacres that accompanied it are of commanding interest. The paucity of scholarly contributions in this area, however, has impeded the development of interest in the subject, thereby contributing to the nebulous state surrounding the conditions that led to the disappearance of an entire nation from its ancestral territories. Some maintain that this nebulousness is compounded by the intrusion of political calculation.1 At issue is whether or not the disaster was intentionally organized by the Ottoman authorities, and whether or not the scope of Armenian losses bore any relationship to that intention.


2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 765-781 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fruma Zachs ◽  
Yuval Ben-Bassat

AbstractThis article focuses on petitions by Ottoman women from Greater Syria during the late Ottoman era. After offering a general overview of women's petitions in the Ottoman Empire, it explores changes in women's petitions between 1865 and 1919 through several case studies. The article then discusses women's “double-voiced” petitions following the empire's defeat in World War I, particularly those submitted to the King-Crane Commission. The concept of “double-voiced” petitions, or speaking in a voice that reflects both a dominant and a muted discourse, is extended here from the genre of literary fiction to Ottoman women's petitions. We argue that in Greater Syria double-voiced petitions only began to appear with the empire's collapse, when women both participated in national struggles and strove to protect their rights as women in their own societies.


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