Lost in Historiography: An Essay on the Reasons for the Absence of a History of Limited Government in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

2009 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baki Tezcan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Limited Government ◽  
History Of

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Faisal H. Husain
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
River Basin ◽  
River Flow ◽  
Animal Husbandry ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Subsistence Strategies ◽  
History Of ◽  
Irrigation Agriculture

This chapter introduces the themes and arguments of the book. In particular, it explains the benefits of adopting a holistic approach to the history of the river basin that acknowledges its cultural, physical, and biological unity. Treating the Tigris and Euphrates as a continuous whole brings to light the magnitude and significance of river flow that fostered contacts between upstream and downstream regions. Beyond facilitating communication, the twin rivers formed the backbone of the early modern Ottoman economy in the region by supporting complementary subsistence strategies, such as irrigation agriculture, animal husbandry, and wetland exploitation. In addition to the themes and arguments, this chapter offers a brief introduction to the history of the Ottoman Empire and the ecology of the Tigris-Euphrates basin.

Halil İnalcık 1916? - 2016

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-165
Author(s):  
Linda T. Darling
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World History ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crucial Part

Halil İnalcık was born in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, into a refugee family, probably in 1916 (he did not know his birthday; in Turkey he adopted 29 May, in the US 4 July). He died at age 100 in Ankara on 25 July 2016, as the premier Ottoman historian in the world. To quote one of his students, “Professor İnalcık transformed the field of Ottoman studies from an obscure and exotic subfield into one of the leading historical disciplines that covers the history of the greater Middle East and North Africa as well as the Balkans from the late medieval to the modern period. He set the tone of debate and critical inquiry from the early modern to the modern period.” Born an Ottoman, he made Ottoman studies a crucial part of world history.

Shipyards

2021 ◽  
pp. 40-58
Author(s):  
Faisal H. Husain
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
River Basin ◽  
Military Operations ◽  
Naval Warfare ◽  
The North ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fluvial Landscape ◽  
Military Revolution

This chapter provides a history of the Ottoman naval fleet in the Tigris-Euphrates basin, referred to as the Shatt River Fleet in Ottoman bureaucratic parlance. In the sixteenth century, the Ottomans established two shipyards at the two ends of the river basin—Birecik in the north and Basra in the south. Both shipyards became the administrative centers for the Ottoman navy operating on the Tigris and Euphrates. Boats of the Shatt River Fleet were fitted with light cannon pieces and played a combat and support role in Ottoman military operations. They cooperated with land forces based in the fortresses to strengthen the Ottoman presence along the eastern frontier. While the literature on naval warfare in the early modern Military Revolution has largely focused on developments taking place at sea, this chapter shows how the Ottoman Empire adapted the latest naval technologies to a fluvial landscape.

A History of the Ottoman Fez before Mahmud II (ca. 1600–1800)

2021 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-183
Author(s):  
Youssef Ben Ismail
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
The State ◽  
Global History ◽  
Imperial History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Point Of Departure

Abstract The history of the Ottoman fez is usually told with the nineteenth century as a point of departure. In the 1820s and 1830s, the reforms initiated by Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–39) elevated the red felt cap to the rank of official headgear of the Ottoman empire. But little is known about its history prior to its adoption by the state: where did the fez come from and how did it become so prevalent in the Ottoman empire? This essay examines the global history of the fez in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Taking Mahmud II’s reforms as an endpoint, it examines the process by which the headgear first came to be both culturally visible and commercially available in the Ottoman realm. Three aspects of this history are considered: the trans-imperial history of the fez as a commercial commodity, its cultural reception in the Ottoman world, and the establishment of a community of Tunisian fez merchants in early modern Istanbul.

DURABLE EMPIRE: STATE VIRTUOSITY AND SOCIAL ACCOMMODATION IN THE OTTOMAN MEDITERRANEAN

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 953-966 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS DOUMANIS
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Arab World ◽  
State University ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
Social Accommodation ◽  
History Of

Subjects of the sultan: culture and daily life in the Ottoman empire. By Suraiya Faroqhi. London: I. B. Tauris, 2000. Pp. x+358. ISBN 1-86064-289-6. £35.00.The Ottoman empire and early modern Europe. By Daniel Goffman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi+273. ISBN 0-5214-59087. £15.99.A shared world: Christians and Muslims in the early modern Mediterranean. By Molly Greene. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+228. ISBN 0-619-00898-1. $29.50.Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab world: the roots of sectarianism. By Bruce Masters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv+222. ISBN 0-521-803330. £48.00.Consumption studies and the history of the Ottoman empire, 1560–1922: an introduction. Edited by Donald Quataert. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. vii+358. ISBN 0-7914-4431-7. $25.50.The Ottoman empire, 1700–1922. Second edition. By Donald Quataert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xxii+212. ISBN 0-521-839106. £40.00.Since Edward Said first launched his devastating critique of western scholarship on the Islamic world, it has been almost impossible to think of Orientalism as anything other than a euphemism for the systematic distortion of an exotic Other. That imaginings of a fanciful ‘Orient’ are now recognized as providing acute expositions of western pathologies, of references to deep-seated desires and anxieties so disturbing that they only reveal themselves in alterities, goes some way towards explaining the sheer bulk of interdisciplinary publications that have been directly inspired by Said's Orientalism.1 As reflexive phenomena, however, such publications have even less to say about the real ‘Orient’. Rather, the historical reconstruction of Orientalism's ostensible subject has been left to a separate and less conspicuous stream of scholarship that is characterized by painstaking archival research.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Alberto Tiburcio
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
History Of

The introduction of the book discusses some of the reasons why the study of Muslim-Christians relations in Iran in the Safavid period has lagged behind when compared to studies of Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire in particular. After discussing some of the documentary challenges behind these kinds of studies, the attention is brought to the question of whether the paradigm of “confessionalisation” can be an adequate one in the early modern Middle Eastern context. In light of these issues, the book proposes that the study of polemics should account not only for the sociological aspects of the context in question, but also for the broader history of the polemical genre as intellectual history.

ŞEVKET PAMUK, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire, Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Pp. 301. $69.95 cloth.

2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-136
Author(s):  
Stephen P. Blake
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Interest Rates ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Global History ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
History Of ◽  
Islamic Civilization

The title of Şevket Pamuk's book is misleading. Far from restricting himself to monetary phenomena—interest rates, coinage, inflation, and availability of specie—the author has chosen to cast his study of money during the Ottoman period (1300–1918) in the widest possible terms. Viewing some of the crucial issues of Ottoman economic and political history through a monetary lens has produced new and interesting insights—in some cases, the result is a revision of old arguments—but on other matters, Pamuk has produced provocative new hypotheses. Furthermore, the book offers a timely addition to the rapidly developing field of global history. Although most of Pamuk's comparative remarks relate to early modern Europe, his study establishes a benchmark against which the analyses of monetary and economic phenomena in the other two early modern Middle Eastern states—the Mughal and the Safavid—can be measured.

AN IRRIGATED EMPIRE: THE VIEW FROM OTTOMAN FAYYUM

2010 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 569-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Mikhail
Keyword(s):  
Resource Management ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Natural Resource Management ◽  
Natural Resource ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Rural Regions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Center Periphery

AbstractUsing both Ottoman Turkish and Arabic archival materials, this article narrates the history of irrigation in Fayyum during the first half of the 18th century. Its environmental perspective shows how a shared reliance on natural resource management bound together extremely rural regions of the Ottoman Empire like Fayyum with centers of power in Istanbul and Cairo. It seeks to make two historiographical interventions. First, its focus on irrigation reveals how the center–periphery model of early modern empires fails to capture the complexity of relationships that rural regions of the Ottoman Empire maintained with other provinces and towns both in the empire and beyond. Water in Fayyum grew food that forged connections of commodity movement with areas of the Mediterranean and Red Seas. Second, through an examination of such intraimperial and transregional ties, this article argues that Egyptian peasants held much of the power in these relationships.

Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate: Early Modern Frontiers and the Renaissance of an Ancient Islamic Institution

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 485-511 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giancarlo Casale
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Abbasid Caliphate ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Wide Gap

This article revisits the question of the “Ottoman caliphate,” the doctrine defining the Ottoman sultan as the universal sovereign and protector of Muslims throughout the world in addition to the territorial ruler of the Ottoman Empire itself. In existing scholarship, a wide gap divides those who describe this doctrine as a construct of modernity, with a history that goes back no farther than the late eighteenth century, and those who maintain a direct line of transmission from the earlier Abbasid caliphate to the Ottoman dynasty. This article proposes an “early modern alternative” to these two opposing narratives, which acknowledges a dynamic history of reinvention for the caliphate but locates its rebirth not in the period of colonial modernity but rather in the sweeping reconfiguration of space, time, and sovereignty ushered in by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494.

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