Imperial Crisis and Muslim-Christian Relations in Ottoman Syria and Palestine, c. 1770-1830

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 490-531
Author(s):  
James Grehan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Social Turmoil

In the middle of the nineteenth century, a wave of anti-Christian violence broke out in Ottoman Syria. Prevailing interpretations tie this social turmoil to the region’s sudden integration into the modern world economy, further aggravated by state reforms that upset long-standing political hierarchies. This paper argues that the origins of these disturbances lay not in the penetration of the modern world economy but in the extended political crisis that shook the Ottoman Empire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Sectarian tensions therefore need to be seen, at their root, as political reactions to the slow disintegration of the early-modern political order. In its timing and causes, this Ottoman experience helps to highlight a broader “sectarian turn” that overtook many other parts of Eurasia in the same period.

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.

Geographical Knowledge

2019 ◽  
pp. 38-62
Author(s):  
Paul Stock
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
Human Geography ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Geographical Knowledge ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Limits Of Knowledge

Chapter 2 explores how late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British geographical works structure and present geographical knowledge. The books may seem disorganized and haphazard to modern eyes, but their contents and procedures are framed by classical and early modern precedents. The influence of Bernhard Varenius is key, especially his specification of ‘celestial’, ‘terrestrial’, and ‘human’ geography. These different emphases provide variant ways to understand space, premised respectively on universal mathematical laws, observation of a tangible physical world, and the vicissitudes of human activity and perception. The chapter shows how the resulting questions about the nature and limits of knowledge affect geographical works’ comprehension of Europe.

Health as a Social Agent in Ottoman Patronage and Authority

2007 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 147-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miri Shefer Mossensohn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Medical System ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
Social Agent ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Over Time

AbstractOttoman society and its medical system of the early modern period and the nineteenth-century demonstrate the marriage of medicine and power. I present the view from the imperial center and focus on the aims and wishes of the Ottoman elite and imperial authorities in İstanbul as they were embodied in state activities, such as formal decrees and policies meant to be implemented all over the empire. For the Ottoman elite, medicine was always a significant imperial tool, but it was neither the only tool of control, nor the most important one. The extent to which the Ottoman elite used medicine in its social policies changed over time. A comparison between the Ottoman use and distribution of health and food from the early modern period until the nineteenth century illustrates this point. It was especially during the nineteenth century that medicine was intentionally-and successfully-implemented as a mechanism of control in the Ottoman Empire.

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