scholarly journals Integration, conflict, and autonomy among religious minorities in the late Ottoman Empire: the Greek-Catholic (Melkite) Church and sectarian turmoil in Mount Lebanon and Damascus

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 59-79
Author(s):  
Youssef Alvarenga Cherem ◽  
Danny Zahreddine
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Religious Community ◽  
Central Component ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Late Ottoman

The 19th century was a time of social and political upheaval for the Ottoman Empire. To contend with dwindling territories, uprisings, unrest, and international military, political, and economic pressure, it had to overcome structural deficiencies in the armed forces, economy, and State bureaucracy that kept it lagging behind its European counterparts. The modernizing impetus ultimately took the form of full-fledged legal and institutional reform by mid-century, transforming but also unsettling the Ottoman State and society. In this article we discuss a central component of those reforms and of the international relations of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century: the legal status of non-Moslem minorities. We frame our discussion in the analysis of two moments: the official recognition of the Greek-Catholic (Melkite) religious community in 1848 and the sectarian civil conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus in 1860. The intersecting vectors of economical, religious and political interests in their local, regional and international dimensions will be fleshed out, evincing a more nuanced and multilayered, and less monolithic and state-centered, approach toward the international relations of the late Ottoman Empire and the working of its institutions.

scholarly journals Projects in Sultanahmet Square in the Late Ottoman Period

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sibel Gürses Söğüt ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Spatial Change ◽  
The South ◽  
Previous Period ◽  
Hagia Sophia ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Late Ottoman

In the 19th century, the foci of the spatial change in the capital of the Ottoman Empire were the squares dating back to the previous period. As buildings were endowed by their builders, the Byzantine forums had disappeared during the Ottoman Empire. During this period, the only place known and named as a square was the Hippodrome (Atmeydanı). To the south of Hagia Sophia, a part of the old Augustaion, whose exact boundaries cannot be determined, turned into a neighborhood. After the fire in 1913 which demolished the neighborhood, the area once more transformed into a square (Hagia Sophia Square). Today, this area is called Sultanahmet Square and is home to one of the first modern indicators of the period, the Darülfünun building, inaugurated in 1863 as university but later used as the Ministry of Justice building. In the blocks overlooking the square, a project for the Zaptieh building to replace the old Finance Administration building came to the fore in 1869, and later in 1871, the first model Central Prison was built next to the Ibrahim Pasha Palace. However, it was demolished in 1939 when the Courthouse was being built, and the prisoners were transferred to the Sultanahmet Jail, built in the “New Ottoman” style in 1918 to the east of Darülfünun. Decorated with symbols of power since the Byzantine, this square continued to be the “central square of the Empire” with different manifestations in the 19th century.

The Invention of ‘National Antiquities’ in the Late Ottoman Empire. Archaeological Interrelations between Discourses of Appropriation, Preservation and Heritage Construction

DIYÂR ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 304-328
Author(s):  
Sebastian Willert
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
German Empire ◽  
Cultural Objects ◽  
Cultural Activities ◽  
The Will ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman

In the late 19th century, the German Empire intensified its economic, military, and cultural activities on Ottoman territory. Within the field of archaeology, the Royal Museums in Berlin endeavoured to demonstrate their hegemony. Thus, they focused particularly on the acquisition of ancient objects from the Ottoman territory. The Ottoman authorities’ responses differed between political and cultural actors: While Sultan Abdülhamid II used Hellenistic and Byzantine antiquities as diplomatic gifts to improve his foreign relations to Berlin, the Müze-i Hümayun (Imperial Museum) appeared as an antagonist to foreign claims in the Ottoman Empire. Its directors, Osman Hamdi and Halil Edhem, aimed to rectify the discrepancy between political concerns and the will to preserve antiquities within the Ottoman realm. However, German archaeologists, museum representatives and diplomats strived to benefit from this discrepancy to obtain cultural objects for Berlin. The article argues that Prussia’s strategies of appropriating ancient objects for the Royal Museums correlated and entangled with the valorisation of antiquities in Istanbul.

DOCUMENTING COMMUNITY IN THE LATE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-443
Author(s):  
Henry Clements
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Alternative Strategy ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Local Practice ◽  
Protracted Conflict ◽  
Holy Places ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
The Church

AbstractThis article traces a conflict that erupted in the late 19th century between the Armenians and the Süryani. This conflict, I argue, precipitated nothing less than the creation of the Süryani community itself. The dispute began over the key to a closet in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but it quickly evolved. Soon, the Armenians and the Süryani were clashing over holy places all around Jerusalem. The dispute centered on an Ottoman administrative arrangement which had been institutionalized nearly 400 years earlier:yamaklık. The Ottoman investigators, however, were unfamiliar with this archaic arrangement and had to be reeducated as to its terms and its history. The Süryani and the Armenians offered divergent accounts. Where the Armenians furnished hard documentation, however, the Süryani could produce only claims to tradition and local practice. In this article I argue that, through this protracted conflict, the Süryani came to understand the importance of the documentary record in a post-Tanzimat Ottoman world. They thus turned to an alternative strategy that would conform to this documentary sensibility and render their community visible to the state: a series of petitions with thousands of Süryani signatures from around the Ottoman Empire.

scholarly journals Racializing Religion: Constructing Colonial Identities in the Syrian Provinces in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 640-661 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Delatolla ◽  
Joanne Yao
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Developmental Difference ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Race And Religion

AbstractIn recent decades, international events and incisive critical voices have catapulted the concepts of race and religion to the foreground of International Relations research. In particular, scholars have sought to recover the racialized and imperial beginnings of IR as an academic discipline in the early-20th century. This article contributes to this growing body of work by analyzing both race and religion as conceptual tools of scientific imperial administration—tools that in the 19th century classified and divided the global periphery along a continuum of civilizational and developmental difference. The article then applies this framework to the case of French, and more broadly, European, relations with populations in the Ottoman Empire, particularly within the Syrian Provinces. As described throughout this article and the case study, the Europeans used the language of race to contribute to religious hierarchies in the Syrian provinces in the mid- and late-19th century, having a lasting effect on discussions of religion in IR and international politics.

The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taner Akçam
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Armenian Genocide ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
Young Turks ◽  
East And West ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Late Ottoman

Introducing new evidence from more than 600 secret Ottoman documents, this book demonstrates in detail that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks from the late Ottoman Empire resulted from an official effort to rid the empire of its Christian subjects. This book goes deep inside the bureaucratic machinery of Ottoman Turkey to show how a dying empire embraced genocide and ethnic cleansing. Although the deportation and killing of Armenians was internationally condemned in 1915 as a “crime against humanity and civilization,” the Ottoman government initiated a policy of denial that is still maintained by the Turkish Republic. The case for Turkey's “official history” rests on documents from the Ottoman imperial archives, to which access has been heavily restricted until recently. It is this very source that the book now uses to overturn the official narrative. The documents presented here attest to a late-Ottoman policy of Turkification, the goal of which was no less than the radical demographic transformation of Anatolia. To that end, about one-third of Anatolia's 15 million people were displaced, deported, expelled, or massacred, destroying the ethno-religious diversity of an ancient cultural crossroads of East and West, and paving the way for the Turkish Republic. By uncovering the central roles played by demographic engineering and assimilation in the Armenian Genocide, this book will fundamentally change how this crime is understood and show that physical destruction is not the only aspect of the genocidal process.

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