Ottoman History Podcast

E383 | The history of capitalism and the world economy, while increasingly global in its perspectives, remains a Eurocentric story, and one struggles to find the place of non-European modes of exchange and legal frameworks such as Islamic law within the big picture. In this episode, we talk to Fahad Ahmad Bishara about his book A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780...

E382 | The history of Ottoman Armenians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Ottoman Empire is inevitably in the shadow of 1915. In today’s episode, we explore new approaches to this history with Dr. Ohannes Kılıçdağı. We speak in particular about the hopes that the empire’s Armenian citizens attached to the 1908 Constitutional Revolution, which were high indeed. On the basis of rese...

E381 | The historian who wishes to study episodes of mass violence is confronted by numerous challenges. Perpetrators of violence may seek to obscure or distort historical events; victims are often left without a voice. Accounts found in newspapers, books, and archives may offer vivid detail but frame events in a biased or incomplete manner. How can the scholar account for diverging narratives or...

E380 | When does a concubine need to join the reading group? And should the six-month old son come along as well? The answers are in our interview with Konrad Hirschler on the libraries of medieval Damascus. Using aoriginal catalog of the Ashrafiyya Library of Damascus, Hirschler discusses the types of books that were donated to libraries, the surprising reading interests of medieval scholars, and...

E379 | How did the Ottomans come to visually represent their mythical origins? And to what ends? In this episode we speak with Ahmet Ersoy and Deniz Türker about the formation, development, and visualization of Ertuğrul sancak, the mythical birthplace of the Ottoman dynasty. In 1886, Sultan Abdülhamid II commissioned an expedition of military photographers, painters, and cartographers to record th...

E378 | Many myths have accompanied the life of Mihri Rasim, but few are as interesting as her life itself. Born to a wealthy family in Istanbul in the late Ottoman period, Mihri Rasim became a politically connected painter, living in Italy for several years on her own and then Paris, where she played a key role in the salons of Ottoman dissidents known as the Young Turks. In the wake of the 1908 C...

E376 | Mesleğiniz tarih sayfalarından silinirse ne hissedersiniz? İstanbul'da yüzlerce meslek artık yok ve yok olmaya devam ediyor. Bu bölümde, Rita Ender ile Kolay Gelsin kitabı üzerine konuşuyoruz. Kolay Gelsin Agos Gazetesi’nde 2012 - 2014 yılları arasında Meslekler ve Mekanlar adıyla yayınlanmış söyleşilerden oluşuyor ve her bir söyleşi İstanbul tarihine, esnaflığa, değişen yeme-içme kültürler...

E375 | The rise of record labels and new recording technologies played an important role in the history of the Nahda (Arabic Renaissance). In Egypt and Lebanon, independent labels like Baidaphon competed with their American and European counterparts to record local singers and popular music styles in an effort to preserve Arab voices. For the first time, these singers could hear their voices playe...

E374 | How did Russia rule its Central Asian borderlands? In this podcast, we explore the long history of local intermediaries in imperial rule through the lens of the Kazakh elite from the 18th century onward. We talk to Ian Campbell about his book Knowledge and the Ends of Empire: Kazak Intermediaries and Russian Rule on the Steppe, 1731-1917 (Cornell University Press) and then continue the disc...

more at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/p/doa.html Balderrama, Francisco E., and Raymond Rodríguez. Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s. Revised edition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Bosniak, Linda. The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Genova, Nicholas De, and Nathalie Peutz, ed...

E371 | In recent decades, the US has come to deport hundreds of thousands of people every year. However, the origins of the laws and institutions that facilitate deportation are much deeper. In this episode, we focus on the period of the 1920s, the era during which the US began to deport thousands of people each year for the first time in its history. As our guest Emily Pope-Obeda explains, deport...

E373 | Who do you think of, when you think of Beirut? In this episode, we speak to Sumayya Kassamali about the many non-citizen workers living in Beirut today, and how migration, race, class and gender affect their lives there. Many domestic workers who have migrated from Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and other countries to work in Beirut have fled their employers' homes. Focusing on the neighbo...

How do you deport someone whose country no longer exists? In the Deporting Ottoman Americans podcast series, we'll be telling the stories of migrants born in the Ottoman Empire and ordered to be deported from the United States during the Great Depression. New episodes this fall. More at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/p/doa.html

This episode introduces the Deporting Ottoman Americans podcast series. Narrated by Chris Gratien and featuring Emily Pope-Obeda, Torrie Hester, and Devin Naar. Most Americans descend from people born elsewhere. But what if instead of simply a nation of immigrants, we see our society as a eugenicist project forged by immigration quotas and selective deportation policies? This proposal may fly in t...

E369 | For more than three centuries, a cadre of African eunuchs were responsible for guarding the Ottoman harem at the imperial palace in Istanbul. The head of this group, the Chief Harem Eunuch, emerged as an extremely influential individual at the court. This was especially true during the crisis years of the long seventeenth century, when the palace became divided along ever-shifting lines of...

E368 | What does it mean to study the past in the midst of momentous change in the present? In this special episode, we discuss history and history-in-the-making with Omar Mohammed, a scholar and activist from Mosul. For several years, Omar was an undercover chronicler of ISIS through the blog and Facebook group Mosul Eye. Currently, he is working on a Ph. D. project about the history and historio...

E367 | Nationalism has greatly influenced the way we think about Palestinian history. In this episode, Salim Tamari discusses this question in relation to his new book, The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine, which explores Palestine under Ottoman rule during World War I. Tamari highlights the transformative nature of the conflict in Palestine, and the Ottomanist roots of many Palestinian and...

E366 | How did a poem by Palestinian poet, Samih al-Qasim, come to be known and published under George Jackson's name, in English translation? George Jackson, a Black revolutionary writer, was incarcerated in California for more than a decade, until he was killed in 1971 by prison guards. Among the ninety-nine books Jackson had in his cell at the time of his death, one was "Enemy of the Sun," a co...

E365 | In the early twentieth century, Muslim modernizers all over the world were making new claims about Islam, and the Muslims of China were no exception. In this episode, we discuss the relationship of Southeast Asia to the emergence of a modern Chinese Islam. In a period often characterized in terms of non-Arab Muslims' rediscovery of the Middle East, John Chen shows how connections between Ch...

E364 | Today’s scholars of early modern Europe continue to explore the myriad ways in which Islam and Middle Eastern culture found its way into European society. In this episode, we unravel another thread by focusing on an anonymous, printed Italian Qur’an that appeared in Venice in 1547. The story of this first vernacular Qur’an and its accompanying biography of Muhammad reveals a complicated tal...

E 363 | What did Istanbul's Spice Bazaar smell like in Ottoman times? In this episode, we explore the historical smellscape of this iconic market space from its early history up to the present day. Through a story about Ottoman smells and their transformations in the twentieth century, we touch on the trade routes of exotic spices, Ottoman marketing practices, and the greener, more fragrant Istanb...

A bonus conversation with Fahad Bishara. Look forward to our interview with Fahad Bishara about his new book A Sea of Debt in Season 8 of Ottoman History Podcast! https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/a-sea-of-debt/976469F77E9D08E56CFC6C10BB4B3F66 BIBLIOGRAPHY Aslanian, Sebouh. From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (University of...

E362 | Our latest podcast in collaboration with The Southeast Passage examines how slavery flourished in the Ottoman Mediterranean in the wake of growing connectivity with other world regions and territorial expansion. The discussion draws out the ambiguity between slavery and servitude in the case of the Mamluks of the Tunisian Beylik during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Which economic...

E361 | In our final episode of Season 7, we feature four student contributions on life in the early modern Ottoman world. These student podcasts come from two university courses in which the podcast medium was integral as both course material and assignment: "Cities of the Sultans: Life in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire" (Michael Talbot, University of Greenwich) and "Podcasting the Ottomans" (Dan...

E360 | In 2017, our episode Podcasting the Ottomans took a look at Professor Dana Sajdi’s Ottoman history course at Boston College that was based primarily on episodes of the Ottoman History Podcast, and elicited student reactions to the medium. In this conversation, we explore students’ experiences of making their own podcasts as we sit down with Dr. Michael Talbot to discuss the pedagogic thinki...