Ottoman History Podcast

E451 | What did it mean to individuals from different ethnic and religious backgrounds to participate in World War I under the same banner? What do personal narratives tell us about the World War I? Accounts of soldiers, officers, and women as well as non-textual sources such as medals and postcards provide novel perspectives into thinking about the experience of the Great War. This episode brings...

E450 | II. Abdülhamid Dönemi yönetim anlayışı, Osmanlı Devleti’nin 16. yüzyıldan itibaren izlediği Alevi/Kızılbaş siyasetini nasıl dönüştürdü? II. Abdülhamid dönemi Alevi/Kızılbaş siyasetinin temel araçları nelerdi? Bu bölümde, Munzur Üniversitesi Tarih Bölümü’nden Yalçın Çakmak ile “Sultan’ın Kızılbaşları: II. Abdülhamid Dönemi Alevi Algısı ve Siyaseti” başlıklı kitabı üzerine sohbet ediyoruz. II...

E449 | Popular revolts across the Middle East during the 19th and early 20th century have often been described as nationalist or anti-colonial. But on what basis did people mobilize and what rights were they attempting to assert? In this conversation, Pascale Ghazaleh examines the language of protest, focusing on the actions of peasants and the working class, their understandings of property right...

E448 | "One Thousand Kisses," "Plate of Cream," "Story of a Lily:" these are some of the provocative titles that graced the covers of Ottoman erotic novels in the early decades of the twentieth century. While erotic fiction and poetry had a long history in Ottoman and Arabic manuscript culture, the erotic novels of the second constitutional period (1908-1914), some creatively adapted from French o...

E447 | Bu bölümde K. Mehmet Kentel ve Akif Ercihan Yerlioğlu ile İstanbul Araştırmaları Enstitüsü’nün Hafıza-i Beşer: Osmanlı Yazmalarından Hikâyeler sergisi üzerine sohbet ediyoruz. Elyazmaları üzerinden Osmanlı toplumunda çok dillilik, gündelik hayat, tıp, evren ve zamanın bilgisi, toplumsal cinsiyet ve cinselliğin izlerini süren sergi odağında yazmalarla Osmanlı tarihyazımındaki yeni yaklaşımla...

Our full interview with Daniel Hershenzon. For more, see https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2020/01/pirates.html

E446 | Piracy is often depicted as a facet of the wild, lawless expanses of the high seas. But in this episode, we explore the order that governed piracy, captivity, and ransom in the early modern Mediterranean and in turn, how these practices shaped early modern politics, Mediterranean connections, and the emergent notions of international law. Emrah Safa Gürkan talks about Ottoman corsairs and t...

E445 | The line between Orientalist and Ottoman painting might at first seem clear. But in this episode, historian Mary Roberts argues that such distinctions are in fact complicated, drawing on her recent book Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture. She explains how Istanbul became a global center of production, circulation, and exhibition of visual cultur...

E444 | In medieval Anatolia, political authority could be found in surprising places. In this podcast, we speak to Hüseyin Yılmaz about the political role of Sufi leaders in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. We explore how these shaykhs could become powerful political leaders in their own right and how the nascent Ottoman state dealt with their power, ultimately participating in what Yılmaz...

E443 | In this episode, Professor Faiz Ahmed recounts the fascinating history of Afghanistan’s first modern constitution, contextualizing it within a broader legal and political history. The constitution was developed by Afghan, Ottoman and Indian and other scholars, at the behest of the country’s monarch, between 1919-1925. After the first world war, Afghanistan was one of few sovereign Muslim co...

E442 | In this episode, Professor Sunil Sharma shares his research on the cast of poets who wrote Persian poetry in India, and the poetic idea of Mughal India as a paradise, or an “Arcadia.” (He also shares some excerpts of this lovely poetry with us!) We discuss how specific regions, like Kashmir, became a hot new topic in Persian poetry, and explore the kinds of competitions that emerged between...

E441 | In this episode, historian Heather Ferguson takes us behind the scenes of early modern Ottoman state-making with a discussion of her recent book The Proper Order of Things. We discuss how the architecture of Topkapı palace, the emergence of new bureaucratic practices, and the administration of space from Hungary to Lebanon projected early modern discourses of “order” that were crucial to im...

E440 | Children are often imagined as victims of war or passive bystanders. But in this episode, Nazan Maksudyan is back on the program to talk about how the First World War looked through the eyes of Ottoman children and their lives as historical actors during and after the conflict. We explore the experience of child workers and the many situations faced by children throughout the war, and we al...

E439 | How can we narrate human history in relation to the non-human world? In this inaugural installment of our new environmental humanities series Climes, we talk to Bathsheba Demuth about the craft of environmental history. She reads selections from her new book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, and we discuss how hunting, capitalism, and communism shaped the Arctic...

E438 | Though the history of capitalism in the Middle East has been closely tied to the history of colonialism, local forms of capitalism emerged in the Ottoman Empire long before the advent of the British and French mandates. In this episode, Kristen Alff offers a new perspective on the joint-stock companies of mercantile families in the late Ottoman Levant. These families, the Sursocks being for...

E 437 | Osmanlı'da çiftler nasıl evlenir, nasıl boşanırdı? Bu podcast'te Leyla Kayhan Elbirlik ile İstanbul Bab, Davud Paşa ve Ahi Çelebi mahkemelerinin 1755-1840 yıllarındaki kayıtlarını inceleyerek tamamladığı doktora araştırması odağında, Osmanlı İstanbul'unda evlilik ve boşanma davaları üzerine sohbet ediyoruz. Elbirlik'in araştırması, kadınların evlilik, boşanma ve mülkiyetle ilişkili konular...

E436 | In this roundtable entitled "Narrating Migration: Emerging Methods and Cross-Disciplinary Directions," held at the 2019 Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting in New Orleans, two historians--Reem Bailony and Andrew Arsan--and two sociologists--Rawan Arar and Neda Maghbouleh discuss their experiences and approaches to studying migration. Throughout this conversation with our four aut...

E435 | World War I and along with it the life of Talaat Pasha, who headed the Ottoman Ministry of Interior and became empire’s Grand Vizier after 1917, remain contentious in Turkey today. Hans-Lukas Kieser, professor at Australia’s Newcastle University, has recently published a pioneering biography of Talaat Pasha, which casts him as the primary author of the Armenian Genocide and a founder of mod...

E 434 | In this episode, historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein speaks to us about the journey of one Jewish family from Ottoman Salonica in the late nineteenth century to Manchester, Paris, Rio de Janeiro and beyond during the twentieth century. In her new book Family Papers, she reveals the poignant continuities and changes that accompanied the Sephardic family's movement from an imperial world into a n...

E 433 | Beginning in the 1880s, thousands of Ottoman Armenians left the Harput region bound for places all around the world. The Ottoman state viewed these migrants as threats, both for their feared political connections and their possession of foreign legal protections. In this episode, David Gutman discusses the smuggling networks that emerged in response to these legal restrictions, as well as...

E 432 | Bu bölümünde Ayşe Ozil ile geç Osmanlı döneminde millet sisteminin ne ifade ettiğini, Rum cemaatini, cemaat kavramının kendisini, Rum topluluklarının devlet ile ilişkisini ve bu ilişkinin ondokuzuncu yüzyıl ortalarından itibaren ne tür değişimler geçirdiğini konuştuk. https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2019/11/millet-sistemi-ve-rum-topluluklar.html Ayşe Ozil Sabancı Üniversitesi Sanat v...

E431 | When Sultan bin Salman left Earth on the shuttle Discovery in 1985, he became the first Arab, first Muslim, and first member of a royal family in space. Twenty-five years later, the discovery of a planet 500 light years away by the Qatar Exoplanet Survey – subsequently named ‘Qatar-1b’ – was evidence of the cutting-edge space science projects taking place across the Middle East. Discussing...

E430 | During the 19th century, Southeast Asia came under British and Dutch colonial rule. Yet despite the imposition of foreign institutions and legal codes, Islamic law remained an important part of daily life. In fact, as our guest Fadzilah Yahaya argues, Islamic law in the region underwent significant transformation as a result of British and Dutch policies. But rather than merely a top-down t...

E429 | World War I brought unprecedented destruction to the Ottoman Empire and resulted in its fall of as a political entity, but war also produced new politics. In this podcast, Yiğit Akın is back to talk about his book When the War Came Home and how years of war transformed the Ottoman Empire. We discuss how the experience of the 1912-13 Balkan Wars reshaped Ottoman officials' understanding of m...

E428 | How do ethnic and confessional identities become the basis for political mobilization? In this episode, Arbella Bet-Shlimon examines the long history of Iraq's first oil city, Kirkuk, to argue that the rise of ethnicized politics was by no means inevitable. She shows how a multilingual city long shared by Arabic, Turkish, and Kurdish-speaking communities transformed under Ottoman and Britis...