Ottoman History Podcast

E327 | Visual sources such as photographs, maps, and miniatures often serve as accompaniment or adornment within works of Ottoman history. In this episode, we feature new work that interrogates methods of analyzing and employing visual sources for Ottoman history that go beyond the practice of "image as decoration." Following a conversation with the organizers of the "Visual Sources in Late Ottoma...

E326 | Commodities, their circulation, and their consumption have long been favorite topics of cultural and economic historians alike. In this episode, we build on the historiography of commodities by studying further the social and political context of two particular commodities: coffee and marijuana. Our guests, Casey Lurtz and Lina Britto, have each studied these commodities in their Latin Amer...

E325 | A perennial question in Ottoman history is why printing was not fully adopted in the Middle East for the production of books until the late nineteenth century. Armenians, however, did start to print their books as early as the sixteenth century. In this episode, Sebouh Aslanian explains this rather sudden shift by telling the story of how the twin traumas of the Celali Rebellions and Shah A...

E324 | Genetics have emerged as a new scientific tool for studying human ancestry and historical migration. And as research into the history of genetics demonstrates, genetics and other bioscientific approaches to studying ancestry were also integral to the transformation of the very national and racial categories through which ancestry has come to be described over the course of the 19th and 20th...

E323 | In this collaboration with The Southeast Passage, we discuss the emergence of the Turkish nationalist movement under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the establishment of a sovereign Republic of Turkey in 1923. As our guest Prof. Erik-Jan Zürcher notes, Kemalism can be studied both as a political transformation from armed struggle to a one-party state administration system and as...

E322 | This episode examines historical approaches to Armenians, Kurds, and Turks in the eastern provinces of Ottoman Anatolia. "Shared history" has been offered up as a corrective to the existing historiography's nationalist and often exclusionary approaches, but what does writing a "shared history" actually look like? Yaşar Tolga Cora and Dzovinar Derderian talk about their approaches in their r...

E321 | What is the aural possibility of Islamic life in the European cities today? This special episode begins with a ten-minute segment from an audio composition crafted by our guest, musicologist Peter McMurray, from recent field recordings and ethnographies he conducted among various Turkish communities in Berlin. As the discussion progresses we weave in and out of two discussions. First, we lo...

E320 | The distance between the shores of the Ottoman Empire and New York City may be great, but, as this episode suggests, a great many connections exist between these places, too. This episode explores both the everyday lives of those hailing from the Ottoman domains over several centuries in the Big Apple, as well as the perceptions New Yorkers and Americans more generally had of the Ottoman Em...

E319 | The rise of Islamic modernist movements from the 19th century onward brought two potentially contradictory processes. On the one hand, Muslim thinkers began to imagine an increasingly global Muslim community unified by identity that might transcend many of the communal and political divisions of the day. On the other hand, in seeking to delineate the parameters of modern Islam, such thinker...

E318 | Long before European contact with the Americas forged transoceanic networks and connections in the Atlantic and Pacific, the Indian Ocean served as a maritime space that connected the many states, economies, and communities of its vast basin stretching from East Africa to Southeast Asia. In this multi-part episode, we follow this maritime space into the modern period, exploring the enduranc...

E317 | The history of late Ottoman Palestine and the changes in settlement, agriculture, economy and politics that occurred there remain a subject of great interest for historians of the Middle East. In this episode, our guest Tamar Novick introduces a new approach to that history using the lens of ecology. We explore changes in late Ottoman Palestine through environment and human-animal relations...

E316 | Among the many important medieval texts written in Arabic, few have received more attention from scholars in Europe than The Muqaddimah, an introduction to history by the 14th-century North African writer Ibn Khaldun. In this episode, we explore another of arena for reception of Ibn Khaldun, the Ottoman Empire, with our guest Kenan Tekin. In particular, we examine Ottoman translations of Ib...

E315 | Orientalist representations loom large in the history of 19th-century colonialism and European engagement with the late Ottoman Empire. But how did the orientalist discourses of the late Ottoman period compare with European representations of the Ottoman Empire during its early rise? In this episode, Pascale Barthe revisits this question through the lens of 16th century French encounters wi...

E314 | Salonica was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world until its liquidation by the Nazis in 1943. Historians often mark the beginning of the end of the Jewish community in 1913 when the city was annexed by Greece. Devin Naar challenges this presumption in this podcast by looking at how the Jewish community continued to flourish and adapt as part of...

Michael Talbot offers a short history of a late Ottoman goodwill mission to Japan followed by commentary by Cemil Aydin Recorded by Michael Talbot in Yokohama, Japan

E313 | In political discourses today, the “Muslim world” is evoked in a variety of contexts, ranging from pan-Islamic visions of political unity to a set of racist generalizations that present roughly a fifth of the world’s population as a monolithic whole. But as our guest in this episode, Cemil Aydın explains in his new book The Idea of the Muslim World, the very notion of a Muslim world is rece...

E312 | More and more, podcasts are appearing on university syllabi. But is it possible to conduct an entire university course that revolves entirely around the podcast medium? In this special episode, we sit down with Dana Sajdi and a class of over 20 students at Boston College who are enrolled in an experimental course entitled "Podcasting the Ottomans." In our conversation, we take a look inside...

E311 | For much of the twentieth century, military officers have been the most successful political operatives in Middle East politics. In this episode we explore the conditions that gave rise to these figures from their schooling to the disingenuous colonial politics of the interwar mandates. Our guest, Michael Provence, speaks to us about the overlooked the military schools in the late Ottoman E...

E310 | The “nahda” is often seen as the beginning of the modern intellectual revival of the Arabs, when European Enlightenment ideas were adopted by Middle Eastern thinkers from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. In this podcast with Peter Hill, we discuss a circle of Syrian Christians in Damietta, Egypt who were actively translating Greek, Italian and French Enlightenment texts into Arabic in th...

E309 | Photography came to the Ottoman empire almost as soon as it was invented in Europe. Over subsequent decades, however, techniques improved, cameras got cheaper and more portable, and photographic production, circulation, and collection in Ottoman lands moved outside of the rarefied circles of the elite studios and the state. In this episode, Ahmet Ersoy discusses one of the main media for th...

E308 | In 1665, an Izmir-born Rabbi named Sabbatai Sevi (1626-76) was proclaimed to be the Jewish Messiah. His messianic movement attracted tens of thousands of followers and become known throughout the early modern world. Ottoman authorities, however, arrested Sevi in 1666, and, under duress, the charismatic leader converted to Islam. Many members of his movement followed suit and became the comm...

E307 | Le mouvement des Jeunes Turcs et la Révolution de 1908 bouleversent profondément le système multiethnique et multiconfessionnel de l’empire ottoman en établissant un nouveau cadre politique pour les identifications concernant l’ État et la Nation. Dans cet épisode, François Georgeon explore avec nous les origines et les principales transformations du mouvement Jeune Turc: qui sont ces révol...

E306 | This episode examines new perspectives on the study of nationalism through a discussion of emerging themes in the history of Eastern Europe. We talk to two researchers about their ongoing projects concerning the history of nationalism in place that did not necessary fit the mold. Cristian Florea discusses the history of Bukovina, a borderland region that often found itself divided between m...

E305 | The destruction of Ottoman-era waqf institutions in the Balkans during the wars of the 1990s was extensive, from masjids and tekkes to bridges and libraries. A bibliographer at Harvard's Fine Arts Library, András Riedlmayer, traveled throughout the region to document this destruction during and after the wars. In this podcast, Riedlmayer describes his work on waqf institutions in the Balkan...

E304 | For much of the early modern period, the Crimean Khanate was the staunch ally of the Ottoman state in its rivalry with the growing Russian Empire. In this regard, Crimea's annexation by Russia in 1783 represented an major historical departure. But as our guest in this episode, Kelly O'Neill, explains, the early period of Crimea's incorporation into the Russian Empire was characterized by co...