Ottoman History Podcast

E303 | Although the Alawi communities of Syria have played an important role in the politics of the 20th century, the longer history of these communities has often been obscured by generalizations and discourses of mystification. In this episode, we talk to Stefan Winter about the history of the Alawis over the centuries, which is the subject of his new book A History of the ‘Alawis: From Medieval...

E302 | Depuis la fin de la guerre d’indépendance, la question des harkis agite les consciences en France comme en Algérie. Pierre Daum, journaliste au Monde Diplomatique et auteur du livre Le dernier tabou : les « harkis » restés en Algérie après l’indépendance, est parti à la rencontre de ces supplétifs de l’armée française et de leurs descendants. Dans cet épisode, il explore avec nous les non-d...

E301 | In the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman/Qajar borderlands (today’s Turco-Iranian border), East Syrian Christians had their first encounters with American Protestant missionaries. These encounters brought to the region new institutions like printing presses and American-style schools. They also helped remap Neo-Aramaic concepts for communal belonging like melat and tayepa – which loosely corre...

E300 | Did the Ottoman Empire "decline" after an initial golden age of rapid expansion and military conquest? This question has long haunted the telling of Ottoman history. Critics note that describing centuries of Ottoman history simply as "decline" makes it seem inevitable that the Empire would be defeated in World War I, emptying the story of the contingency and nuance it deserves. How else mig...

E299 | In this episode, we approach the religious architecture of the Alevis, to examine how practice shapes architectural space and how socioeconomic change transforms such spaces. Many of our episodes on Ottoman History Podcast have focused on how monumental architecture, such as mosques and other buildings of religious significance, are tied to political transformation and expressions of politi...

E298 | A handful of obscure archival fragments from Sultan Abdülhamid II’s imperial library in Yıldız have revealed a curious architectural practice that took place in the urban gardens of members and officials of the Ottoman court: they had a penchant for imported chalets. In this episode, Deniz Türker discusses her research on how this relatively niche fad for importation quickly shifted to wide...

E297 | The preeminent position of manuscript painting and poetry at the Ottoman court has been well established by historians, yet the equally important practice of commissioning and collecting sumptuously decorated copies of the Qur’an--the sacred text of Islam--has been less explored. The role of the Qur’an in the artistic culture of the Ottoman world is just one facet of the landmark exhibition...

E296 | In French Algeria, the colonial imperatives of assimilation and difference gave birth to legal pluralism. In this episode, Dr. Sarah Ghabrial explains what it meant for Algerian women to have different legal structures operating at the same time. The ability to argue one's case in an Islamic court and also appeal it in French common law provided openings for women in matters of personal sta...

E295 | We often assume that as we become increasingly connected to ever larger networks of information and news we become part of larger and more cohesive polities. In this episode, Arthur Asseraf discusses how the introduction of new networks of communication in colonial Algeria generated friction and unevenness instead of expansive flows. Looking at telegraphs, newspapers, cinemas and more we di...

E294 | In this episode, Christine Philliou traces the story of Istanbul's Phanariots, a group of wealthy, "Greek-identified" families who rose to play a central role in Ottoman foreign policy and diplomacy in the 17th and 18th centuries. What happened to these families in the tumultuous years preceding and following Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1832? In this episode, we explore th...

E293 | The Opium Wars and the massive trade in opium between South Asia and China over the nineteenth century made famous the role of opium within the history of colonialism and globalization. But it is less well known that in the early twentieth century, the Republic of Turkey became the largest exporter of opium in the world. In this episode we speak with Daniel-Joseph Macarthur-Seal about how a...

E292 | Ottoman History Podcast'in bu bölümünde, Özge Samancı ile Osmanlı’da saray, elit mutfağı ve sokak yemek kültürü üzerine bir sohbet gerçekleştirdik. Osmanlı saray mutfaklarında çalışanlar arasında nasıl bir işbölümü olduğuna ve mutfağın mekansal düzenine değindik. Alaturka ve alafranga mutfak kültüründe, yemek ve içecek olarak tüketilen ürünleri ve nasıl tüketildiklerinin yanı sıra tüketim a...

E291 | A tale of mutual ignorance between psychoanalysis and Islam has obscured the many creative and co-constitutive encounters between these two traditions of thought, both so prominent in the 20th century. This presumed incommensurability has hardened the lines between the "modern subject," assumed to be secular and Western, and its Others, often associated with Islam or with the East. In this...

E290 | National language politics and the transformation of literacy have effected major changes in both spoken and written language over the course of the last century, but few languages have changed as dramatically as modern Turkish. The reform of the language from the 1920s onward, which not only replaced the Ottoman alphabet with a new Latin-based alphabet but also led to a radical transformat...

E289 | What terms and ideas were considered erotic in early modern Ottoman literature, and what can studying them tell us about later historical periods and our own conceptions of the beauty, love, and desire? In this episode, we welcome İrvin Cemil Schick back to the podcast to discuss a project he is compiling with İpek Hüner-Cora and Helga Anetshofer: a dictionary called the "Erotic Vocabulary...

E288 | The political, social, and cultural roots of the modern Middle East stretch into the early modern period of Ottoman and Safavid rule and even beyond. So how should we narrate the long making of the Middle East within the context of an ever-changing present? In this episode, we talk to Betty Anderson about the perspectives and practices that inform her new textbook A History of the Modern Mi...

E287 | Pre-Saharan Morocco is a transitional space between the Atlas Mountains in the north and the Sahara in the south, and the oases of pre-Saharan Morocco have long been marked by local autonomy, diversity, and particularities of agriculture, property ownership, class, and race. In this episode, we talk to Karen Rignall about her research on land, labor, and social life in a Moroccan oasis and...

E286 | During the late 19th century, Louis Pasteur and his disciples promoted a laboratory-based study of disease and contagion that led to what many call "the bacteriological turn" and reshaped public health in France and beyond. In this episode, we sit down with doctor, philosopher, and historian Anne-Marie Moulin to talk about the history of the Pastorians and the early establishment of Pasteur...

E285 | Famous images such as Amin al-Husayni's meeting with Hitler have come to dominate the public imagination of Arab-Nazi relations in Western societies. But to what extent does this imagery reflect actual trajectories of reception and reflection of fascist ideology in the Middle East or the experience that Arabs and Muslims of other origins had under Nazi rule? In this episode, we discuss the...

E284 | The history of Mediterranean islands offers a dynamic paradox of insularity engendered by geographical isolation and connectivity fostered by access to ports and maritime networks. In this podcast, we discuss those themes through a conversation about the transformation of Cyprus over the centuries of Ottoman imperial rule. Our guest Antonis Hadjicyriakou has studied the history of Cyprus fr...

E283 | The epithet "abid," Arabic for "slave," still follows those with dark skin as they move around today's Cairo. The word and its negative connotations, however, have a long history. In this episode, Professor Eve Troutt Powell explores this history by tracing the many lives of slaves and slavery in late Ottoman Egypt. She draws on the narratives of Ottoman Egyptian elites, Sudanese slave trad...

E282 | Classical encyclopedias and compendia such as Pliny’s Natural History have long been known to Western audiences, but the considerably more recent works of medieval Islamic scholars have been comparatively ignored. In this episode, we talk to Elias Muhanna about his new translation of a fourteenth-century Arabic compendium by Egyptian scholar Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri, which covers everything...

E281 | In the conventional telling of the intellectual history of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamicate world, there has been very little room for people outside the ranks of the learned scholars or ulema associated with the religious, intellectual, and political elite of Muslim communities. But in this episode, we explore the writings of Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Budayr, an 18th-century Damascene b...

E280 | What happens when we encounter "Orientalist" aesthetics outside the West? In the late nineteenth century, a cosmopolitan group of Ottoman architects turned to modern forms of art history writing to argue that synthesis and change stood at the heart of a particularly "Ottoman" architectural aesthetic. Working together, these writers produced the first text of modern art history writing in th...

E279 | Between December 1991 and February 2002, Algeria experienced a protracted civil war, which earned the period the designation of the "dark decade." In this episode, we explore how Algerians experienced and coped with the violence and trepidation of the civil war through the lens of humor. Our guest Elizabeth Perego has studied to role of humor, jokes, and caricatures in the politics of Alger...