Ottoman History Podcast

E278 | The French military struggle to maintain control over Algeria throughout the war period (1954-1962) is remembered for its violent and destructive impacts. But during the war, the French administration also sought to maintain control over Algeria by attempting to build the rural economy and deepening the structures of colonial rule in the countryside. In this episode, we talk to Muriam Haleh...

E277 | The Algerian War is perhaps the most recognizable national and anti-colonial movement of the 20th century. From the iconic film “The Battle of Algiers” to Frantz Fanon's influential book The Wretched of the Earth, the violence of the Algerian fight for independence and the French reaction has marked depictions of not only the war but representations of Algerian history on the whole. In this...

E276 | Whereas military histories once focused narrowly on armies, battles, and technologies, the new approach to military history emphasizes how armies and navies were linked to issues such as political economy, gender, and environment. In this episode, we sit down with Gábor Ágoston to discuss the principal issues concerning the relationship between the Ottoman-Habsburg military frontier in Hu...

E275 | The turn of the nineteenth century was a period of tumult and transformation in the Ottoman Empire, as in many places around the world from France to Haiti, China, and the United States. With people, ideas, and armies on the move as never before, new geopolitical pressures pushed states around the globe to reinvent their relationships to their subjects and citizens. In this episode, we talk...

E274 | How does the structure of bureaucracies and state administrations influence the capacity for political and social change, and what are the legacies of empire for contemporary societies? In this episode, we take a comparative look at these questions by focusing on former regions of the British Empire that have been subject to different forms of political partition. Our guest Yael Berda is a...

E273 | The Palestinian Arabs who remained within the borders of Israel after the 1948 war became citizens of the new state. But in those early years Arab villages lived under military rule that would last nearly two decades. In this episode, Shira Robinson discusses the research for her book Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel's Liberal Settler State, which examines the crucial...

E272 | The 1925 Palestine Citizenship Order-in-Council, passed by the British government and implemented in the Palestine Mandate, was the first piece of mandate legislation to officially recognize Palestine's Arab community as citizens of Palestine rather than 'ex-enemy Ottoman subjects.' This marked a change in the legal position of Palestine's Arab residents, and a confirmation of the de facto...

E271 | L’histoire de l’Algérie coloniale est souvent abordée du point de vue des bouleversements économiques et politiques engendrés par l’occupation française. Mais cette dernière entraîna un remaniement dans la sphère de l’intime qui fut tout aussi significatif, bien que peu étudié. Dans cet épisode, Aurélie Perrier se penche sur la question de l’évolution des formes de sexualités illicites en A...

E270 | Genomic research is resolving old questions about the history of plague, revealing, for example, that the Black Death was caused by the same species of plague that exists today and demonstrating the complex ways in which plague moved throughout the medieval and early modern world. Yet even as scientific methods today shed light on the history of plague, past understandings and depictions of...

E269 | In many countries of the Middle East and North Africa, European colonial rule lasted only for a matter of decades, and yet its influence in the realms of politics and economy have been profound. In this episode, we talk to Jonathan Wyrtzen about the legacy of colonialism in Morocco for the politics of identity, which is the subject of his new book entitled Making Morocco. As Dr. Wyrzten exp...

E268 | While the millet system has been used as a means of studying the special case of religious pluralism in the Ottoman Empire, many have pointed to the limitations of this framework in which religious communities appears as segmented units separate by firm boundaries. In this interview with Nathalie Clayer, we discuss new ways of thinking about religious pluralism in the Ottoman Empire through...

E267 | During the 1920s, a publisher in Lahore published a satire on the domestic life of the Prophet Muhammad during a period of religious polemics and communal tension between Muslims and Hindus under British rule. The inflammatory text soon became a legal matter, first when the publisher was brought to trial and acquitted for "attempts to promote feelings of enmity or hatred between different c...

E266 | The changing of one's religion may be viewed today as a matter of personal spirituality or identity, but as the historiography of the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere increasingly shows, conversion was often a public act with political, socioeconomic, and gendered components. In this episode, Elyse Semerdjian returns to the podcast to discuss her research on conversion in early modern Aleppo an...

E265 | The Capitulations are regarded as one of the most obvious and humiliating signs of European dominance over Ottoman markets and diplomatic relations in the 19th century, granting European merchants and their Ottoman protégés extensive extraterritorial privileges within the empire. In this podcast, Professor Omar Cheta probes the limits of the Capitulations in the Ottoman province of Egypt, w...

E264 | The period from the 1870s to 1914 was the peak of the nineteenth-century globalisation characterised by increased movement of capital across the world. In this podcast, Coşkun discusses his recent book on ‘Sovereign Debt and the International Financial Control: the Middle East and the Balkans, 1870-1914’, the role of banks as intermediaries between the Ottoman government and international f...

E263 | Ottoman History Podcast'in bu bölümünde, Nurçin İleri ile geç dönem Osmanlı İstanbul’unda gece, korku ve suç ilişkisi üzerine konuştuk. Farklı toplumsal tabakalardan insanların, demografik ve fiziksel anlamda hızla dönüşen kent mekanınını sokakların aydınlatılması çalışmaları, geceleri mobilite, kamusal eğlence ve aktivitelerin kontrolü ekseninde nasıl deneyimledikleri ve ne hissettiklerini...

E262 | The illustrated account of the festivals surrounding the circumcision of Sultan Ahmed III's sons in 1720 is one of the most iconic and celebrated depictions of urban life in Ottoman Istanbul. With its detailed text written by Vehbi, accompanied by the vibrant miniature paintings of Levni, this work has been used as a source for understanding the cast of professions and personalities that oc...

E261 | Emerging as a literary genre towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman novel has been overshadowed by the transformation of the Turkish language and alphabet after 1928. In this episode, we speak with Melih Levi about his recent English translation with Monica Ringer of one the first examples of the Ottoman novel, Ahmed Midhat Efendi's Felatun Bey and Rakım Efendi (Syracuse Uni...

E260 | Ottoman-German relations have usually been studied in the context of great-power politics, imperialism both hard and soft, or the military and economic spheres. In this podcast Philipp Wirtz presents some initial findings of a larger research project focusing on personal networks and experiences of Germans residing in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic and two German expatri...

E259 | In this episode, we talk with Marc Aymes about his approach to Ottoman provincial history through the history of 19th century Cyprus. What is the difference between an Ottoman "provincial history" and "a history of the Ottoman provinces?" Can a "provincial" approach to Ottoman history change the way we understand major questions in Ottoman historiography, including the impact of 19th centur...

E258 | The body of water now known as the Red Sea lay well within the bounds of the Ottoman Empire's well-protected domains for nearly four centuries. It wasn't until the 19th century, however, that this body of water began to be called or conceived of as "the Red Sea" by either Ottomans or Europeans. In this episode, Professor Alexis Wick argues that we have much to learn about how history (and O...

E257 | The Ottoman slave trade, which was part of an increasingly globalized trafficking network of the early modern period, brought millions of people from the surrounding regions of Europe, Asia, and Africa to the Ottoman Empire. While abolition and emancipation movements occurred in various forms throughout the last century of the empire's history, slavery remained in practice until its very en...

E256 | After facing the destruction of their community during the First World War, former Ottoman Armenians set about rebuilding in Turkey first during a period of relative optimism under the Allied occupation of Istanbul and later as non-Muslim citizens of new Turkish nation-state. In her new work entitled Recovering Armenia, Lerna Ekmekçioğlu explores the changes and continuities in the identity...

E255 | Interest in Ottoman photography has tended to focus on the orientalist gaze or the view from the imperial center. In this episode, Armen T. Marsoobian offers us the unique lens of the Dildilian family of Armenian photographers in provincial Anatolia. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the Dildilians worked to memorialize portraits of fragmenting families and to document everyday scen...

E254 | Since its foundation in 1928 by Boghos Nubar, son of Egyptian Prime Minister and Ottoman dignitary Nubar Pasha, the Nubarian library in Paris has served as a major resource for Armenian intellectual life and historical research in the diaspora. What is less well-known is how the library's rich holdings in Ottoman Turkish, Armeno-Turkish, French and English as well as in Armenian might be us...