Ottoman History Podcast

E253 | The styles of Iznik and Kütahya porcelain, which have become synonymous with excellence in Ottoman-Turkish ceramics, adorned and renovated buildings in a radius extending beyond the Anatolian heartland and including Damascus, Mecca, and Cairo. They bear a striking resemblance to the colorful and ornate tiles on many buildings in the city of Jerusalem today, including the Dome of the Rock. T...

E252 | Geneticists and historians are generally considered strange bedfellows. However, new advances in bio-archaeology and genetics are facilitating this odd coupling. In this episode, we speak to Nükhet Varlık, author of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World : the Ottoman experience, 1347-1600 (Cambridge University Press), about how genetic evidence has transformed the study...

E251 | Commentaries are a common, even a nearly ineluctable, part of the textual landscape of the early modern Ottoman Empire. Especially when it came to philosophy, commentaries were perhaps the main venue of discussions. An earlier generation of scholars believed these commentaries to be derivative but we now see them as a major piece in the development of the philosophical tradition in the Midd...

E250 | A man known as Wojciech Bobowski to some, Albertus Bobovius to others, and Ali Ufki to yet others, is one of the prime examples of an early modern intermediary operating in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. In this podcast, we discuss with Michael Tworek the fascinating figure of the Bobovius, from his childhood in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, to his capture in a Tatar slave ra...

E249 | We often regard print as a motor of social change, leaving revolutions in its wake, whether political and religious. For historians of the Middle East, this line of thought always leads to the (predictable) question: why didn’t Muslims or Ottomans or Arabs adopt print? In this episode, Kathryn Schwartz discusses why this question is often poorly posed and then delves into an in-depth look a...

E248 | With political and economic developments in 19th century Egypt, the lives of women began to change in dramatic ways. From the rise of wage labor and the restructuring of rural households to the emergence of women's movements and publications, pre-colonial Egypt witnessed numerous transformation in the realm of gender. In this episode, Liat Kozma shares her research regarding some of the mos...

E247 | During the late nineteenth century, Egyptian society witnessed the rise of new debates and practices concerning reading and writing in the Arabic language. In this episode, Hoda Yousef explores the discources surrounding literacy in Egypt, which is the subject of her first book entitled Composing Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2016). This work examines how different actors from Islamic m...

E246 | The fountain standing in the Hippodrome (At Meydanı) in Istanbul, located just a few steps away from some of Turkey’s most famous tourist attractions like Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, doesn’t attract much notice these days. But wrapped up in this monument, gifted to the people of the city by the German Emperor Wilhelm II, is a story that sheds some light on the bilateral relations betw...

E245 | In the classical Ottoman period, European embassies in Istanbul pretty much looked like any other residential building. At the end of the eighteenth century, however, a period of dramatic geo-political and social change, official foreign residences likewise underwent a process of transformation. Architectural designs shifted from Ottoman to Western styles, and these landmarks became increas...

E244 | As spaces fundamental to Muslim religious and communal life, mosques have historically served as sites of not just architectural but also ideological construction. As our guest Kishwar Rizvi argues in her latest book entitled The Transnational Mosque (UNC Press 2015), states operating in transnational contexts have taken a leading role in the building of mosques and in doing so, they forge...

Join us in this special introductory episode to "The Visual Past" series on Ottoman History Podcast featuring Nina Ergin with Chris Gratien and Emily Neumeier. Special thanks to our friends at Muhtelif for the intro music. "The Visual Past” is a podcast series curated by Emily Neumeier and Ünver Rüstem. It showcases the latest research by scholars who explore the visual, spatial, and material cult...

E243 | Although artistic production occurs in a political context, art and politics are often studied as separate fields of historical inquiry. Our guest in this episode, Dr. Sarah-Neel Smith, offers a reflection on the close relationship between art and politics in Turkey through a discussion of her research on the figure of Bülent Ecevit. As a politician, Ecevit is remembered for his four stints...

E242 | “Hrig,” the Moroccan Arabic term for “illegal” immigration, translates to “burning.” In the latest episode of Tajine, Isabella Alexander discusses the dramatic rise in sub-Saharan migrants attempting to enter the E.U. from Morocco - now the primary entry point for all African migrations north. As Spanish officials start exploring their border controls further south in response, hundreds of...

E241 | During World War I, the Lazarist college at Antoura, in the mountains of Mt. Lebanon north of Beirut, was taken over by Cemal Pasha to be used as an orphanage for Armenian and Kurdish orphans. Turkish feminist Halide Edip recounts in her memoirs that the time she spent as director of the orphanage during the war was among the happiest periods of her life. In this episode, Professor Selim De...

E240 | What is a caliphate? Who can be caliph? What is the history of the idea? How can we interpret and use it today? In this podcast we discuss with Prof Hugh Kennedy his forthcoming book The Caliphate (Pelican Books) and the long-term historical context to the idea of caliphate. Tracing the history from the choosing of the first caliph Abu Bakr in the immediate aftermath of the Prophet Muhammad...

E239 | Were Ottoman courts just? Boğaç Ergene discusses this basic question in this podcast by forging a new path beyond the earlier views of the justice system as inherently fickle and capricious—immortalized in Weber’s concept of kadijustiz—and the idealistic views of Ottoman courts as a site of equal and fair treatment for all. Drawing on the results of research for his forthcoming publication...

E238 | The First World War and the fall of the Ottoman Empire are defining moments in the political history of the modern Middle East. This narrative is usually told through the lenses of the breakup of empire, the successes and failures of national movements, and the colonial involvement of British and French Mandates in the region. In this episode, Keith Watenpaugh offers a different approach to...

E237 | *Bonus Episode* In comparison with the historiography of other world regions, class has often been an ignored aspect of the history of the late Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East. This has been especially true with regard to the middle class. But as our guest Keith Watenpaugh has argued in Being Modern in the Middle East, the middle class emerged as a discrete segment of late Ottoman soc...

E236 | Non-Muslim communities of the Middle East were intimately involved in the rise of constitutional politics that occurred in both the Ottoman Empire and Iran during the early 20th century. But to what extent were their interests represented in the emerging parliaments of revolutionary constitutional governments? In this episode, Saghar Sadeghian discusses her research on the representation of...

E235 | The linguistic landscape of Mandate Palestine was highly complex. Arabic and other languages of the former Ottoman Empire were joined by the wide array of tongues spoken by Jewish immigrants as well as English, the language of Palestine's new British governors. As our guest Liora Halperin demonstrates in her book Babel in Zion (Yale University Press), this linguistic diversity appeared to b...

E234 | Ottoman History Podcast'in bu bölümünde, Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar Üniversitesi Sosyoloji Bölümü'nden tarihçi Burak Onaran ile yemeğin ve mutfağın siyasi ve toplumsal tarihini konuşuyoruz. Son dönem Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nda kamu diplomasisi açısından Osmanlı mutfağını nasıl okuyabiliriz? Osmanlı mutfağından Türk mutfağına geçiş, mutfağın ve yemeğin ulusallaşması süreci nasıl gerçekleşmişt...

E233 | At the heart of medieval political economies were a variety of practices, structures, and activities that revolved around the production and distribution of food. In this episode, Nicolas Trépanier discusses his research for Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia, which examines life in the early Ottoman Empire through the lens of food and drink. We discuss diverse subjects from agrar...

E232 | Starting in the fifteenth century, medical doctors from the Italian peninsula began accompanying Venetian consular missions to cities in the Mamluk and Ottoman empires. These doctors treated not only Venetian consular officials, but also local artisans and rulers. In this podcast, Valentina Pugliano discusses the experiences of these travelling doctors both in the Italian peninsula and in t...

E231 | During the late Ottoman period, the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut became a leading center of higher education in the Eastern Mediterranean and for the Arab world in particular. With the establishment of British and French Mandates in the Middle East following the First World War, the Syrian Protestant College--now known as the American University of Beirut--became an educational hub n...

E230 | In this episode, Ellen Fleischmann and Christine Lindner discuss the history of women and gender and the American Protestant Mission in Lebanon. How did American missionary women experience and transform the American Protestant project in the Levant in the 19th and 20th centuries? How did American missionaries, both women and men, interact with women from Beirut and Mt. Lebanon, both those...