Ottoman History Podcast

E229 | Scholars have long neglected the Middle East’s Christian communities in general and Christian women in particular. In this episode, Akram Khater draws attention to the biography of Hindiyya al-'Ujaimi (1720-1798) to explore the religious and political upheavals of 18th-century Aleppo and Mount Lebanon. Hindiyya’s story speaks to the dynamic history of the Maronite Church, the fraught encoun...

E228 | The conventional story of the 1908 Revolution in the Ottoman Empire is that of the Young Turks and a multi-confessional alliance of political parties usurping the authoritarian rule of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. The learned class of Muslim notables, the ulema, are usually portrayed as apprehensive bystanders threatened with marginalization by the restoration of the Ottoman constitution. But as...

E227 | During the late eighteenth century, a series of volcanic eruptions at a site called Laki in Iceland created climatic effects that spanned the entire globe. In this episode, Alan Mikhail shares his research on the impacts of these eruptions on the agrarian economy of Ottoman Egypt through an explanation of the localized climatic and environmental effects of Laki on the Nile River. We discuss...

E226 | Events such as earthquakes, floods, and epidemics provide vivid illustrations of the natural world's impact on human society, but the outcomes of natural disasters also offer a window onto aspects of social and political life in past societies. In this episode, Yaron Ayalon discusses his research on natural disasters in the Ottoman Empire and what such events tell us about Ottoman state and...

E225 | As research on the early modern period increasingly shows, bubonic plague played a formative role in the making of state policies and medical practice, and concern over plague created new connections between different regions of the Mediterranean. In this episode, Edna Bonhomme joins us again to talk about her research on plague in North Africa, its relationship with the issue of the global...

E224 | Ondokuzuncu yüzyılda Osmanlı merkezi yönetimi vergi gelirlerini nasıl ve hangi koşullarda arttırabilmişti? Bu vergi artışının toplumsal ve siyasal bedeli ne olmuştu? Bu podcastimizde, Prof. Dr. Nadir Özbek ile son dönem Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nda vergi siyaseti ve toplumsal adaleti konuşuyoruz. http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2016/02/osmanlda-vergi.html Prof. Dr. Nadir Özbek, Boğaziçi Ü...

E223 | We often speak of physical and abstract worlds as if they were self-evident. But the concept of "the world" has been forged and continually remade through imagination and debate. In this podcast, Ayesha Ramachandran discusses the historical context of the world's ascendance as a meaningful concept and offers a preview of her new book entitled Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Eu...

E222 | In the second half of the sixteenth century, the Ottoman court became particularly invested in writing its own history. This initiative primarily took the form of official chronicles, and the court historian (şehnameci), a new position established in the 1550s, set to work producing manuscripts accompanied by lavish illustrations. However, the paintings in these texts should not be understo...

E221 | Where did the Ottomans fit within the geographical understandings of Christian kingdoms in early modern Europe? How did Europeans reconcile the notion of "the Turk" as other with the reality of an Ottoman presence in the Balkans and Eastern Europe? What was the relationship between the maps and representations of Ottoman space in Europe and the self-mapping carried out by the Ottomans in ma...

E220 | Hundreds of cartographic images of the world and its regions exist scattered throughout collections of medieval and early modern Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts. The sheer number of these extant maps tells us that from the thirteenth century onward, when these map-manuscripts began to proliferate, visually depicting the world became a major preoccupation of medieval Muslim scholars...

E219 | Just as the Ottoman Empire is often known for the discourse of Pan-Islam during the 19th century, the Russian Empire is similarly known for its prominent role as the foremost Christian rival of the Ottomans. Yet the long and deep relationship between the Russian Empire and Islam has received comparatively little historical scrutiny. In this podcast, Eileen Kane discusses her recent book ent...

E218 | On August 27, 2015, our dear friend and colleague Vangelis Kechriotis passed away in Istanbul. Vangelis is deeply missed and fondly remembered. He was a historian, a public intellectual, a dedicated teacher, and passionate activist who endeavored to write the history of non-Muslim communities in the Ottoman Empire and to make Istanbul, his adopted home, a place for all of its residents. Nev...

E217 | Nearly two centuries ago, Greece achieved its independence from the Ottoman Empire. Yet for centuries before, and for many Greeks even a century after, the story of Greek history was deeply intertwined with that of the Ottoman state, its institutions, and its other subjects. In this episode, we sit down with Molly Greene to discuss her new work on the history of Greeks from the beginning of...

E216 | Osmanlı edebiyatında ‘halk’ edebiyatı ve ‘divan’ edebiyatı kategorileri homojen midir? Onsekizinci yüzyıl elyazmaları ve bu elyazmalarındaki okuma/okuyucu notları bize neler anlatıyor? Bu podcastte, Elif Sezer ile Osmanlı edebiyatını, yazılı ve sözlü kültür tartışmaları, elyazmaları ve Fîrûzşah hikayesi üzerinden konuşuyoruz. Elif Sezer, İstanbul Şehir Üniversitesi Tarih bölümünde doktora ö...

E215 | Note: This podcast refers to visuals available at http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2015/12/tanzimat.html Within Anglophone historiography, the Tanzimat period is conventionally represented as an era of centralizing reforms emanating from the imperial center that represent a trend often labeled as "modernization" or "Westernization." Less attention has been given to what these administra...

E214 | The city of Istanbul underwent vast transformations over nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule, but it nonetheless retained its place at the center of Ottoman urban life. In this episode, Kate Fleet and Ebru Boyar discuss some of the transformations and continuities that shaped the urban history of Istanbul between 1453 and 1923. Natural disasters, shifting gender relations and practices of...

E213 | The urban history of the Ottoman Empire usually deals with subjects pertaining to the imperial capital of Istanbul. But Istanbul was only one of many important urban spaces in the empire. For example, the nearby city of Edirne, which was a significant city throughout the Ottoman period and preceded Istanbul as capital, has received considerably less attention despite its physical and symbol...

E212 | Much of the scholarship on the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence, which had its roots in the sociopolitical context of the 8th century Iraq, focuses on the early centuries of that school's development. Meanwhile, recent scholarship on the later periods emphasizes the transformations within the Hanafi jurisprudence in the early modern and modern periods, particularly as a result of the...

E211 | When employing textual sources for history, it is easy to lose track of the fact that experiences of the past were immersed in rich sensory environments in which "the word" was only a small component of daily life. How can we restore the sights, sounds, and sensations of the Ottoman past? In this episode, Nina Ergin presents some of her research involving the sonic history of the Ottoman Em...

E210 | The subject of health in the modern period is often discussed as a transition from traditional to scientific medicine and what Foucault has called "the birth of the clinic." Such perspectives view medicine and healing through the lens of changing methods, forms of knowledge, and authority. In this podcast, our guest Sylvia Wing Önder offers a slightly different approach to the subject in a...

E209 | Moroccan folk literature has drawn the attention of researchers for over a century, beginning with the earliest French colonial ethnographers' exhaustive studies of Moroccan dialects through recordings of poems, folktales, and proverbs. The influence of these stories can also be found in the work of some of Morocco's most internationally acclaimed authors such as Mohammed Mrabet. On this po...

E208 | Osmanlı tarihinde, tıpkı dünya tarihinde olduğu gibi, büyük toplumsal dönüşümlere, devrimlere, savaşlara ve barışlara dair anlatılara erkeklerin eylemleri, sesleri ve kalemleri egemen olurken, kadınlar ve çocuklar sıklıkla bu anlatıların ya dışında bırakıldı yada yardımcı öğesi olageldi. Sosyal ve feminist tarih yazımının en önemli katkısı kadın anlatılarını merkez alarak ve görünür kılarak...

E207 | The 1925 Syrian Revolt was catalyzed by contestation over authority between local notables and the French mandate government, but it soon spread throughout the mandate as a form of anti-French protest. In this episode, Reem Bailony explores the ways in which the Great Syrian Revolt was also a transnational affair, sharing her research on the activities of the Greater Syrian diaspora in the...

E206 | In this episode, Sherene Seikaly discusses the intersection of politics and economics under the British Mandate in Palestine through the lens of Palestinian capitalists, who are the subject of her new book entitled Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press). More at: http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2015/10/capitalism-palestine.html Sherene Sei...

E205 | In the 1920s and 1930s, politicians, intellectuals, and members of the public joined a lively debate about the issue of female suicide in Turkey. While we cannot know whether the rates of female suicide were actually skyrocketing during this period, the fact that so many public figures began to treat this issue as a central concern tells us a lot about the relationship between the modernizi...