Ottoman History Podcast

E089 | Günümüzde tarihin nasıl algılandığı, yeniden üretildiği, sembolize ve politize edildiği tartışılırken, geçmiş toplumların kendi geçmişlerini nasıl algıladıkları sıklıkla gözden kaçmaktadır. Bu podcastımızda Yard. Doç. Dr. Tülün Değirmenci resimli el yazmalarındaki I. Selim (1512-1520) imgesi üzerinden 17. yüzyıl Osmanlı şehirlilerinin tarih algısını inceliyor. Siyaset, popüler algı ve tarih...

E087 | Genelde hükümdar merkezli bir siyasi tarih anlayışı geliştiren Osmanlı tarihyazımı ironik bir şekilde bu hükümdarlar üzerine kapsamlı biyografiler üretememiştir. Bu podcastimizde Collège de France ve Sorbonne Üniversitesi’nden Dr. Güneş Işıksel ile II. Selim’in şehzadelik dönemine odaklanarak üzerine pek fazla bilgimizin olmadığı bir alan olan Osmanlı diplomasisini inceledik. Modern Osmanlı...

E073 | Birçok araştırmacı zengin ve köklü bir geleneğe sahip olan İslam hat sanatının ortaya çıkışını İslam dininin insan suretinin resmedilmesini yasaklaması ile açıklamaya çalışmıştır. Ancak, bu yorum İslam dünyasının kültür ve tarihi hakkında bir takım yanlış çıkarsamalara olduğu kadar, Batının tarihi ve kültürel gelişimini normatif olarak kabul eden modası geçmiş bir tarihsel metodolojiye de d...

E048 | The early modern era was a period of tremendous fluidity in terms of borders of identities. In this podcast, we discuss the life and times of Sefer Muratowicz, an Armenian merchant born in Ottoman Anatolia during the late sixteenth century who settled in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and became an envoy to the Safavid Shah in Persia through his role as a merchant. Sefer left an account...

E093 | Osmanlı tarihçileri uzun bir zamandır 17. yüzyılın krizlerle dolu ilk yarısında klasik Osmanlı kurumlarının geçirdiği büyük dönüşümlere odaklanmaktadır. Bu podcastımızda Taylan Akyıldırım le Anadolu’yu tamamen etkisi altına alıp önemli siyasi, iktisadi ve toplumsal etkiler yaratan Celali İsyanları üzerine konuştuk. Küçük Buz Çağı, Fiyat Devrimi, Osmanlı gerilemesi, Askeri Devrim gibi paradi...

E072 | Türkçe yaptığımız ilk podcastimizde Kahraman Şakul ile Yeni Askeri Tarih üzerine konuşuyoruz. Aynı zamanda genel bir literatür değerlendirmesini de içeren bu podcastimizde, Yrd. Doç. Dr. Şakul bize Osmanlı tarihyazımında görece ihmal edilmiş bir alan olan Askeri Tarihin sadece savaş ve seferlerin tarihi olmadığını belirterek, verdiği çeşitli örneklerle bu tarihin sosyal, ekonomik ve kültüre...

E039 | For at least two centuries, Western countries have used international criminal, civil, and commercial law as a means of influencing the Ottoman and Turkish governments, leading some to speak of a phenomenon called legal imperialism, and while these efforts have impacted policies in Turkey, they have not always achieved their intended effect. In this episode, Chris Gratien discusses an inter...

E077 | The entity known today as the Ottoman Empire is often taken by historians as an exemplary model of an imperial state. Yet, until the nineteenth century, Ottomans had never referred to their state as an empire in their writings or bureaucratic records and diplomatic correspondences. In this podcast, Einar Wigen explores the curious absence of the term "empire" within the Ottoman vocabulary,...

E097 | Osmanlı toplumunun yaşamının hızla değiştiği bir dönem olan 19. yüzyılda sanat alanında da birçok yenilikler ortaya çıktı. Bu podcastın birinci bölümünde Doç. Dr. Melda Üner ile batılılaşma ve modernleşme paradigmaları çerçevesinde 19. yüzyıl Türk Edebiyatı’nda müzik ögesinin nasıl kullanıldığını konuşacağız. Dönemin bir çok edebi eseri üzerinde yoğunlaşarak Tanzimat ve Servet-i Fünûn gibi...

E136 | When are policies driven by prejudice, and when do policies give rise to prejudiced representations? In this episode, Nicholas Danforth explores depictions of Middle East politics in the Turkish satirical periodical Akbaba from the 1930s onward in an attempt to understand the politics of representation. - See more at: http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2013/12/arabs-turkish-eyes-politics....

E100 | Bu ezber bozan podcastımızda Prof. Dr. Cem Behar bizlere 16. yüzyılın ortalarında zuhur eden geleneksel Osmanlı/Türk musikisinin modernizasyon projesi çerçevesinde bir çok "icat edilmiş gelenek" ile nasıl inkıta'ya uğratıldığını anlatıyor. Günümüz Türk Sanat musikisi ile Osmanlı dönemindeki musikinin kompozisyon ve icraları arasındaki farklılıklar üzerinde durarak "gelenek"in yerini nasıl "...

E062 | Historians have used classical Ottoman texts to explore social issues such as sexuality, with compiled manuscripts from various literary genres often forming a data-mine for historical information. However, this type of selective reading has often distorted or obscured the original meaning and context of literary works. Sometimes, texts that appear erotic or sexual in nature such as gazel c...

E114 | During the interwar period, nationalist and socialist movements throughout the world looked to the peasant as both the source and object of state programs wherein establishing a link between the center and the provinces was a critical part of fostering the sense of nation devised by elite intellectuals. In Turkey, the ideas of Ziya Gökalp regarding the importance of the Anatolian villager i...

E081 | Osman Hamdi Bey is recognized today as the foremost artist of the late-Ottoman period. Yet, in his time, it was his unique access to the ancient past as the head of Istanbul's archaeology museum that drew the interest of his Western contemporaries. In this episode, Emily Neumeier retraces the story of a rare Osman Hamdi Bey painting (At the Mosque Door, 1890 - click for high res image) that...

E104 | Stories of insincere conversion under duress and secret Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire give the impression that many Christians lived in hiding from a Muslim majority. However, as Zeynep Türkyılmaz argues in this podcast, the phenomenon of Crypto-Christianity is really more complex, as diversity and heterogeneity among the Ottoman Empire's rural communities gave rise to "in-bet...

E124 Part 2 | While science was once understood by historians "on its own terms," i.e. as a rational means of arriving at objective truths about the natural world, over the past decades, historians of science have illustrated the numerous ways in which scientific production is rooted in social and material contexts. In part one of this two-part series on the history of science, Nir Shafir leads us...

E127 | Historians have come to understand the Enlightenment, a cultural movement emphasizing reason and individualism, as a phenomenon of increasingly early origins that pervaded early modern European intellectual circles. This begs the question: as one of Europe's largest polities of the period, was the Ottoman Empire also party to this intellectual trend. In this episode, Harun Küçük describes w...

E137 | What does it mean to wield or possess a certain technology? What are the limits to associational claims to technical expertise or superiority? In this podcast, Daniel Pontillo considers these cultural and social dimensions of technology through a study of the travel narrative Across Asia on a Bicycle, in which two American men set out at in the heat of the late nineteenth-century bicycle cr...

E040 | Human beings live their lives under a state of constant observation that is both perceived and real. Widespread folk traditions such as the notion of the "evil eye" (Turkish: nazar) reflect a belief in the profound power of the mere act of looking, which psychoanalysts such as Lacan have developed into theories of gaze (French: le regard) and the gaze effect that have gained resonance withi...

E061 | Groups variously labeled as nomadic and tribal formed an integral part of Ottoman society, but because their communities exercised a wide degree of autonomy, they are often represented as somehow separate or "other" to urban and settled populations. However, the social history of these communities reveals that tribes and their members were involved in the continual transformation of Ottoman...

E130 | Inheritance and the transfer of property across generations connects the history of families to a broader analysis of political economy, particularly in societies where wealth and capital are deeply rooted in the earth. In this episode, Zoe Griffith provides a framework for the study of family history through the lens of the mulberry tree and its produce in a study of Ottoman court records...

E144 | The capitulations, a series of bilateral agreements with European states and merchants, are sometimes held up as symbols of early Ottoman concessions to European powers and the beginnings of Ottoman economic decline. This misreading, which is in part the product of a misinterpretation of the word "capitulation" itself, impedes a proper understanding of Ottoman Empire and the legal context o...

E143 | The Ottoman Empire occupies an unusual place among the competing imperial powers of the nineteenth century. On one hand, a weak military position often forced the Ottomans to accept unfavorable economic and political arrangements while playing other empires off each other to maintain autonomy. On the other, we find expansion of state institutions throughout the Ottoman domains and an increa...

E132 | Alchemy has traditionally been understood as a pseudoscience or protoscience that eventually gave way to modern chemistry. Less often have the writings of alchemists been studied on their own terms. Yet, given the endurance and prolific nature of the alchemical traditions and the involvement of important figures of "modern science" such as Isaac Newton in the field of alchemy, a teleologica...

E140 | Historians have begun to explore the paradox of the identification of a would-be universal form of rational knowledge known as science with the particular historical experience of Europe. This begs the question: how have new forms of scientific knowledge been translated, received, assimilated, and engaged outside of the cultural contexts within which they were produced? In this episode, Mar...