Ottoman History Podcast

E 427 | How do social networks determine the results of government reform? In this episode we examine this quesiton during the Tanzimat reform era (1839-76) with historical sociologist Yonca Köksal. Her research focuses on the differing outcomes of the Tanzimat in two core provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Ankara and Edirne. Applying social network analysis to imperial correspondence and provincial...

A preview of our interview with historian Yiğit Akın about how war transformed Ottoman society. Thanks to Sara Afonso and Sato Moughalian for music

E426 | In this episode, we sit down with Anahit and Gohar, creators of Akanjogh: Armenia's first podcast about feminism. The name of their program plays on the Armenian words for "earring" and "take heed," and the goal of this program is to grab a new Armenian audience of podcast listeners by the ear and draw their attention to enduring importance of feminist thought in the context of Armenia's ne...

E 425 | In this episode, Alp Eren Topal traces the history of medical metaphors for describing and diagnosing state and society in Ottoman political thought. From the balancing of humors prescribed by Galenic medicine to the lifespan of the state described by Ibn Khaldun and the germ theory of nineteenth-century biomedicine, we explore some of the ways people thought about the state and its health...

E424 | The 1001 Nights, an Arabic collection of tales, have been translated into numerous languages and adapted to many cultural contexts. In this episode, we explore the impact of the 1001 Nights on the history of cinema. As our guest Samhita Sunya explains, the 1001 Nights corpus influenced Western cinema from the earliest decades of the medium's rise. However, in our conversation, we focus on t...

E423 | When the Ottoman state granted the province of Egypt to the family of Mehmed Ali Pasha in the 19th century, neither party much cared where Egypt's western border lay. As Matt Ellis argues in his book, Desert Borderland, sovereignty in the eastern Sahara, the expanse of desert spanning Egypt and Ottoman Libya, was not simply imposed by modern, centralized states. In this episode, we discuss...

E 422 | Edebiyat ve kurmacanın tarihyazımına sunduğu imkânlar nelerdir? Bu bölümde, aynı kuşaktan 14 genç tarihçinin arşiv belgesi, gazete kupürü, günlük, mektup gibi tarihsel bir malzemeden ya da metinden yola çıkarak kurguladığı öykülerden oluşan "Tarihçilerden Başka Bir Hikâye" kitabı üzerine sohbet ediyoruz. Kitabın editörlerinden Fatih Artvinli ve Ebru Aykut ile tarihsel gerçeklik, edebiyat v...

E 421 | How did the experience of pregnancy and childbirth change in the Ottoman Empire in the context of nineteenth-century reforms? In this episode, we discuss how the question of managing a "population" become a key concern for the Ottoman state, bringing new opportunities and difficulties for Ottoman mothers and midwives alike. Questions about childbirth also became enmeshed in late-imperial d...

E 420 | How did an Irish-born Russian nobleman serving in the Russian army end up an Ottoman slave and valet to an Ottoman-Albanian officer? And what possibilities existed for his eventual release? In this episode, Will Smiley traces the history of Ottoman laws of captivity and ransom in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, showing how older practices of enslavement and ransom transformed into...

E 419 | Ottoman literature is heavily associated with verse, namely, Ottoman court poetry, and to some extent, folk literature. Ottoman stories, however, remain unexplored, even though they circulated in the empire and entertained many. For us, today, they are an invaluable source to study daily life, gender and space in the early modern Ottoman world. What is an Ottoman story? What do Ottoman sto...

E 418 | Bu bölümde Egemen Yılgür ile 19. yüzyılın son çeyreğindeki kitlesel göç hareketlerinin yarattığı konut talebiyle eş zamanlı olarak yaygınlaşmaya başlayan teneke mahalleleri üzerine yürüttüğü araştırmaları üzerine sohbet ettik. Bomonti, Nişantaşı ve Kumkapı'daki teneke mahalleleri temelinde, bu mekânsal odakların oluşumuna yol açan toplumsal ve siyasi süreçleri inceledik; göç ve kent yoksul...

E417 | After their expulsion from the Iberian peninsula during the 15th century, Jewish communities settled throughout the Mediterranean, with many finding new homes in the cities of the ascendant Ottoman Empire. Centuries later, Ottoman Jews descended from this early modern diaspora still spoke a language related to Spanish, often referred to as Ladino. During the late 19th century, a new wave of...

E416 | What made for a good poet in the Ottoman Empire? It is a question that far too few historians tackle because Ottoman poetry, especially that of the court, is often regarded as inaccessible. In this podcast, Sooyong Kim brings to life the social world of Ottoman poets, focusing in particular on Zati, a poet plying his trade in the imperial court in the first half of the sixteenth century. We...

E 415 | Bu bölümde Erol Ülker ile 1918 - 1923 yılları arasında İstanbul'da işgal güçlerine karşı oluşan direniş hareketini, bu hareket içerisinde yer alan İttihatçılar'dan, komünistlere farklı kesimlerin siyasal faaliyetlerini, birbirileri ile olan ilişkilerini ve gerilimlerini konuştuk. Ayrıca dönem içinde çok canlı olan işçi hareketine ve aynı zamanda da İstanbullu gayr-i Müslimler tarafından bu...

E414 | Abdul Rahman Munif is one of the most celebrated authors in the Arabic language. In this episode, we sit down with literature scholar Suja Sawafta to learn about the social and political experiences that shaped Munif as an author, and in particular, we explore the role of the environment in some his most important works such as Cities of Salt . We discuss why Munif's politics led him to lit...

E 413 | Our latest podcast in collaboration with The Southeast Passage examines how Kemalism as a political category has been used widely and often ambiguously throughout the history of the Turkish Republic in public discourse as well as in historiography. In this episode, we discuss Kemalism from an innovative transnational perspective. The making of Kemalism was embedded in hybridity and circula...

E412 | During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hundreds of thousands of people from the Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman states emigrated to the United States. Among them were musicians, singers, and artists who catered to the new diaspora communities that emerged in cities like New York and Boston. During the early 20th century, with the emergence of a commercial recording industry in the U...

Victoria Saker Woeste was educated at the University of Virginia (B.A. 1983) and the University of California at Berkeley (M.A. 1985, Ph. D. 1990). Since 1994 she has been a member of the research faculty at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago, where she specializes in U.S. legal history and writes about political economy, hate speech, antisemitism, and modern American political conservatism. M...

Justene Hill Edwards is an historian of African-American history, focusing on the history of American slavery. She is finishing her first book, Black Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and Capitalist Enterprise in South Carolina (under contract with Columbia University Press, in the Columbia Series on the History of U.S. Capitalism). More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2019/05/slavery-capitali...

Tony C. Perry is a professor in the Carter G. Woodson Institute and Department for African-American and African Studies. He researches the environmental history of slavery in Maryland, specifically enslaved people's relationship to the environment. More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2019/05/perry.html

Sarah Milov is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, where she teaches courses on modern US history. Her first book, The Cigarette: A Political History, will be published by Harvard University Press in the fall of 2019. Reading list: Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better...

E411 | Leo lived in New York City with his family. Born and educated in the cosmopolitan Ottoman capital of Istanbul, he was now part of the vibrant and richly-textured social fabric of America's largest metropolis as one one of the tens of thousands of Sephardic Jews who migrated to the US. Though he spoke four languages, Leo held jobs such as garbage collector and shoeshine during the Great Depr...

E 410 | Ottoman History Podcast'in bu bölümünde Doğan Çetinkaya ile 1908 - 1914 yılları arasında Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nda ortaya çıkan boykot hareketlerine odaklanarak, II. Meşrutiyet dönemindeki kitle hareketi mefhumunu, toplumsal sınıfların siyasal alandaki yeni rollerini, Müslüman-Türk milliyetçiliğin aşağıdan toplumsal bir olgu olarak gelişimini ve Osmanlı toplumsal ve siyasal ikliminde bu kı...

E409 | In 1827, Hussein Dey, the Ottoman governor of Algiers, hit a French consul on the nose with a fly whisk during a dispute over unpaid French debts. And as the story goes, the rest is history. France soon invaded Algeria and stayed for over 130 years. But as our guest in this episode Jennifer Sessions explains, France's decision to invade and colonize Algeria beginning in 1830 was far less ar...

E408 | Colonialism and violence are frequently paired in studies of the modern Middle East, but environment and violence are less commonly paired. But in this episode, Jennifer Derr explains the indelible connection between the two in a conversation about her recent monograph The Lived Nile: Environment, Disease, and Material Colonial Economy in Egypt. According to Derr, the transformation of Egyp...