As with most empires of the Early Modern period (1500-1800), the Ottomans mobilized human and material resources for warmaking on a scale that was vast and unprecedented. The present volume examines the direct and indirect effects of warmaking on Aleppo, an important Ottoman administrative center and Levantine trading city, as the empire engaged in multiple conflicts, including wars with Venice (1644-69), Poland (1672-76) and the Hapsburg Empire (1663-64, 1683-99). Focusing on urban institutions such as residential quarters, military garrisons, and guilds, and using intensively the records of local law courts, the study explores how the routinization of direct imperial taxes and the assimilation of soldiers to civilian life challenged and reshaped the city s social and political order.
Animating this book is a twofold question: In what ways are adult and popular educators responding to various harsh economic, political, cultural and environmental conditions? In doing so, are they planting seeds of hope for and imaginings of alternative futures which can connect individuals and communities locally and globally to achieve economic, ecological and social justice? The book illustrates how transformative politics of solidarity often involve actors across vastly different backgrounds. Solidarity is therefore a political relationship that is forged through particular struggles situated in place and time across power differentials. The authors put popular education to work by describing and analysing their strategies and approaches. They do so using accessible language and engaging styles. Popular education is a medium for dreaming, for imagining other futures. It is also essential for countering the wilful spreading of fake news and propagation of ignorance. Pedagogies of solidarity are necessary to building connections amongst people at a time when competitive individualism and alienation are rampant. Forging solidarity with and amongst communities is a means towards that end, and, indeed, an end in itself. “Corporate mines and agribusiness poison the water we drink, the air we breathe and the food we eat. Together with their political proxies they destroy the earth and her peoples – too many are killed because of their military, economic, religious and information wars. How do we stand up for ourselves and the earth that nourishes us against this global system? Forging Solidarity shares inspiring stories that feed our deep connection and power.” – Pregs Govender: Author of Love and Courage: A Story of Insubordination “Forging Solidarity is a critical and timely collective intervention that ponders, prods, pokes, and plays in the most generative ways. In so doing, it invites us to continue deepening our engagements with questions of responsibility and justice in relation to education everywhere.” – Richa Nagar, author of Muddying the Waters: Co-authoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism “This book inspires people to realize that not fighting against socio-economic injustices is to side with oppressors.” – Ntombi Nyathi, Programme Director of Training for Transformation
The newly awakened interest in the lives of craftspeople in Turkey is highlighted in this collection, which uses archival documents to follow Ottoman artisans from the late 15th century to the beginning of the 20th. The authors examine historical changes in the lives of artisans, focusing on the craft organizations (or guilds) that underwent substantial changes over the centuries. The guilds transformed and eventually dissolved as they were increasingly co-opted by modernization and state-building projects, and by the movement of manufacturing to the countryside. In consequence by the 20th century, many artisans had to confront the forces of capitalism and world trade without significant protection, just as the Ottoman Empire was itself in the process of dissolution.
This book discusses the role of Arabs in the Ottoman Empire for the four centuries that they were its subjects. The conventional wisdom was that the Arabs were a subject people who resented or, at best, were indifferent to their Ottoman overlords. This book argues that two social classes - Sunni religious scholars and urban notables - were willing collaborators in the imperial enterprise, and without whose support the Ottoman Empire would not have ruled the Arab lands for as long as they did.
Inspired by the “spatial turn,” this volume links for the first time the study of diplomacy and spatiality in the premodern Islamicate world to understand practices and meanings ascribed to territory and realms. Debates on the nature of the sovereign state as a territorially defined political entity are closely linked to discussions of “modernity” and to the development of the field of international relations. While scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds have long questioned the existence of such a concept as a “territorial state,” rarely have they ventured outside the European context. A closer look at the premodern Islamicate world, however, shows that “space” and “territoriality” highly mattered in the conception of interstate contacts and in the conduct and evolution of diplomacy. This volume addresses these issues over the longue durée (thirteenth to nineteenth centuries) and from various approaches and sources, including letters, chancery manuals, notarial records, travelogues, chronicles, and fatwas. The contributors also explore the various diplomatic practices and understandings of spatiality that were present throughout the Islamicate world, from Al-Andalus to the Ottoman realms. The book will be of interest to students and researchers in a range of disciplines, including international relations, diplomatic history, and Islamic studies.
A study of Islamic law and political power in the Ottoman Empires richest provincial cityWhat did Islamic law mean in the early modern period, a world of great Muslim empires? Often portrayed as the quintessential jurists law, to a large extent it was developed by scholars outside the purview of the state. However, for the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, justice was the ultimate duty of the monarch, and Islamic law was a tool of legitimation and governance. James E. Baldwin examines how the interplay of these two conceptions of Islamic law religious scholarship and royal justice undergirded legal practice in Cairo, the largest and richest city in the Ottoman provinces. Through detailed studies of the various formal and informal dispute resolution institutions and practices that formed the fabric of law in Ottoman Cairo, his book contributes to key questions concerning the relationship between the shariaa and political power, the plurality of Islamic legal practice, and the nature of centre-periphery relations in the Ottoman Empire.Key featuresOffers a new interpretation of the relationship between Islamic law and political powerPresents law as the key nexus connecting Egypt with the imperial capital Istanbul during the period of Ottoman decentralizationStudies judicial institutions such as the governors Diwan and the imperial council that have received little attention in previous scholarshipIntegrates the study of legal records with an analysis of how legal practice was represented in contemporary chroniclesProvides transcriptions and translations of a range of Ottoman legal documents
While the Ottoman conquest of the Mamluk realm in 1516-17 doubtlessly changed the balance of political power in Egypt and Greater Syria, the changes must be seen as a wide-ranging transition process. The present collection of essays provides several case studies on the changing situation during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and explains how the reconfiguration of political power affected both Egypt and Greater Syria. With reference to the first volume (2017), this second volume continues the debate on key issues of the transition period with contributions by scholars from both Mamluk and Ottoman studies. By combining these perspectives, the authors provide a more comprehensive and nuanced picture of the process of transformation from Mamluk to Ottoman rule.
This volume offers a synthesis of current expertise on contact-induced change in Arabic and its neighbours, with thirty chapters written by many of the leading experts on this topic. Its purpose is to showcase the current state of knowledge regarding the diverse outcomes of contacts between Arabic and other languages, in a format that is both accessible and useful to Arabists, historical linguists, and students of language contact.
Aleppo and its Hinterland in the Ottoman Period comprises eleven essays in English and French by leading specialists of Ottoman Syria which draw on new research in Turkish, Levantine and other archival sources.
