Living in the Ottoman Realm brings the Ottoman Empire to life in all of its ethnic, religious, linguistic, and geographic diversity. The contributors explore the development and transformation of identity over the long span of the empire's existence. They offer engaging accounts of individuals, groups, and communities by drawing on a rich array of primary sources, some available in English translation for the first time. These materials are examined with new methodological approaches to gain a deeper understanding of what it meant to be Ottoman. Designed for use as a course text, each chapter includes study questions and suggestions for further reading.
The long and elaborate past of the Ottoman Empire, encompassing a wide geographical area, presents a mosaic of knowledge and acquisition of experience. Upon this complicated and plural nature, Ottoman history looks like a puzzle that requires a wealth of skills and approaches to decipher. The foremost step to achieve this sophisticated task is to go beyond the borders of formalistic narratives and gain a multiplicity of perspectives through collaborative studies. This book is one of the outputs of such cooperation toward a more comprehensive Ottoman historiography. The first part, entitled “Religious Identities, Intercommunal Relations and Social Life”, focuses on the communal structure of the Ottoman society. In this part, the transformation of the multilingual, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious empire and of the world around it is discussed on the basis of changes in social and administrative structures. The second part, “Administration and Business in the Center or Periphery”, consists of the studies on the administrative instruments of the political and economic reforms in the 19th century Ottoman worldand the way these instruments reshaped market mechanisms. The third part, entitled “Personal Documents, Public Prints and Medical Approaches”, contains articles on personal narratives, diaries, travel notes, and the Ottoman press. The final part, which discusses the military and geopolitical strategies that the Ottoman Empire followed throughout its journey from a principality to an empire, is entitled “Warfare and Intelligence”. In the book, a panorama of the empire’s lifestyle is manifested, and the course of history is outlined from various perspectives. It analyses the story of the Ottomans based on various personal, communal, social, economic, and military affairs.
This book provides a general overview of the daily life in a vast empire which contained numerous ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities. The Ottoman Empire was an Islamic imperial monarchy that existed for over 600 years. At the height of its power in the 16th and 17th centuries, it encompassed three continents and served as the core of global interactions between the east and the west. And while the Empire was defeated after World War I and dissolved in 1920, the far-reaching effects and influences of the Ottoman Empire are still clearly visible in today's world cultures. Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire allows readers to gain critical insight into the pluralistic social and cultural history of an empire that ruled a vast region extending from Budapest in Hungary to Mecca in Arabia. Each chapter presents an in-depth analysis of a particular aspect of daily life in the Ottoman Empire.
The Ottoman Empire was a hub of flourishing intellectual fervor, geopolitical power, and enlightened pluralistic rule. At the helm of its ascent was the omnipotent Sultan Selim I (1470-1520), who, with the aid of his extraordinarily gifted mother, Gülbahar, hugely expanded the empire, propelling it onto the world stage. Aware of centuries of European suppression of Islamic history, Alan Mikhail centers Selim's Ottoman Empire and Islam as the very pivots of global history, redefining such world-changing events as Christopher Columbus's voyages - which originated, in fact, as a Catholic jihad that would come to view Native Americans as somehow "Moorish" - the Protestant Reformation, the transatlantic slave trade, and the dramatic Ottoman seizure of the Middle East and North Africa. Drawing on previously unexamined sources and written in gripping detail, Mikhail's groundbreaking account vividly recaptures Selim's life and world. An historical masterwork, God's Shadow radically reshapes our understanding of a world we thought we knew.A leading historian of his generation, Alan Mikhail, Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Yale University, has reforged our understandings of the past through his previous three prize-winning books on the history of Middle East.
Centred on the socio-economic life of Anatolia in the Ottoman period, this volume examines aspects of production, local and international trade, consumption and the role of the state, both at a local and a central level.
The Ottoman Empire was one of the most powerful empires in history, known for its military prowess, multi-cultural make-up, and advances in art and architecture. Positioned at the crossroads of East and West, at its height it encompassed most of Southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. In existence from the late 13th century until 1922, the Ottoman legacy can still be felt today throughout the Balkans and the Arab world in the areas of politics, diplomacy, education, language, and religion. This comprehensive volume is a valuable addition to world history curricula and adds a level of historical understanding to the current conflicts within the Western and Islamic worlds.
Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul explores biography writing and dream narratives in seventeenth-century Istanbul. It focuses on the prominent biographer ‘Aṭā’ī (d. 1637) and with his help shows how learned circles narrated dreams to assess their position in the Ottoman enterprise. This book demonstrates that dreams provided biographers not only with a means to form learned communities in a politically fragile landscape but also with a medium to debate the correct career paths and social networks in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Istanbul. By adopting a comparative approach, this book engages with current scholarly dialogues about life-writing, dreams, and practices of remembrance in Habsburg Spain, Safavid Iran, Mughal India and Ming China. Recent studies have shown the shared rhythms between these contemporaneous dynasties and the Ottomans, and there is now a strong interest in comparative approaches to examining cultural life. This first English-language monograph on Ottoman dreamscapes addresses this interest and introduces a world where dreams changed lives, the dead appeared in broad daylight, and biographers invited their readers to the gardens of remembrance.
This book dedicated to Suraiya Faroqhi shows that the early modern world was not only characterized by its having been split up into states with closed frontiers. Writing history “from the bottom”, by treating the Ottoman Empire and other countries as “subjects of history”, reduces the importance of political borders for doing historical research. Each social, economic and religious group had its own world-view and in most of the cases the borders of these communities were not identical with the political frontiers. Regarding the Ottoman Empire and the other early modern states as systems of different ecumenical communities rather than only as political units offers a different approach to a better understanding of the various ways in which their subjects interacted. In this context the term ecumenical community designates social, religious and economic groups building up cross-border communities. Different ecumenical communities overlapped within the boundaries of a state or in a specific area and gave them their distinctive characters. This festschrift for Suraiya Faroqhi aims to describe some of the close contacts between various ecumenical communities within and beyond the Ottoman borders.
