Beshara B. Doumani. Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean: A Social History

Abstract

Beshara Doumani’s book deals with the family dynamics in the Ottoman Arab lands before the Western hegemony ruled over there, focusing on “three of the areas usually ignored in the scholarship: provincial regions, the middle centuries of the Ottoman rule, and middling propertied urban groups.” (p. 39) Challenging “big isms” such as Orientalism or Islamism, he aims at historicizing family in Nablus and Tripoli in order to offer a new and better frame for family, gender and property of this time and freeing them from stereotypes. The relatively large time period of this study is two centuries spanning from 1660 to 1860 on the ground that “family life is best measured by generations, not decades.” (p. 40) The author primarily relies on the Ottoman court records and utilizes stories of people derived from these records as the skeleton of the chapters. To him, these registers create a “communal textual memory,” therefore worthy of attention of not only legalists, but also of social historians to delve into daily life of ordinary individuals.