Late Ottoman Empire Research Articles

The Ālūsī Family between Baghdad and Istanbul: Imperial Connections and the Development of Salafi Commitments

Abstract The Ālūsīs of Baghdad were one of the most influential families in the late Ottoman Empire, producing various prolific scholars. They were inspired by Ibn Taymiyya, supported the permissibility of ijtihād, and criticized excessive Sufi practices. Although accused of being Wahhabi owing to their Salafi ideas, they maintained strong ties with the Ottoman state, holding judicial and bureaucratic positions. This article situates the family within the Ottoman imperial framework and explains how they navigated as Salafi scholars in the predominantly Ḥanafī-Māturīdī structure of the Ottoman Empire.

Forging a Lineage: Kinship, Mobility, and the Zildjian Cymbal

Abstract Renowned for its 400-year-old Ottoman/Turkish/Armenian past and produced by “America's oldest family-run business,” the Zildjian cymbal is paradoxically rendered an unremarkable “humble object” in its assumed inclusion in orchestras and bands around the world. Tracing the lineages of the Zildjians and their cymbals through historical documentation, ethnography, and the materiality of the instruments themselves, I first discuss the cymbal's shifting musical contexts and functions in Ottoman Janissary mehter bands, European orchestras, American jazz bands, and many other ensembles over the past four centuries, as well as the role of the Zildjians in this musical expansion. Then, I examine how twentieth-century negotiations of Zildjian kinship emerged in contentions over the authenticity and ownership of cymbal production. Finally, I consider how the assimilatory pressures of nation-states shaped narratives of cymbal production as well as the Zildjians’ mobilities, particularly in the context of the ethnoracialization of minority populations in the late Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic as well as the struggle of Armenian migrants to the United States to be recognized as valid U.S. American citizens at the turn of the twentieth century. By approaching the cymbal itself as the main interlocutor of this exploration, I aim to foreground the ways in which cymbals have sounded and resounded the mobility and kinships of its human creators. In doing so, I regard musical instruments as essential mediators of histories of cultural and musicological development as well as constructions of human identity and relationship, glimpsing how such objects may both reify and unsettle our epistemologies and the institutions of modern life.

CAN NACAR. Labor and Power in the Late Ottoman Empire: Tobacco Workers, Managers, and the State, 1872-1912 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019). 202pp. $99.00 cloth. ISBN 9783030315580; also in paper ($16.99) and as an e-book ($16.99).

CAN NACAR. Labor and Power in the Late Ottoman Empire: Tobacco Workers, Managers, and the State, 1872-1912 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019). 202pp. $99.00 cloth. ISBN 9783030315580; also in paper ($16.99) and as an e-book ($16.99).

The International Moral Economy of Saving Lives at Sea in the Late Ottoman Empire

This article discusses the international conditions and actions that in the mid-nineteenth century have led to the creation of a service to prevent shipwreck and save lives at the entrance to the Bosporus, at the time an increasingly important strategic and commercial global passage. The initiative for its creation originated in lobbying by the western shipping and insurance industry in Constantinople, the provision of expertise from the British Board of Trade, and the diplomacy of several foreign missions to the Ottoman government. Why did these actors go to such lengths to create a lifesaving service that could not be found at any other transit point of global trade in the nineteenth century? How to make sense of the framing of this initiative as ‘humanitarian’? The article uses the example of this Black Sea Lifesaving Service to address larger questions of the mixing of moral and material values in humanitarian projects.

Changing patterns of inclusion into old age protection in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey (1865–2020)

Who is protected by social security? This article explores this question by tracing the chronological sequence of inclusion into old age protection in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. The focus lies on how legislation defines the groups that are covered by old age pensions. We argue that the old age protection system transformed from being aimed at protecting people working for the state, towards covering diverse societal groups and aspiring to universal social protection. The Ottoman Empire institutionalised its centuries-old system of protection of elderly state employees surprisingly early, through pension funds in the late nineteenth century. The Republic of Turkey maintained this approach for several decades, pointing to continuities between the late Ottoman Empire and the early Republic. From the mid-twentieth century onwards, the state transformed old age protection with new schemes for mostly employment-based groups. The analysis reveals intriguing parallels between political inclusion and inclusion in old age protection, with key expansions in the scope of old age protection mirroring shifts in the political regime.

Late Ottoman Empire reforms: the musical policies of Sultan Mahmud II

ABSTRACT With the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, European nations made rapid progress in the fields of law, education, culture, army and economics, the fields that constitute the building blocks of states. The Ottoman Empire also embarked on reforms in order to catch up with Europe’s progress. The reforms introduced by Sultan Selim III in a variety of fields were made more comprehensive by Sultan Mahmud II. This study describes Sultan Mahmud II’s policies in the field of music. It reviews the relevant literature and historical documents from the Pera Museum, the Topkapı Palace Museum Archive and the Istanbul Rare Works Library Archive. This study found that Sultan Mahmud II implemented reform policies for music such as abolishing the Mehterhane, establishing the Muzika-i Humayun, using official anthems, hosting foreign musicians, providing members of the palace with education in Western music, having the bands participate in official ceremonies, and encouraging opera and theater.

Greek Orthodox Communities, Religious Festivals, and National Identity in the Late Ottoman Empire

Abstract This article investigates the extent to which religious festivals played a formative role in shaping dynamic relations between Greek Orthodox Ottomans and the Ottoman and Greek states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A considerable number of festivals held on recurring cycles in the Ottoman Empire served as a unifying force by bringing together Greek Orthodox groups hailing from disparate geographical locations in the Ottoman Empire, Greece, and elsewhere. Although they were primarily religious occasions, these festivals, especially Easter, carried substantial cultural and social importance since they served as a crucial catalyst in the emergence and articulation of nationalist ideals among Ottoman Greeks.

Protesting exile: Cretan refugee activists in the late Ottoman Empire

AbstractFocusing on the long aftermath of the July Revolution of 1908 in the Ottoman Empire, this article examines the intellectual and popular climate of protest in the context of a crisis of sovereignty over Crete. Keeping the geographical focus on İstanbul and on the regions receiving tens of thousands of civilians displaced from this Mediterranean island around the turn of the twentieth century, I discuss how multiple segments of a refugee population animated a mass protest movement. Pursuing a multi-class perspective, the article demonstrates how the mobilization of the displaced rested on the actions of mutually reinforcing social clusters: an upper-class cohort of Cretans based in İstanbul and more numerous but equally vocal underprivileged groups from the provinces. Approaching displacement as a condition that generates not only victimhood but also impetus for collective action, I argue that the displaced Cretans became the leading agents of mass politics in the post-revolutionary Empire.

An Orient of One’s Own: Music and Islamic Modernism in the Late Ottoman Empire

Abstract During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Muslim intellectuals sought to articulate new forms of Islamic thought and practice that would be suitable for the modern world. Islamic modernist movements drew on concepts of civilization, progress and science that were integral to European imperialism while also constituting a critical response to the latter. In this essay, I examine the views of prominent Ottoman Muslim reformists concerning music, and situate them within a transnational debate about Islam and modernity. While the views of earlier reformers were shaped by Eurocentric notions of musical progress, an oppositional discourse emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. This discourse, associated especially with Rauf Yekta (1871–1935), appropriated the idea of ‘the Orient’ in order to establish a pan-Islamic narrative of music history, which also emphasized the scientific aspects of Islamicate music theory. In the final part of the essay, I discuss how debates about musical reform were related to the political dynamics of the late Ottoman Empire, particularly in terms of religious and ethnic identity. In conclusion, I argue that the discursive categories of the late nineteenth century continue to underly music historiographies both in the West and in other places, precisely as a consequence of the global connections that emerged during this period. In order to write more ‘global’ histories of music, it is therefore necessary to move beyond the analysis of Western colonialist representations by engaging more closely with non-European sources and discourses, which reveal more entangled and ambivalent stories about music, empire and modernity.

Imagined Musical Geographies in a Global Age: Views from Jodhpur, Istanbul and Buenos Aires, c. 1870–1930

Abstract This collection of papers explores the intellectual history of music in global context during the period between around 1870 and 1930. Following an introduction that discusses the state of the field, each of the three papers presents a case study that explores the intersection between music and global history from diverse perspectives. The first paper discusses a Hindi music treatise published in 1896. By situating this work within multiple ‘significant geographies’, the paper highlights the limitations of ‘global’ approaches that neglect the more immediate musical, social and intellectual environments of their subjects. The second paper analyses the intersection between music and Islamic modernism in the late Ottoman Empire. It argues that a Eurocentric understanding of music history propagated by earlier reformists was succeeded at the end of the nineteenth century by an oppositional narrative that drew on the geopolitical imaginary of pan-Islamism. The final paper discusses the work of the Argentine composer Alberto Williams, particularly in relation to his views on race and national music. The paper demonstrates how contemporary scientific theories such as positivism and Social Darwinism contributed to a narrative of national musical development that created hierarchies of musical genres and excluded Argentine composers of African descent.

Religious Reform in the Late Ottoman Empire: Institutional Change and the Professionalisation of the Ulema By Erhan Bektaş

<i>Religious Reform in the Late Ottoman Empire: Institutional Change and the Professionalisation of the Ulema</i> By Erhan Bektaş

Kaçak electricity: negotiating rights and privileges in the Ottoman Empire during the imperialist era

ABSTRACT What are the political and economic relationships between public utilities, companies, states and people that contemporary societies inherited from the age of imperialism, when new energy infrastructures and technologies started spreading across the world? Through a historical-anthropological exploration of kaçak (informal/illicit/smuggled) electricity use and exchange during the late Ottoman Empire, this article analyzes how the relationships between companies, state and consumers were negotiated at the outset of electrification and how the moral economic discourses established in this era continues to influence the current nexus. By examining the terms of formal and informal access to electricity in the Ottoman Empire, first as a privilege for the few and then as a public good, I show how people living in the periphery during capitalist markets’ expansion to the Ottoman Empire related to electricity as a new commodity. Through examining kaçak use and exchange in the process of Ottoman electrification, I argue that the question of kaçak is a moral economic discourse on who is a citizen worthy or deserving of access to public utilities and infrastructure, extending to the relationship between economic privileges and political rights that is also at the center of the current global debates about neoliberalism and privatization.

Competing Visions of Morality in Politics: A New Perspective on the Ideological Currents of the Late Ottoman Empire

Abstract This article focuses on the debates about morality in the late Ottoman Empire and their lasting impact on modern Turkey. Studying different moral viewpoints offers the possibility of a new classification for the study of Ottoman intellectual history which, by relying on a political framework, has, to date, dealt only with certain ideological currents such as Ottomanism, Turkism, Islamism, and Westernism. Through a careful reading of the writings of Tevfik Fikret, Ziya Gökalp, Ahmed Naim, and Mehmet Akif, we focus on their different views of morality which can be classified as “universal morality”, “national morality”, and “Islamic morality”. Differing, even competing moral visions of morality were decisive in shaping the intellectual, cultural, and political currents of the time.

The Ottoman Legacy of the Connected Histories of Demographic Engineering: The Case of the Ottoman Greeks of Western Anatolia

ABSTRACT Is there any relationship between the seemingly separate histories of demographic engineering that affected millions of Ottoman peoples of Albanian, Arab, Bulgarian, Circassian, Georgian, Greek, Jewish or Kurdish origin and the Muslim refugees from the Balkans and Russian territories during the late-Ottoman period? Does this historical legacy play a role in the nation-state building processes of the Republic of Turkey and other post-Ottoman nation-states? What may sound like simple and rhetorical questions, taken at their face value, provide a scholarly framework for a more connected and holistic history of demographic engineering. Focusing on the personal micro-histories of the victims and perpetrators of demographic engineering clearly demonstrates how such histories are entangled with each other, and their role in the creation of the post-Ottoman world. The article argues that, unique as it may seem, a segment in the life of a Unionist-appointed and Muslim nationalist Ottoman civil servant; Ferid Bey, who was both a victim and a culprit of ethnic violence, points out to a pattern that connects histories of demographic engineering designed primarily by competing nationalists in the late Ottoman Empire. It underlines the impact of this legacy on the nation-state building processes of the post-Ottoman world.

From Silvio Pellico to Selahattin Demirtaş: Prison Literature and Literary Polemics in Turkey

ABSTRACT Selahattin Demirtaş’s fiction has led to some fierce discussions in the literary world in Turkey. The polemics were a reminder that prison literature, broadly defined, always was a hotly debated genre in the literary sphere of the late Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey. Indeed, the publication of a Turkish translation of a classic example of the genre—namely Silvio Pellico’s Le mie prigioni, translated by Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem in 1874—caused a vivid reaction by the Young Ottoman reformer Namık Kemal. This article looks at how the debate on the partial Turkish translation of Pellico’s memoirs that combined both aesthetic concerns and political sensitivities is not without similarities with debates about Demirtaş’s literary work. After a first part outlining varied responses to Demirtaş’s short stories and novels, the article analyses Namık Kemal’s “Mes prisons Muahazanamesi” (A Criticism of Mes prisons) and brings to the fore those aspects that were to become characteristic for future literary polemics. That Pellico’s first Ottoman Turkish critic should have been himself an author and activist who was repressed, incarcerated, and exiled for his political views and engagement, shows how essential prison literature was in the development of modern literature in Turkish.

Turkey – 100 Years of Longing for Modernity

The text traces the painful development of Turkish modernity – a process of still ongoing clashes between the aspirations of a part of the elites to be “modern Europeans”, the unquestioning certainty of another part of them that “modernity” and “Europe/West” are by no means equivalent, and the traditional mentality of broad segments of Turkish society. At the heart of the study are two extremes: high literature (the works of Orhan Pamuk) and popular culture (television series), which reveals the wide register of possibilities for tracing the longing for modernity and its (un)realisation in Turkish reality. The original synonymy of “modernity” and “the West” that fueled the longing – from the late Ottoman Empire, through the Republican period until the end of the millennium – gradually disintegrated. In the new millennium, the official notion of achieved modernity increasingly asserted itself, however not as juxtaposition with the West, but in spite of it.

The conceptual and doctrinal evolution on irregular warfare in Türkiye: 1919-1952

ABSTRACT This study investigates the evolution of concepts and doctrine on irregular warfare in Türkiye from 1919 to 1952, focusing on two primary research inquiries. It explores the conceptual approach towards irregular warfare and delves into the treatment of the subject and the development of doctrine. Using a qualitative research methodology, discourse and content analysis have been employed, drawing from various primary and secondary sources. The analysis reveals that concepts such as small war (harb-i sagir), banditry (eşkıyalık), committee (komita) and gang (çete) were acknowledged during the late Ottoman Empire, with early written examples contributing to doctrine development in the 1930s. It also accentuates inherent terminological differences to imply the actors of insurgents and government forces, although irregular warfare can be employed by both.

The Transformation of the Ottoman State’s Relationship with the Nusayri/ʿAlawi Community in the Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACT This article aims to examine the changing nature of the Ottoman central administration’s policies towards Nusayris in the nineteenth century. In different contexts of space and time, the Ottoman authorities employed different measures of collaboration, oppression and persecution, while the Nusayris responded to these policies by either resistance or accommodation. Drawing on various sources from the Ottoman archives, the article singles out various contexts in time and space, in which the Ottoman state – both centrally and locally – condemned them as ‘heretics’ or, alternatively within this fluid continuum, accommodated them to local political and administrative practice and needs. A close analysis of the practices and the terminology brought to bear in dealing with the Nusayris suggests an adaptive, ever changing and dynamic relationship of the state to these parts of the population. The findings presented here thus urge the historicization of instances of persecution and marginalization in order to come to terms with complex religio-political entanglements and, finally, to delineate a more nuanced perspective on the history of this community in the late Ottoman Empire.

Of hovels and homes: consumption, class, and domestic space in early republican Turkey

In histories of preventing and treating tuberculosis, many physicians came to prioritize the place and role of the home by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This was as true in the West as it was in the late Ottoman Empire. Also common, practices of scapegoating the poor and other marginalized populations as TB’s sources and carriers were pervasive. In this article, we examine how ideas of health, TB, and home converged to accentuate class in the ostensibly objective public health literature and propaganda of late Ottoman and early republican Turkey. Analyzing both textual and graphic narratives found in primary sources written in Ottoman Turkish, our study explores how officials – lacking resources and alternatives – opted to pursue ambitious public health propaganda campaigns to at least achieve broad educational inoculation of the population. In doing so, rudimentary matters of treatment were taught and legislated in ways that aligned with the contemporary propagation of national citizenship.

The Fragility of Governmentality and Domination: The State, Carceral Labour and “(In)docile Resistance” in the Late Ottoman Empire

The “power relations” in the Ottoman Empire were gradually governmentalised and centralised through modernist reforms in the long nineteenth century. As part of this process, the practice of intramural and extramural carceral labour became an important element in the Ottoman penal system in the late empire. Despite the state’s emphasis on the rehabilitative effect of prison labour in legal regulations, particularly regarding intramural carceral labour, the expansion of the practice into extramural activities reveals that providing economic benefits was another driving force in the Ottoman case. In this line, extramural labour was used as a complement to free labour rather than a substitute for it. However, the adverse reactions of prisoners to carceral labour were just as important as the regulations, disciplinary practices, and the administrative and financial limits of the state in determining the success of the practice. By focusing on the resistance strategies of prisoners, including escapes, writing petitions, collective walkouts, slowdowns, strikes, and pilferage, this paper aims to amplify their voices. This prisoner-centred view enables us to take a Foucauldian perspective in the context of power relations and resistance to such practices and to illustrate how prisoners, as “indocile bodies,” weakened the governmentality and domination of the state through many forms of “indocile resistance.”