This article focuses on a specific subset of archival materials: suicide-related news reports published in nineteenth century Ottoman Turkish newspapers, identified through digital tools such as Wikilala and Müteferriqa. Among these, the study selects only those articles that provide statistical data on suicide rates in Europe or offer a critique of Western civilization. The analysis reveals that the Ottoman press was well aware of the increasing suicide rates in the West and familiar with emerging European claims that associated these rates with civilizational development. In some cases, the reports not only relayed but also echoed such interpretations. Interestingly, the lack of similar statistical efforts within the Ottoman Empire (and the absence of critique regarding this gap) suggests that suicide was largely perceived as a Western phenomenon. The Ottoman press employed suicide statistics as a rhetorical and discursive tool for expressing broader critiques of Western modernity. Since Ottoman intellectuals were already engaged in debates over the adoption of Western civilization, especially concerning its moral and cultural dimensions, suicide became integrated into this wider framework of scepticism and critique. Rather than presenting suicide as a domestic issue, Ottoman newspapers largely reported on it as a problem confined to Europe, reinforcing the notion that it was a byproduct of Western modern life. This article aims to demonstrate how suicide functioned as a symbolic site for articulating anxieties about civilization and moral decline. By analysing these reports, the study contributes to broader discussions about the Ottoman engagement with modernity and the selective appropriation of Western ideas within the empire’s public discourse.

This study examines the impact of novel reading to understand how literacy shaped cultural norms, considering the institutions that promoted reading in late Ottoman society. As opportunities for women's education expanded and the Ottoman elite's awareness of its importance grew, a larger female readership emerged. This shift brought both an increased literary presence for women and concerns about the influence of novel-reading on women. In this article, I aim to explore how novel reading was viewed in late Ottoman society and the role that fictional portrayals of women readers played in both reinforcing and challenging perceptions of novel reading. First, the perception of women’s engagement with novels in the late nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire is examined. Next, how Fatma Aliye Hanım addresses concerns about women reading novels in Muhâdarât (1891) is discussed. Muhâdarât is the first text written by a female writer that openly engages with the perception of the dangerous effects of reading, particularly novel reading, on women. It is argued that, by providing positive fictional representations of the woman reader, Muhâdarât encodes women’s education and the reading of novels as means of empowerment.

Credit relations in the Ottoman Empire developed within the framework of the Islamic prohibition of riba. In this context, murabaha, was used by the Ottomans in the sense of a legitimate (free from riba) return on loans along with its classical jurisprudential meaning. However, especially since the second half of the nineteenth century, murabaha was also burdened with the meaning of usury, which signifies riba. This article aims to analyse the transformation of murabaha in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire and examines how meanings changed and transformed as a result of social reality permeating daily language. In this context, Ottoman credit terminology and the socio-economic history of credit relations will be analysed in the Late Ottoman Empire. Archival documents, writings of Ottoman authors in newspapers and books, translations from foreign languages and dictionary sources as well as sharia court records and fatwas will be used in the research. In the light of the mentioned sources, it is aimed to correct some misconceptions in Ottoman historiography regarding credit relations. In addition, the development of credit relations in the Ottoman Empire and how these relations were shaped will be revealed by tracing the evolution of murabaha in Ottoman history.

SummaryThe Ottoman Empire instituted state-sponsored inspection and registration of the dead in the early nineteenth century. For the first time, medical professionals known as tabib were hired to investigate the causes of deaths within Istanbul’s perimeters. This initial surveillance effort in 1838–39 created the city’s first two death registers, comprising 9,500 individual cases in total. In the light of these records, the current study investigates the surveillance of death and disease in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire by situating it within the global context of registering the dead, examining the first Ottoman regulations to detail the procedures concerning the registration process and identifying the professionals engaged therein. Since the primary concern of the present study is an investigation of the administration of the dead and medical surveillance, we emphasise the discrepancies observed in the registration process and scrutinise both the medical categories used and the registering physicians’ professional backgrounds.

ABSTRACT This article examines the importance of “sacred bread” (nan-ı aziz) in the context of migration and settlement in the mid nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. It considers the aftermath of the Crimean War of 1853–1856 during which Crimean Tatars, Noghays, and refugees from other territories sought sanctuary within Ottoman lands. In this context, state welfare, refugee identity, and new conceptions of political authority began to evolve around the exchange of sacred bread. The symbolic and material significance of sacred bread transformed groups of incoming Muslims into a special class of Ottoman refugees throughout the 1850s and 1860s. This study argues that the symbolic and material currency of food or, more specifically, sacred bread constituted a way to acculturate the Crimean and Caucasian refugee community (muhacirin) in the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman food traditions such as sacred bread not only generated a Muslim refugee cultural identity, but also collectively united Muslim refugee communities on the basis of class and social identity. More importantly, bread played a significant role in transforming and acculturating refugee communities within Ottoman culture and served as a vector of cultural cohesion by forging a unified community. By examining refugee petitions and imperial correspondence, this article explores the centrality of sacred bread in Ottoman food systems and expands our conception of the postwar experiences of refugees by introducing bread as a novel way to analyze identity, subjecthood, and loyalty.

Abstract The Greek anti-Ottoman revolt in the 1820s brought increased suspicion among the empire’s ruling circles toward not only Greeks but non-Muslim subjects in general. This sparked government security measures in Istanbul, home to substantial Christian and Jewish populations. This article examines such measures intended to bring non-Muslim subjects under control, and the overall impact the Greek revolt had on the Ottoman approach to its subjects. It argues that the revolt catalyzed changes in the state’s attitude toward population surveillance and its treatment of non-Muslims. When the empire felt the need to bring non-Muslims under control, a major challenge was how to verify and vouch for the latter’s identity, since they deemed Muslim officials incapable of doing so. Thus, though they were suspicious of non-Muslims, they actively used the religious authorities of their communities to implement various security measures, including the creation of a population record and the introduction of internal passports. At the same time, religious authorities found it essential to demonstrate their and their community’s pro-Ottoman position by cooperating with the state in its efforts to find enemies within. Incorporation of non-Muslim religious authorities into imperial governance led to official recognition of the representatives of smaller non-Muslim groups, including Latin subjects, Armenian Catholics, and Jews. The result was a standardization of non-Muslim communities with officially recognized representatives before the government.

This paper investigates the Jesuit mission to Little Armenia, initiated in 1881, emphasizing the collaboration between the Holy See and France amidst escalating competition with Protestant powers within the Ottoman Empire. The study aims to scrutinize the Jesuits' endeavors to advance France's religious-cultural activities until the severance of relations between the Holy See and France. The Jesuits provided religious and educational assistance, thus promoting French influence among Ottoman Christians. This research contends that the partnership between the Holy See and France facilitated through the Jesuit mission, exemplifies the significant impact of religion on France's international policies during the Third Republic. Drawing on a diverse array of historical sources, including diplomatic records, missionary accounts, and scholarly works, this study offers a comprehensive understanding of the interplay between the Jesuits, the Holy See, and France within the intricate political and religious context of the late nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire.

Abstract This article makes a case for a critical engagement with the Ottoman institution of slavery and slave trade in its globalist rethinking of the rise of the novel. It argues that production of late Ottoman Turkish novelistic writing hinged on a domestic imagination to which the labor of enslaved women was indispensable. Placing Namık Kemal's İntibah in conversation with other novels contemporaneous with it, the article underscores the interlacement between the genre-conscious crafting of novelistic writing in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and the ubiquitous presence of enslaved women in the fictions from the period. As such, it highlights the necessity of reframing the transnational history of the novel by expanding the interrogation of its gendered and racialized economy to hitherto neglected Ottoman contexts of enslavement.

Contextualizing in the developments in the spheres of administration, economy, and jurisprudence during the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire, this article sought to present a snapshot from the prison of Bitlis in particular and prisons in the eastern provinces in general. Two interrelated developments of the nineteenth century became the tools to analyze the prisons of Bitlis. First, the imprisonment became a legal procedure of punishment both in Ottoman and universal level during the nineteenth century. This development harbingered a new kind of governmentality; the sovereign powers adopted the perspective that the individual subjects could be controlled and disciplined. In this regard, the concerns for public health, the sanitary conditions served to social control and discipline. Second, in the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire went through a set of transformations in which state-subject relations were reshaped. As a modernizing state, the Ottoman Empire tried to implement the principle of ‘equality’ among its subjects who also became responsible to the state in terms of taxation and conscription. This article aims to analyze the prison of Bitlis in terms of this new governmentality. On the one hand, prisons along with the military posts, police institutions, government offices served to the disciplinary power of the imperial states. On the other hand, the hygiene of the prisons, the well-being and well-treatment of prisoners came at the target of the imperial state.

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Elpis Kesaratsian (1830–1913), the first Armenian female editor who founded and published the Guitar magazine (1861–63) but has been neglected in the field of Armenian history and culture studies for more than 160 years. This study sheds light on the geopolitical and historical contexts in Constantinople in the second half of the nineteenth century, the imperial censorship, the criticism regarding the magazine Guitar, the unbreakable will that the first Armenian female editor, who also acted as a writer, journalist, and translator, Elpis Kesaratsian was guided by throughout her life as a representative of a Christian national minority living in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. The many roles of Elpis Kesaratsian, including those of woman-editor, woman-publicist, woman-publisher, woman-book author, woman-translator, woman-lead nurse, woman-teacher that she fulfilled under the oppression and censorship of the Ottoman Empire, were revealed through investigative, biographical and comparative analyses. Our findings revealed that Elpis Kesaratsian’s main goal was the improvement of society.

Abstract: One of the major goals of the American missionary activities in the nineteenth century was to evangelise and enlighten the Orient. Having lived in the Ottoman Empire for over forty years and well-versed in more than ten languages, William Gottlieb Schauffler (1798-1883) was one of the longest-serving and most influential Protestant missionaries to achieve this religious and secular American dream in the Middle East. This article provides a comprehensive overview of the life and legacy of Schauffler, emphasising his pivotal role in establishing and institutionalising American Protestant missions among Ottoman Jews, Sabbateans and Turks. It also evaluates his substantial contributions to the translation of both secular and religious texts, including dictionaries and Holy Scriptures, from German, English, and Hebrew into the vernacular languages of Ladino and Turkish in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Drawing on missionary archival records and scanty Ottoman documents, the article argues that Schauffler, through his passionate and solitary efforts, helped to institutionalise American missions, targeting mainly Jews and Dönmes within the Ottoman Empire. As such, Schauffler's life and endeavours warrant distinctive recognition in the historiography of Ottoman Jews and Sabbateans.

Abstract The nineteenth century was a period of profound transformation in Ottoman historical writing, as in other avenues of Ottoman cultural, intellectual, and socio-political life. Aiming to establish a general framework for nineteenth-century Ottoman historiography, the present article traces the evolution of late Ottoman historical writing and explores the ways in which Ottoman historiographical practices changed over the century. The article first focuses on the Tanzimat period and examines the process of what can be called historiographical expansion, which took place with the emergence of a new understanding of history among the Ottomans. Then, the article considers Ottoman historiography during the Hamidian era and traces how it received a relatively Islamized and nationalized content as a result of the shift in the political context. Lastly, the article concludes with an epilogue on Ottoman/Turkish historiography after the 1908 Constitutional Revolution, which led to a decisive break from traditional patterns of historical writing.

This paper, by focusing on a secret report delivered by the Ottoman High Commissioner in Egypt—Gazi Ahmed Muhtar Pasha—to the imperial center regarding the Armenian revolutionaries’ movements, aims to examine three important phenomena of the late Ottoman history. The first goal is to reveal the revolutionary mobilities in the late Ottoman Empire by tracking how said revolutionaries took advantage of the borderlands to mobilize themselves. Second, this particular research serves as an indicator of the spatial politics in the late nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire by exposing how the imperial center governed a multi-layered administrative borderland region of Egypt—a semi-autonomous Khedivate. Finally, this paper seeks to confront traditional historiography on the intelligence activities during the reign of Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909). By doing so, this paper demonstrates how the intelligence organization stretched from the administrative center to the frontiers and borderlands of the Ottoman Empire, contrary to the common assumptions in the existing literature.

This article focuses on the early career of Luigi Mongeri, who was appointed as the chief physician to the Süleymaniye Mental Asylum in 1856 to treat mental illness and improve the living conditions of mentally ill patients in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. It focuses on Mongeri's early career in Italy, investigates his involvement in Ottoman imperial patronage networks and their subsequent effects on his career, and finally explores the reform program he implemented at Süleymaniye. While in the Ottoman Empire, Mongeri appeared as a reformist who claimed to improve the living conditions and treatment of patients by the use medical statistics, abolishing the use of shackles, etc. At the same time in Europe—and especially in France, which was one of the important centers of alienist medicine at the time— he presented himself as an expert on "oriental insanity,” a claim which gained him access to international medical circles and organizations.

Abstract This article takes Pertevniyal Valide Sultan’s endowments as a case study and proposes an original contribution to the literature by discussing the transformation of Ottoman endowment management throughout the nineteenth century. The account books of landed estates (çiftliks), other endowment documents, and the Ottoman imperial archives constitute the basis of explaining different phases of estate management practices for endowments in the Thessaly region of northern Greece. The main argument is that, in contrastto the administration of earlier endowments in the region, the central administration of Pertevniyal Valide Sultan’s endowments expanded its control over its provincial revenue sources. This transformation became possible with the help of negotiations and alliances with several imperial and provincial institutions. This article also contributes to understanding social and economic life in Ottoman çiftliks by analysing land, production, and taxation relations in Thessaly.

Abstract Copies of Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt (Proofs of Good Deeds) by the Moroccan Sufi saint Muḥammad b. Sulaymān al-Jazūlī (d. 870/1465) were in high demand in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. This required producing manuscripts in large numbers and, later, printing the text. These mostly lithographic copies and corpora of the Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt, when combined with references to biographical dictionaries, inheritance records, inventories, library catalogues, and endowment deeds, reveal a great deal of information about the public and private prevalence of the text, within and beyond the empire. The Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt appealed to many individuals, from Ottoman sultans to royal women, and from madrasa students to members of the learned class. Its copies were endowed to mosques and libraries, held in different book collections of the Topkapi palace, and were available from booksellers. Be it silently or aloud, the Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt could be read in private homes and in mosques from Istanbul to Medina, a feature of pious soundscapes across the empire.

As an important woman writer, Nigâr binti Osman (1862–1918) contributed to social and cultural change in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire through her intellect and her writings. From her early work onward, Nigâr Hanım cared about the issue of “writing herself.” Her diaries, kept from 1887 to 1918 evidence this: the diaries are constantly cited but have not been transliterated into the Latin alphabet. From an upper-class woman’s perspective, her writings convey firsthand impressions of the Ottoman Empire’s rapid political and social changes during the nineteenth century. Her diaries reveal her position, daily life, emotions, literary preferences, writing adventures, and quests. From these texts, Nigâr Hanım’s experience of life can be discussed as memory, experience, and testimony. In this study specifically, her diaries will be examined in detail as to construction of the self through this daily written genre, through writing by the female subject, and subsequent inclusion in public literature.

The nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire witnessed a gradual change in the forestry regime. In response to the intensifying struggle over forest resources in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Ottoman government introduced a series of reforms aimed at exerting more direct control over forests. In the implementation of these reforms not only did opposing interests clash at the central level but local interest groups involved in regional trade networks also appeared as influential actors. Focusing on a lawsuit related to forest crimes committed in the Teke region in the beginning of the 1890s, this paper discusses how modern, bureaucratized forestry practices were negotiated at the local level. By uncovering a complicated interaction among forest officials at the center and in the provinces, as well as timber merchants, this paper considers smuggling an integral component of politics over natural resources.

Reviewed by: The Ottoman Empire in the Tanzimat Era: Provincial Perspectives from Ankara to Edirne by Yonca Köksal Uğur B. Bayraktar Yonca Köksal. The Ottoman Empire in the Tanzimat Era: Provincial Perspectives from Ankara to Edirne. London: Routledge, 2019. xiii + 194 pp. Cloth, $124.00. ISBN: 978-1138335738. Köksal’s The Ottoman Empire in the Tanzimat Era: Provincial Perspectives from Ankara to Edirne offers a novel and revisionist perspective on the interaction between the provincial notables and the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. In this comparative work, Köksal does not merely bring back the notables of the prior century into the nineteenth-century politics, but also underlines that it was the interaction between the empire and the notables that set the course of reforms during the period. In the introduction, the author challenges the structuralist perspectives of Ottoman modernization, mostly confined to a zero-sum game in which the notables’ accumulation of economic and social capital challenged the power of the imperial center. Contrary to a rather uninterrupted transformation from indirect rule to a direct one, Köksal emphasizes the existence of “previous administrative practices which conditioned how the state conceived and experimented with reform” (p. 14). In Chapter Two, the author introduces the provinces of Ankara and Edirne. Noting the political, geographical, and economic differences between the two provinces, the author argues that “Tanzimat strategies of rule and their outcomes varied on the basis of divergent paths in the provinces” (p. 30). While the state followed the coercion-intensive path in Ankara (the extractive state policy), it followed an integrationist policy (capital-intensive path) in Edirne due to the concerns of social and economic development of the region. In Chapter Three, focusing on local administration and reforms in Ankara, Köksal demonstrates that the ayan families of the previous century assumed administrative responsibilities as state officials of local origin. Underlining the disconnected local structure, she argues that the Tanzimat reforms brought about gradual changes in Ankara, which were rather slow compared to the Balkan provinces. In Chapter Four, the author deals with the province of Edirne. She demonstrates that the densely connected local networks, severe competition among many intermediaries leading to coalition formations, and [End Page 249] collective action based on formal ties and market relations in addition to the gradual elimination of state officials of local origin led the Tanzimat reforms to accomplish a lot in the province (p. 125). In Chapter Five, Köksal applies Social Network Analysis (SNA) to the local intermediaries of the two provinces. By the analysis, she substantiates the arguments she makes in the previous chapters. Finally in the conclusion, Köksal sums her argument that the differences in terms of local political structures, geopolitical location, and economic development led to varying outcomes of the Tanzimat reforms in the provinces of Ankara and Edirne. She skillfully shows that the incorporation of local intermediaries into its administration was “important to understanding the emergence or the absence of local support organized by the local elite in both provinces” (p. 158). Köksal’s study is a brilliant challenge against the rather standardized and top-down representation of the Tanzimat. Framing the rich archival material with the sociological methods, the author shows that it was not just the state but the societal actors who actually set the course of the reforms. Given the still infant state of provincial and comparative histories of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, Köksal’s study delivers a fresh perspective on conceptualizing different regional transformations. Her argument that Tanzimat was a transition period in which the imperial government continued benefitting from notables is important not only in terms of bridging the two distant periods of the empire (i.e., age of ayans and the Tanzimat) but also demonstrating the path-dependent trajectory of the reforms, results of which were based on negotiation between the state and societal actors. Considering the Ottoman historiography’s preoccupation with annihilation of local intermediaries from the provincial political landscape, Köksal meticulously shows that albeit with the gradual elimination “a considerable number of müdürs of local origin continued to exist in the system throughout the reform...

In the nineteenth-century Ottoman empire, Cappadocia, in the heart of Anatolia, was one of the last regions where Rum Orthodox Christians cohabited with Muslims in rural areas. Among the main aspects of everyday coexistence were the beliefs and ritual practices that, shared by Muslim and Christian individuals, blurred religious belonging as it is traditionally defined. Anthropologists and ethnologists have studied exopraxis broadly, while historians have neglected the topic until recently. In the case of anthropologists, studies have mostly focused on the spatiality of sharing that is characteristic of exopraxis. This article, based largely on testimonies collected in the Oral Tradition Archives of the Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens, analyzes the temporality of exopraxis and inquires into the different but shared calendars that ordered the ritual life of Muslims and Orthodox Christians in Cappadocia. These testimonies, taken from Orthodox Christians who lived in Turkey prior to the exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece in 1923, help us to understand how the sharing of religious calendars resulted in feelings of belonging to a single collectivity.