Ottoman Anatolia Research Articles

Response

Response Leslie Peirce (bio) I would like to begin by saying what a privilege it is for me to have three new colleagues—Indrani Chatterjee, Julie Hardwick, and Patricia Skinner—comment so thoughtfully on my work, and what an opportunity it is for all of us to have this forum for the exchange of ideas and information and even of good book titles. So I thank each commentator individually for her insights and I also thank the editors of Journal of Women's History for making this exchange possible. My immediate reactions upon reading the three essays were several. The first was just plain excitement at the sheer volume of fascinating insights that such a comparative project can spawn. At the simplest level, comparative history has the power to highlight what is specific to the cultures we study as well as what is universal, or at least trans-regional, either because of the basic demands of human existence or the limited repertoire of mechanisms available to governments in controlling their populations. My second reaction was consciousness of my own shortcomings: I was rather sorry I hadn't thought of the incisive phrases that pepper the three comments—learned normativity, collusion with the dominant discourse as a positive tactic of women in court—which might have saved some pages of labored explication. I also felt "unnerved," to borrow from Hardwick's confession, by my ignorance of histories that ran on intersecting tracks with the history I attempted to recount. My ignorance was willed to a degree (this is not an excuse), as I sat myself mentally in Aintab in order to work out what was going on locally and didn't look much beyond the surrounding region, except occasionally towards Istanbul. In the process, I seem to have reinvented some wheels that might have moved the project along more rapidly had I done more comparative reading. In what follows, I will not comment for the most part on commonalities among the histories featured here, since the reader can deduce these for herself. I would rather use this space to raise a few bigger issues that stem from (apparent) difference. But I cannot restrain myself from citing at least a few shared features of which I am now aware as a result of reading the three commentaries (those I cite are from Skinner's): the matter of publica fama, the transfer of land ownership to the person who had cultivated it unchallenged, and the persecution as witches/heretics of older, resourceless women. I am not sure why it is a pleasurable sensation to recognize shared foibles, habits, and aspirations among peoples across time and [End Page 197] space—perhaps it is our defensive attachment to the societies we study. It may also be useful here, while I am getting things out of the way, to mark one major difference that contributed to legal life in the Ottoman empire: the tribal communities that populated the hinterlands of Ottoman Anatolia, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and even the Balkans, with its Gypsy communities. One of the "backstories" to the evolution of Ottoman legal practice was the challenge of controlling these fiercely independent and fractious sectors of the population. One of the big questions that was sparked by my reading of the commentaries is whether there is a domain that can be isolated as "secular" in the early modern Ottoman world. This question was inspired by Skinner's recognition that tensions between religious and secular domains were shared by Europeans and Ottomans, and Hardwick's comments about the rise of secular courts. "Secular" is a word I rarely use in my writing or teaching (if I did use it in the book, the word is probably in quotes). We would not, I think, speak of a specifically secularist thrust, in the sense of derivation from non-religious sources of authority, in law or any other domain until later, modern, times in the Ottoman empire. In the realm of law, kanun—which can mean both customary and imperial law, law that is normative in large part because it is based on actual practice or practical needs—may at first seem a secular counterbalance to sharia (Islamic jurisprudence and...

POPULATION CHANGES IN OTTOMAN ANATOLIA DURING THE 16TH AND 17TH CENTURIES: THE “DEMOGRAPHIC CRISIS” RECONSIDERED

The historiography of the past two decades of the demographic history of 16th- and 17th-century Ottoman Anatolia has seen diverse and often conflicting arguments among historians. Whether the Ottoman Empire witnessed “population pressure” in the 16th century, and whether this was followed in the 17th century by a serious “demographic crisis,” considered by some historians as a “catastrophe,” have constituted the central theme of the debate. The roots of these issues can be traced as far back as the early works of Ömer Lütfi Barkan in the 1940s and 1950s. It appears that the disagreements not only arose as a result of the different models of historical demography developed by diverse schools of thought, but that they also owed much to the highly disputed nature of the sources that provide the bulk of quantitative data for the demographic history of the Ottoman Empire.

Ottoman Mersin: The Making of an Eastern Mediterranean Port-town

In a report prepared by a German geologist in 1917, Çukurova was designated as the most important region of cotton agriculture in Ottoman Anatolia. At the turn of the 21st century, the corporations of two families from Çukurova, Sabancı and Karamehmet, ranked among the largest 65 of the world. No other region of the former Ottoman Empire produced such wealth. This paper traces its generation back to nineteenth century processes of capital accumulation through the development of the port-town of Mersin.

Confraternal religion: from liberation theology to political reversal

Heterodox mystics and heretics of any kind can be sometimes dangerous and other times reliable depending upon political situations, as was the case with Bektashis in Ottoman Anatolia or in early independent Albania. The historical anthropology perspective taken in this article appears helpful in revealing that Bektashism is probably the mystical order of Islam that best exemplifies a transformational pattern from a theological and ideological, as well as cultural, social and political, point of view. The system of beliefs and practices related to Bektashism seems to correspond to a kind of liberation theology, whereas the structure of Bektashi groups corresponds more or less to the type of religious organization conventionally known as “charismatic groups”. It becomes understandable, therefore, that their spiritual tendency can meet social, cultural and national perspectives. In turn, when the members of the previously persecuted religious minority have already acquired a degree of religious and political respectability within society at large, the doctrines of heterodoxy and liberation theology fade into the background. In the end, the heirs of the heterodox promoters of spiritual reform and social movement turn into followers and faithful defenders of a legitimate authority. They become the spokespeople for an institutionalized orthodoxy whose support will be sought by the political regime.

A Historical archaeology of the Ottoman Empire: breaking new ground

Preface. Introduction. 1. The Future of the Ottoman Past U. Baram, L. Carroll. Part II: From Archaeology to a 'History from Below'. 2. Agriculture and Rural Settlement in Ottoman Crete, 1669-1898: A Modern Site Survey A. Brumfield. 3. The Archaeology of Ottoman Ti'innik, an Interdisciplinary Approach G. Ziadeh-Seely. 4. Dendochronologically Dated Ottoman Monuments P.I. Kuniholm. 5. Entangled Objects from the Palestinian Past: Archaeological Perspectives for the Ottoman Period, 1500-1900 U. Baram. 6. Toward an Archaeology of Non-Elite Consumption in Late Ottoman Anatolia L. Carroll. Part III: Trade, Subsistence, and Ideology in the Ottoman Empire. 7. The Sadana Island Shipwreck: A Mid-Eighteenth Century Treasure Trove C. Ward. 8. Daily Life in the Shadow of Empire: A Food Systems Approach to the Archaeology of the Ottoman Period O. LaBianca. 9. Transformations, Readings and Visions of the Ottoman Mosque A.B. Snyder. Part IV: Prospects. 10. Sultans, Merchants, and Minorities: The Challenge of Historical Archaeology in the Modern Middle East N.A. Silberman. 11. Diverse Approaches to the Ottoman Past: Toward a Globally Conceived, Regionally Specific Historical Archaeology P.L. Kohl. Appendix A: Chronology for the Ottoman Empire: Some Key Dates in Ottoman History, 1260-1923.

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS Get access State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire: Agrarian Power Relations and Regional Economic Development in Ottoman Anatolia during the Sixteenth Century. By HURI ISLAMOĞLU-INAN . LEIDEN: E. J. BRILL, 1994. Pp. xvii + 293. Price HB NLG 130.00. 9004-10028-8. Eugene Rogan Eugene Rogan St Antony's CollegeOxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Islamic Studies, Volume 9, Issue 1, January 1998, Pages 85–87, https://doi.org/10.1093/jis/9.1.85 Published: 01 January 1998

Wages in Nineteenth-Century Anatolia: A Comparison of Urban and Agricultural Trends

In this paper I will construct separate time series for the wage levels of agricultural and unskilled (and non-factory) urban workers in nineteenth-century Ottoman Anatolia. An earlier study (Boratav et al. 1985) was able to construct an annual time series for urban wage levels by utilising a weighted average of the wages of skilled and unskilled laborers in towns and cities. Production of a time series for agricultural wages, on the other hand, is important for seeing the wage variations in rural and urban areas in the nineteenth-century Anatolian context and is crucial for understanding the peculiarities of the Ottoman (and later Turkish) economic development. These variations, at least to a degree, were responsible for the differences in labor costs in various parts of the empire and thus determined the peculiarities of the Ottoman incorporation into, world-economy (Ergene 1995).

State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire: Agrarian Power Relations and Regional Economic Development in Ottoman Anatolia during the Sixteenth Century

State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire: Agrarian Power Relations and Regional Economic Development in Ottoman Anatolia during the Sixteenth Century

State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire. Agrarian Power Relations and Regional Economic Development in Ottoman Anatolia during the Sixteenth Century. By Huri Islamoglu-Inan. The Ottoman Empire and its Heritage, Volume 1. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994. Pp. xvii, 293.

State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire. Agrarian Power Relations and Regional Economic Development in Ottoman Anatolia during the Sixteenth Century. By Huri Islamoglu-Inan. The Ottoman Empire and its Heritage, Volume 1. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994. Pp. xvii, 293. - Volume 57 Issue 1

State and peasant in the Ottoman Empire: agrarian power relations and regional economic development in Ottoman Anatolia during the sixteenth century

This book provides important insights for the conceptualisation of change in pre-industrial societies through a detailed study of the dynamics of the Ottoman peasant economy during the sixteenth century in the context of the specific character of the Ottoman state, of the relations of surplus extraction and of exchange that the state rules or institutions described.

Towns, Agriculture and the State in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Anatolia

Towns, Agriculture and the State in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Anatolia

Towns, Agriculture and the State in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Anatolia

Towns, Agriculture and the State in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Anatolia

‘Genocide in the 20th Century’

The article analyses the various military factors which contributed to the Armenian genocide of 1915–1918. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the course of the 19th century engendered a variety of military factors. First, jihâd, or the concept of Holy War, came to be exploited for a variety of unscrupulous designs, and, for the sake of destroying often innocent non-Muslims, was used improperly to attack and annihilate villagers. Second, extensive raiding activity by Kurds, Circassians and Turkmen had destroyed Christian and other non-Muslim villages for decades before the genocide of 1915–1918. These raids continued to afflict the non-Muslim populations of north-east Anatolia as part of the genocidal plan in 1915–1918. Finally, the concept of total war, developed by the Ottoman army under German (and other European) military influences proved to be a deciding factor in the annihilation of the Armenian population of Ottoman Anatolia. The article also demonstrates that the Ottoman army used similar oppressive measures against the other subject populations of the Ottoman Empire.

オスマン朝社会経済史研究とファローキー：『オスマン朝下アナトリアの都市と都市民』をめぐって

オスマン朝社会経済史研究とファローキー：『オスマン朝下アナトリアの都市と都市民』をめぐって

Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia: Trade, Crafts and Food Production in an Urban Setting, 1520-1650

Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia: Trade, Crafts and Food Production in an Urban Setting, 1520-1650

Muslims and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of The Empire

Muslims and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of The Empire

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article: Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh. By Gilles Kepel. Translated by Jon Rothschild. New afterword for the U.S. edition translated by Rose Vekony. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986 (original ed. 1984). 281 pp. Preface by Bernard Lewis. Map; Table; Charts; Chronology; Index. $18.95, cloth. Religion and Modernization in Southeast Asia. By Fred R. von der Mehden. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986. viii plus 240 pp. Tables; Figures; Bibliography; Index. $29.95, cloth; $14.95, paper. Modern Islamic Political Thought. By Hamid Enayat. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. xii plus 225 pp. $20.00, cloth; $8.95, paper. Islamic Movements in Egypt, Pakistan and Iran: An Annotated Bibliography. By Asaf Hussain. London: Mansell Publishing and New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 1983. xiv plus 163 pp. Index. $27.00. Iran Since The Revolution: Internal Dynamics, Regional Conflicts, and the Superpowers. Edited by Barry M. Rosen. [Brooklyn College Studies on Society in Change, #47]. Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 1985. (Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York.) xx plus 187 pp. Photos. Index. $20.00, hardcover. Islam in Revolution: Fundamentalism in the Arab World. By R. Hrair Dekmejian. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1985. xi plus 178 pp. Tables; Glossary; Bibliography; Index. $26.00, cloth; $12.95, paper. Mouvements communautaires et Espaces urbains au Machreg. Mona Zakaria et al. Beyrouth: CERMOC, 1985. 175 pp. n.p. Islam in the Modern World. Edited by Denis MacEoin and Ahmed al‐Shahi. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983. xviii plus 148 pp. Index. $22.50. From Socialism to Islam? By David Westerlund. [Research Report No. 61.] Uppsala: The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1982. 62 pp. Skr. 20:‐. The World or Islam. By T.B. Irving. Brattleboro, VT: Amana Books, 1984. 200 pp. $9.95, paper. Islam and Contemporary Society. Edited by Salem Azzam. London and New York: Longman, 1982. x plus 279 pp. Indices, n.p. Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience. By Alixa Naff. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985. x plus 376 pp. Photographs; Bibliograpy; Index; $19.95. Voyageurs to a Rocky Shore: The Lebanese and Syrians of Nova Scotia. By Nancy W. Jabbra and Joseph G. Jabbra. Halifax, Canada: Institute of Public Affairs, Dalhousie University, 1984. xv plus 177 pp. Photographs; Bibliography. $15.00, paper. Women and the Family in the Middle East. New Voices of Change. Edited by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. xxi plus 356 pp. $24.50, cloth. The Passion of al‐Ḣ;allāj: Mystic and Martyr of Islam, 4 vols. By Louis Massignon. Translated from the French with a biographical foreward by Herbert Mason. [Bollingen Series XCVIII]. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982, lxix plus 645 pp. (vol. I); xiii plus 493 pp. (vol. II); xiv plus 360 pp. (vol. III); xviii plus 294 pp. (vol. IV). $125.00. The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. By Amin Maalouf. Translated from the French by Jon Rothschild. London: Al Saqi Books, 1983. iv plus 293 pp. Maps; Chronology; Glossary; Index. $10.95, paper. Divine Omniscience and Omnipotence In Medieval Philosophy: Islamic, Jewish and Christian Perspectives. Edited by Tamar Rudavsky. [Synthese Historical Library, Volume 25.] Rodrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1985. ix plus 299 pp. $54.00. Muslims and Minorities: The Populations of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of the Empire. By Justin McCarthy. New York: New York University Press, 1983. 248 pp. $35.00. The USSR and the Muslim World: Issues in Domestic and Foreign Policy. Edited by Yaacov Ro'i. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984. xv plus 298 pp. $37.50. The Syrians in Egypt: 1725‐1975. By Thomas Philipp. [Berliner Islamstudien, Band 3.] Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1985. xv plus 187 pp. Graphs, n.p. Hindu Javanese: Tengger Tradition and Islam. By Robert W. Hefner. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. xi plus 290 pp. Photographs; Maps; Tables; Index. $36.00. The Crescent Arises over the Banyan Tree: A Study of the Muhammadiyah Movement in a Central Javanese Town. By Mitsuo Nakamura. Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1983. xx plus 223 pp. Photographs; Maps; Tables; Index, n.p. Divorce in Java: A Study of the Dissolution of Marriage among Javanese Muslims. By Hisako Nakamura. Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1983. xxiii plus 145 pp. Maps; Tables; Index, n.p. The Renaissance of Modern Hebrew and Modern Standard Arabic: Parallels and Differences in the Revival of Two Semitic Languages. By Joshua Blau. [Near Eastern Studies Vol. 18]. Berkeley‐Los Angeles‐London: University of California Press, 1981. vii plus 260 pp. Bibliography. Typescript paperback. $19.25. The Pen and the Faith: Eight Modern Muslim Writers and The Qur'an. By Kenneth Cragg. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985. viii plus 181 pp. Bibliography. Index. Qur'anic passages cited. £12.95.

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Faroqhi, Suraiya. Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia: Trade, Crafts, and Food Production in an Urban Setting, 1520-1650

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Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia: Trade, Crafts and Food Production in an Urban Setting, 1520-1650

Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia: Trade, Crafts and Food Production in an Urban Setting, 1520-1650