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This chapter traces Ottoman responses to the challenge of Europe’s rise and global hegemony – responses that engendered two emergent properties: religious disenchantment and growing resentment at the loss of Muslim primacy. These properties informed new political programs in the buildup to and during critical junctures. Milestones included the Tanzimat (1839) and subsequent, Young Ottoman reforms led by bureaucrats and intellectuals. The result was a framework for multicultural citizenship – an Islamo-liberal project. It bore fruit in the first Ottoman constitution (1878), but was soon suspended by Sultan Abdülhamid II (r.1876–1908/9) who instead developed (pan-)Islamism as a political program. His authoritarian rule, in turn, spurred a coalition of liberal and proto-nationalist Young Turks to revolt (1908), launching the “second constitutional period.” The revolution was then captured by an illiberal Triumvirate espousing a more unitary, proto-nationalist project. No linear or teleological process, the chapter reveals that contests were driven by the complex interplay of ideas, actors, and contextual pressures. These forces informed a new menu of programs for managing religion and diversity that would outlive the empire itself: Islamo-liberalism, liberalism, Islamism, and Turkism.
This chapter reconstructs the development of constitutional law in the Ottoman region from the earlier nineteenth century to the middle part of the twentieth century. It shows how constitution making in this setting gave extreme expression to general militaristic tendencies in constitutional law, as the imposition of norms of citizenship in the Ottoman Empire both induced deep lateral conflicts and stimulated external violence. This is exemplified through analysis of the imperial constitution at the end of the Tanzimat era and of sub-imperial constitutions in Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece. The chapter reconstructs post-Ottoman lineages in constitutional law against this background, showing how internal and external conflicts persistently converged and military units assumed dominant nation-building roles.
The Introduction provides a theoretical and conceptual framework of the book by defining ecological disequilibrium and slow violence. It also provides a historiographical discussion on collective violence against Armenians in the late Ottoman Empire.
This chapter traces the shadow that ancient Greek epic, and the Homeric poems most particularly, have cast over the modern nations of Greece and Turkey, using case studies with a specific focus on how the epics came to figure in the nation-building work of both countries. Greece presents a unique case for the reception of these poems for two related reasons: Homeric Greek can be integrated into modern Greek literature without transl(iter)ation, and a long-standing national discourse casts the Greek heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey as the ancestors of Greeks living today. On the other hand, Turkey, whose borders encompass the ancient site of Troy, made different use of the Homeric tradition. During the self-conscious process of Westernisation in the twenty-first century, the Homeric poems were among the first great works of ‘Western’ – not Greek – literature to be translated by translators working in the employ of the state. Hanink uses these contrasting studies of the national receptions of ancient epic in the ‘Homeric lands’ to point to the range of ways that Homeric poetry has been invoked in modern nation-building projects.
In this innovative, interdisciplinary work, Zozan Pehlivan presents a new environmental perspective on intercommunal conflict, rooting slow violence in socioeconomic shifts and climatic fluctuations. From the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, recurrent and extreme climate disruptions became an underlying yet unacknowledged component of escalating conflict between Christian Armenian peasants and Muslim Kurdish pastoralists in Ottoman Kurdistan. By the eve of the First World War, the Ottoman state's shifting responses to these mounting tensions transformed the conflict into organized and state-sponsored violence. Pehlivan upends the 'desert-sown' thesis and establishes a new theoretical and conceptual framework drawing on climate science, agronomy, and zoology. From this alternative vantage point, Pehlivan examines the impact of climate on local communities, their responses and resilience strategies, arguing that nineteenth-century ecological change had a transformative and antagonistic impact on economy, state, and society.
This chapter concerns the preface to an 1844 (Ottoman) Turkish translation of al-Siyāsa al-Sharʿiyya by Kemalüddin İbrahim b. Bahşi b. Dede Cöngi (d. 975/1567). The translator, Meşrebzâde Mehmed Ârif Efendi (d. 1274/1858), examines the use and application of the technical Arabic term siyāsa in its Muslim legal and political contexts. The translated work reflects the need to legitimate sultanic intervention in law in the wake of the addition of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina to the Ottoman Empire in 1517; it aims to conceptualise Ottoman criminal law in religio-legal terms, in an attempt to bolster the religious credibility of the Ottoman state. Its translation in the 19th century reflects changes in administration that led to the redefinition of the broad powers and discretionary (taʿzīr) authority given to administrators in the field of politics, as well as the mission descriptions of governors and judges.
In contemporary public discourse, Gaza tends to be characterized solely as a theatre of the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. However, little is known about Gaza's society, politics, economy, and culture during the Ottoman era. Drawing on a range of previously untapped local and imperial sources, Yuval Ben-Bassat and Johann Buessow explore the city's history from the mid-nineteenth century through WWI. They show that Gaza's historical importance extends far beyond the territory of the 'strip' since the city was an important hub for people, goods, and ideas in the Eastern Mediterranean from Antiquity until the twentieth century. Using new digital methodologies, Ben-Bassat and Buessow introduce readers to the world of Gazans from various walks of life, from the traditional Muslim elites to the commoners and minority communities of Christians and Jews. In so doing, they tell the lively story of this significant but frequently misunderstood city.
This article offers a nuanced examination of the complex identity dynamics among the Christian and Muslim communities in Cyprus during the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly in the aftermath of British administration replacing Ottoman rule in 1878. The article draws attention to the profound impact of this historical transition on the identity formation processes of both communities. Despite the shared wartime experience of the First World War, the Christian and Muslim communities in Cyprus failed to construct a cohesive identity rooted in their common geographical space. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of ambivalence, the article explores the complex process by which Cypriot communities sought to align their identity with larger nations, namely Greece and Turkey, rather than grounding it in their local context. The article contends that the genesis of their ambivalence can be traced back to 1878 when British administration replaced Ottoman rule on the island.
This essay challenges the ethnocentrism of the dominant literature on hikmet-i cedide, or the new philosophy, in the late Ottoman Empire. Hikmet-i cedide was “new” in the sense that it did not confine itself to theological discussions and interpretations of holy books. Instead, it found its source of inspiration in the principles of modern Western philosophy, and especially the philosophy of the Enlightenment and Auguste Comte’s positivism. The dominant literature reduces this hikmet-i cedide to the philosophical writings of Muslim/Turkish intellectuals. Problematizing such ethnocentrism, this essay gives an account of hikmet-i cedide from the perspective of Ottoman–Armenians’ early engagement with positivism and the political philosophy of the Enlightenment. It argues that Armenians’ philosophical discourses in the second half of the nineteenth century were characterized by a belief that the principles of the new philosophy were the sine qua non for national survival in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious context of the Empire. They were also characterized by a commitment to reconciling modern Western philosophy with religious attachments. However, this characterization should not be thought to be confined to so-called “Armenian philosophy” but may be generalized to broader late Ottoman thought.
In 1920, the Syrian Congress at Damascus ratified a democratic constitution that would have been beyond the dreams of activists in the 2011 Arab Spring. Under the leadership of the leading Islamic reformer of the day, Sheikh Rashid Rida, the constitution disestablished Islam as a state religion, guaranteed one-third of parliamentary seats to non-Muslim minorities, and promised autonomy to the majority Christian territory of Mount Lebanon. Unlike the Ottoman constitution that had once reigned in Greater Syria, the Syrian document granted the preponderance of power to parliament, not the monarch. Nonetheless, the British and French colluded in the willful destruction of this nascent democracy. And with League of Nations’ support, they divided the Syrian Arab Kingdom into sectarian mandatory states. By stripping Syrian Arabs of a self-determined political community, Europeans denied them the “right to have rights,” as Hannah Arendt argued. The political backlash against European rule transformed the minority question in Syria into a polarized and violent contest, leading to the sectarian conflicts that overwhelmed Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine in the remainder of the 20th century.
With drastic changes in borders and regimes in the post-World War I period, what meaning did home have for those on the ground? How can we understand different conceptualizations of “home” and “homeland”? The 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange enshrined a notion of “unmixing” that rested on a presumed overlap between religion and ethnicity: Orthodox Christians in Anatolia would be deported to Greece and Greek Muslim nationals would be deported to Turkey. The reduction of identity left other communities that necessarily did not understand themselves as “Turks” or “Greeks” vulnerable to deportation. This article examines the case of an Albanian-speaking Muslim village in Greece, Vinan (Vineni), and the people from there who were deported to Turkey as part of the exchange process. This case illuminates the ways refugees navigated consulates and new national regimes in an attempt to return to their original village. New migration pathways and concepts of home and homeland were negotiated through the process with and for the refugees. This article takes the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange as an ongoing process of forging new migration pathways and conceptions of home, as opposed to understanding the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange as a singular event.
A graph superimposes the growth–decline curves of major Late Rider Empires, from 1200 to 1800. This was a period of shift from horses to sails. West European feudalism indirectly led to respect for law and a curiosity revolution. Inciting exploration, the latter began to give rise to transoceanic empires, first of all Spanish. But at first, Mongol horsemen seized a record-size area, unsurpassed among land-borne empires. Up to 1750 all truly large empires except Spanish remained land bound: Manchu Qing, Russia, Ottoman, and Mughal. The burgeoning French, Portuguese, and British empires were still modest. Much of the Mongol hold meant sparsely populated superficial tribute area, but by conquering China the Mongol empire also became the world’s most populous. Later on, Ming, Mughal, and Qing shared this eminence. Nomad empires were a phenomenon that rose and ended with the Rider phase. The Inca and Aztec empires retraced from scratch the human self-domestication process that the Old World underwent thirty-five centuries earlier, but they still lacked metals and the wheel.
While the Europe-wide cultural impact of the fall of Constantinople to Sultan Mehmed II is well known, its political reverberations in the Holy Roman Empire have received comparatively little attention. This article argues that the events of 1453 inaugurated a new dynamic in the empire that facilitated the polity's consolidation and the creation of new collective institutions within it long before Maximilian I (1486–1519), whose reign is often presented as a constitutional turning point. Some prince-electors had been calling for more effective peace-keeping and judicial institutions for decades before 1453 but lacked the leverage to compel kings and emperors of the Romans to accept political change on their terms. The fall of Constantinople provided a focal point for these negotiations: in return for promising to support an anti-Ottoman crusade, the reformists were able to force a compromise on new peace-keeping legislation at the diets of the 1450s and 1460s. This compromise was catalyzed by public pressure. There was a widely held expectation that leading imperial protagonists should fulfill this mission to defend Christendom, manifested in orations, diplomatic missives, poetry and songs, plays, and early printed pamphlets produced within and for a range of German-speaking public spheres.
Security measures aimed at the repression of corsairing continued apace in the wake of 1816. ‘Barbary piracy’ remained a subject of negotiation and cooperation during the late 1810s and early 1820s. It was dealt with at ambassadorial conferences in London, during meetings of the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen), in combined talks with the Ottoman Porte, and through an Anglo-French expedition to the coasts of North Africa. Increasingly ambitious efforts to enact maritime security and an increasingly vocal opposition to such efforts marked the eight years following the Anglo–Dutch bombardment of 1816. The authorities of the regencies managed to thwart several European security practices, ranging from concerted communications to defensive alliances. To understand the starts, stops and reversals of the fight against Mediterranean piracy, local activity needs to be analysed. This chapter foregrounds the role of actors who were deemed piratical threats. The contestations of these threatening actors influenced the shape and success of European security practices.
The creation of a new order of security in the Mediterranean revolved around shared conceptions of threat and a common apparatus of cooperative repressive practices. This conclusion explains how the repression of ‘Barbary piracy’, which European contemporaries perceived as one of the most urgent and persistent threats to security, was used to bring significant changes to the traditional diplomatic and maritime practices of the Mediterranean region. In fact, the fight against this imputed piratical threat fostered new ideas of the Mediterranean as a regional whole that could be rendered secure through policing efforts and imperial interventions. As a result, the political appearance of the Mediterranean Sea and its shorelines changed profoundly between 1815 and the closing years of the 1850s, when the Mediterranean seemed perfectly secure from piratical threats.
Focusing 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.
New ideas of security spelled the end of piracy on the Mediterranean Sea during the nineteenth century. As European states ended their military conflicts and privateering wars against one another, they turned their attention to the 'Barbary pirates' of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Naval commanders, diplomats, merchant lobbies and activists cooperated for the first time against this shared threat. Together, they installed a new order of security at sea. Drawing on European and Ottoman archival records – from diplomatic correspondence and naval journals to songs, poems and pamphlets – Erik de Lange explores how security was used in the nineteenth century to legitimise the repression of piracy. This repression brought European imperial expansionism and colonial rule to North Africa. By highlighting the crucial role of security within international relations, Menacing Tides demonstrates how European cooperation against shared threats remade the Mediterranean and unleashed a new form of collaborative imperialism.
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.
Focusing on the years between 1895 and 1897, this article reconstructs what happened after the arrival of Young Turk revolutionaries into the cities of the Danubian hinterland, particularly centering on Rusçuk (Ruse in today’s Bulgaria). In tracing the footsteps of İbrahim Temo and Mustafa Ragıp, two self-exiled figures from İstanbul, this study captures a particular moment when the Danubian cities became the hotbed of transnational radicalism, as a number of assassination plots began to be hatched by Muslim revolutionaries. A well-connected port city serviced by regular steamship links, Rusçuk was where professional revolutionaries met with the local Muslims, much to the ire of Ottoman diplomats in the region. In capturing their encounters, the goal is to point to the significance of Young Turk activities in the Balkans before the turn of the century, a phase which remains understudied in the existing literature. By focusing on a secondary port city that became home to failed assassination plots, this article also seeks to contribute to ongoing discussion in global history that warns against narratives of unhindered globalization. In studying fin-de-siecle radicalization, I hope to contribute to these debates by reflecting upon the limits of globalization as a productive field of historical inquiry.
Chapter 4 more resolutely follows Indian pilgrims beyond India. It thus surveys the remarkable ascendance, on the broader circuits of the hajj, of an institutional network meant for Indian Sufi pilgrims, a series of linked lodges that sprawled from Arabia, Syria, Anatolia, to Istanbul. Mainly through Ottoman sources, the chapter demonstrates how banded and corporatized attitudes formed among mobile and migrant South Asian pilgrims in the Middle East, and how these social formations in turn animated the authority and influence of “neo-Sufi” groups of Naqshbandis and Qadiris. Taking readers into the built environments of the so-called Hindi or “Indian” Sufi lodges of the Ottoman empire, the chapter additionally explores how the hajj gave way not only to forms of cultural cosmopolitanisms but also cultural differences among globally interacting Muslims. As the chapter argues, due to an influx of Indian pilgrims into the Hindi Sufi lodges, their institutional identities as sites and spaces of sociability for South Asian pilgrims abroad sharpened during the eighteenth century. Simultaneously, however, itinerant Indian Sufis also drew on Ottoman channels of social communications, legal petitioning strategies, and state and interstate linkages to successfully situate themselves as “transimperial subjects” straddling South Asia and the Middle East.