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New perspectives on the Ottoman Empire, challenging Western stereotypes.
A Moveable Empire examines the history of the Ottoman Empire through a new lens, focusing on the migrant groups that lived within its bounds and their changing relationship to the state's central authorities. Unlike earlier studies that take an evolutionary view of tribe-state relations -- casting the development of a state as a story in which nomadic tribes give way to settled populations -- this book argues that mobile groups played an important role in shaping Ottoman institutions and, ultimately, the early republican structures of modern Turkey. Over much of the empire's long history, local interests influenced the development of the Ottoman state as authorities sought to enlist and acco...
In the first two decades after W.W.II, social scientist heralded Turkey as an exemplar of a 'modernizing' nation in the Western mold. Images of unveiled women working next to clean-shaven men, healthy children in school uniforms, and downtown Ankara's modern architecture all proclaimed the country's success. Although Turkey's modernization began in the late Ottoman era, the establishment of the secular nation-state by Kemal Ataturk in 1923 marked the crystallization of an explicit, elite-driven 'project of modernity' that took its inspiration exclusively from the West. The essays in this book are the first attempt to examine the Turkish experiment with modernity from a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, encompassing the fields of history, the social sciences, the humanities, architecture, and urban planning. As they examine both the Turkish project of modernity and its critics, the contributors offer a fresh, balanced understanding of dilemmas now facing not only Turkey but also many other parts of the Middle East and the world at large.
Seema Alavi challenges the idea that all pan-Islamic configurations are anti-Western or pro-Caliphate. A pan-Islamic intellectual network at the cusp of the British and Ottoman empires became the basis of a global Muslim sensibility—a political and cultural affiliation that competes with ideas of nationhood today as it did in the last century.
The Global History of Childhood Reader provides an essential collection of chapters and articles on the global history of childhood. The Reader is structured thematically so as to provide both a representative sampling of the historiography as well as an overview of the key issues of the field, such as childhood as a social construct, commonalities and differences globally, and why the twentieth century was not the "century of the child" for most of the world’s children. The Reader is divided into four parts: Theories and methodologies of the history of childhood Constructions of childhood in different times and places Children’s experiences in different times and places Usage of the pas...
Investigating how a number of modern empires transform over the long 19th century (1789-1914) as a consequence of their struggle for ascendancy in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State moves the study of the modern empire towards a comparative, trans-regional analysis of events along the Ottoman frontiers: Western Balkans, the Persian Gulf and Yemen. This inter-disciplinary approach of studying events at different ends of the Ottoman Empire challenges previous emphasis on Europe as the only source of change and highlights the progression of modern imperial states. The book introduces an entirely new analytical approach to the...
Nelly Hanna's work challenges the standard perceptions about Middle East society and economy of the seventeenth century. Both novel in its approach and information, this book's central theme revolves around the rise of an indigenous form of capitalism existing as early as the 1600s. Making Big Money in 1600 examines the reemergence of the economic sector and its complex influences on social conditions during this time. By examining the life and work of Isma'il Abu Taqiyya, Hanna traces the relationship between economic activities and culture. As we are introduced to Abu Taqiyya we learn how he negotiates partnership with other merchants, arranges for the handling of goods, and negotiates loans for colleagues. Hanna reveals his home life, his wives, children, and concubines, his relations with his family and friends, and how these relations evolved and were affected by the changing social and economic conditions-a perspective rarely discussed in works before the modern period.
As Mubarak's regimenearing its end becomes a strong possibility, many pressures, both foreign and domestic, are coming to bear on Egypt to bring democratic reforms to this struggling country. In The Mubarak Leadership and Future of Democracy in Egypt , Alaa Al-Din Arafat studies this new era and the obstacles that must be overcome.
By using the core insights of the constructivist approach in International Relations, this book analyzes the foreign policy behavior of Turkey. It argues that throughout its modern history, Turkey's foreign policy has been affected by its Western identity created in the years following the War of Independence.
Gözde Yazıcı Cörüt unfolds the details of everyday life and represents the local people as active agents – active, moreover, in relation both to the changing nature and effectiveness of the Ottoman state's assertion of territorial authority and also to the differences between policies and practices of the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Overall, she focuses on the end-of-empire border politics and the issue of Ottoman citizenship not only from the perspective of macro-level political developments and central state power but also in terms of the peripheral specificities of administration and the movements and subjecthood choices of people inhabiting the Russo-Ottoman borderland. The author presents a new type of multi-faceted account of borderland development in which ethnoreligious considerations came to inform a somewhat messy production of sovereignty in the context of the modernizing transition between empire and nation-state.