Without the labor of the captives and slaves, the Ottoman empire could not have attained and maintained its strength in early modern times. With Anatolia as the geographic focus, Leslie Peirce ...searches for the voices of the unfree, drawing on archives, histories written at the time, and legal texts. Unfree persons comprised two general populations: slaves and captives. Mostly household workers, slaves lived in a variety of circumstances, from squalor to luxury. Their duties varied with the status of their owner. Slave status might not last a lifetime, as Islamic law and Ottoman practice endorsed freeing one’s slave. Captives were typically seized in raids, generally to disappear, their fates unknown. Victims rarely returned home, despite efforts of their families and neighbors to recover them. The reader learns what it was about the Ottoman environment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that offered some captives the opportunity to improve the conditions of their bondage. The book describes imperial efforts to fight against the menace of captive-taking despite the widespread corruption among the state’s own officials, who had their own interest in captive labor. From the fortunes of captives and slaves the book moves to their representation in legend, historical literature, and law, where, fortunately, both captors and their prey are present.
Turkish republicanism is commonly thought to have originated with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the founding of modern Turkey in 1923, and understood exclusively in terms of Kemalist ideals, ...characterized by the principles of secularism, nationalism, statism, and populism. Banu Turnaoğlu challenges this view, showing how Turkish republicanism represents the outcome of centuries of intellectual dispute in Turkey over Islamic and liberal conceptions of republicanism, culminating in the victory of Kemalism in the republic's formative period.
Drawing on a wealth of rare archival material, Turnaoğlu presents the first complete history of republican thinking in Turkey from the birth of the Ottoman state to the founding of the modern republic. She shows how the Kemalists wrote Turkish history from their own perspective, presenting their own version of republicanism as inevitable while disregarding the contributions of competing visions. Turnaoğlu demonstrates how republicanism has roots outside the Western political experience, broadening our understanding of intellectual history. She reveals how the current crises in Turkish politics-including the Kurdish Question, democratic instability, the rise of radical Islam, and right-wing Turkish nationalism-arise from intellectual tensions left unresolved by Kemalist ideology.
A breathtaking work of scholarship,The Formation of Turkish Republicanismoffers a strikingly new narrative of the evolution and shaping of modern Turkey.
Intriguing dreams, improbable myths, fanciful genealogies, and suspect etymologies. These were all key elements of the historical texts composed by scholars and bureaucrats on the peripheries of ...Islamic empires between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. But how are historians to interpret such narratives? And what can these more literary histories tell us about the people who wrote them and the times in which they lived? In this book, Mimi Hanaoka offers an innovative, interdisciplinary method of approaching these sorts of local histories from the Persianate world. By paying attention to the purpose and intention behind a text's creation, her book highlights the preoccupation with authority to rule and legitimacy within disparate regional, provincial, ethnic, sectarian, ideological and professional communities. By reading these texts in such a way, Hanaoka transforms the literary patterns of these fantastic histories into rich sources of information about identity, rhetoric, authority, legitimacy, and centre-periphery relations.
This book intends to contribute to the discussions on the "New" Turkey, which has become a noteworthy term during the third term of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and which was officially ...used by Erdogan, the Republic of Turkey in 2014. The "New" Turkey, although a connotation used frequently for a new beginning of politics followed by each political power, has been attributed to a symbolic value by the current political power, AKP. The "New" Turkey has a bipolar meaning in Turkish politics: One that is strongly defended and supported by the current political power to maintain the historical bond between the Ottoman heritage, a mixture of Turkish culture and Islamic identity, and the Turkish republic, therefore to reinstate the Ottoman understanding among the people through state institutions while challenging the secular and Kemalist side, which resists losing the "old" Turkey's Kemalist identity. Political, social and economic transformations are visible in daily and social life in Turkey toward Turkish-Islamic synthesis. Such a visibility is of concern for both polarized sides in Turkey. The "conservative democrat" AKP is deeply keen on bringing back the "national" and "local" philosophy of culture, production, technology and identity while protecting their "own" and "othering" those who do not agree with the AKP, securitizing the opposition who disregard the Ottoman heritage and who states the Turkish Republic was founded from a scratch. This book focuses on the political regime transformation, social problems such as aging and nation, economic problems such as import and export destinations during the third term of AKP, when they officially started to name it "New" Turkey. Although the "New" Turkey is very often used to denote a state culturally and ideologically conservative, it is also a term to utter a regional power, which centers itself in the world politics. Today, the biggest question is whether Turkey is going to manage to undo polarization of the society while maintaining development. The present work seeks answers to these questions.
The Balkans offer classic examples of how empires imagine they can transform themselves into national states (Ottomanism) and how nation-states project themselves into future empires (as with the ...Greek “Great Idea" and the Serbian “Načertaniye"). By examining the interaction between these two aspirations this volume sheds light on the ideological prerequisites for the emergence of Balkan nationalisms. With a balance between historical and literary contributions, the focus is on the ideological hybridity of the new national identities and on the effects of “imperial nationalisms" on the emerging Balkan nationalisms. The authors of the twelve essays reveal the relation between empire and nation-state, proceeding from the observation that many of the new nation-states acquired some imperial features and behaved as empires. This original and stimulating approach reveals the imperialistic nature of so-called ethnic or cultural nationalism.
One of the goals of Russia's Eastern policy was to turn Moldavia
and Wallachia, the two Romanian principalities north of the Danube,
from Ottoman vassals into a controllable buffer zone and a
...springboard for future military operations against Constantinople.
Russia on the Danube describes the divergent interests and uneasy
cooperation between the Russian officials and the Moldavian and
Wallachian nobility in a key period between 1812 and 1834. Victor
Taki's meticulous examination of the plans and memoranda composed
by Russian administrators and the Romanian elite underlines the
crucial consequences of this encounter. The Moldavian and
Wallachian nobility used the Russian-Ottoman rivalry in order to
preserve and expand their traditional autonomy. The comprehensive
institutional reforms born out of their interaction with the tsar's
officials consolidated territorial statehood on the lower Danube,
providing the building blocks of a nation state.
The main conclusion of the book is that although Russian policy
was driven by self-interest, and despite the Russophobia among a
great part of the Romanian intellectuals, this turbulent period
significantly contributed to the emergence, several decades later,
of modern Romania.
The Treaties of Carlowitz (1699) presents studies on the Lega Sacra War of 1683-1699 against the Ottoman Empire, the Peace treaties of Carlowitz (1699), and the legacy of the conflict for Modern ...Europe, the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire.
Human rights are politically fraught in Turkey, provoking suspicion and scrutiny among government workers for their anti-establishment left-wing connotations. Nevertheless, with eyes worldwide ...trained on Turkish politics, and with accession to the European Union underway, Turkey's human rights record remains a key indicator of its governmental legitimacy. Bureaucratic Intimacies shows how government workers encounter human rights rhetoric through training programs and articulates the perils and promises of these encounters for the subjects and objects of Turkish governance. Drawing on years of participant observation in programs for police officers, judges and prosecutors, healthcare workers, and prison personnel, Elif M. Babül argues that the accession process does not always advance human rights. In casting rights as requirements for expertise and professionalism, training programs strip human rights of their radical valences, disassociating them from their political meanings within grassroots movements. Translation of human rights into a tool of good governance leads to competing understandings of what human rights should do, not necessarily to liberal, transparent, and accountable governmental practices. And even as translation renders human rights relevant for the everyday practices of government workers, it ultimately comes at a cost to the politics of human rights in Turkey.
Scientific Instruments between East and West is a collection of essays on the transmission of knowledge about scientific instruments and the trade in such instruments between the Eastern and Western ...worlds.
Turkey's economy is a complex mix of modern industry, a traditional agricultural sector, and a rapidly growing private sector. At the same time the country is positioning itself and preparing for ...entry into the European Union. That Turkey should meet her national economic goals is, therefore, particularly important. A vital factor in achieving these will be the country's regional economies and their associated economic policies. To date, however, many of the policy interventions adopted have been based on models drawn from developed economies and the outcome has raised a number of concerns. Are policy interventions drawn from advanced economies appropriate for transitional economies such as Turkey? Aksel Ersoy's book is the first work to explore the dynamics of local and regional development in Turkey. In addition, he offers a new theoretical framework for understanding the local and regional dynamics of emerging and transitional economies more generally.
