In the late fifteenth century, the north-eastern Balkans were under-populated and under-institutionalized. Yet, by the end of the following century, the regions of Deliorman and Gerlovo were home to ...one of the largest Muslim populations in southeast Europe. Nikolay Antov sheds fresh light on the mechanics of Islamization along the Ottoman frontier, and presents an instructive case study of the 'indigenization' of Islam – the process through which Islam, in its diverse doctrinal and socio-cultural manifestations, became part of a distinct regional landscape. Simultaneously, Antov uses a wide array of administrative, narrative-literary, and legal sources, exploring the perspectives of both the imperial center and regional actors in urban, rural, and nomadic settings, to trace the transformation of the Ottoman polity from a frontier principality into a centralized empire. Contributing to the further understanding of Balkan Islam, state formation and empire building, this unique text will appeal to those studying Ottoman, Balkan, and Islamic world history.
This book addresses fundamental issues about the last decades of Tsarist Russia, contributing significantly to current debates about how far and how successfully modernisation was being implemented ...by the Tsarist regime. It focuses on successive outbreaks of cholera in the city of Saratov on the Volga, in particular contrasting the outbreak of 1892 - widely regarded at the time as a national fiasco and a transformative episode for the Russian Empire - with the cholera epidemics of 1904-1910 when - despite completely new scientific discoveries and administrative arrangements - Russia suffered another national outbreak of the disease.
The book sets these outbreaks fully in their social, economic, political and cultural context, and explains why a medical and social disaster - which had long since been overcome in other parts of Europe - continued much later in Russia. It explores autocratic government, urban renewal, public health, and disaster management, including the management of widespread public hysteria and social unrest. The book further analyses the assimilation of Western medical knowledge, and the resulting institutional and epistemological changes. Overall, it demonstrates that Russia's medical history was inseparably linked to the nature of the tsarist regime itself in its confrontation with modernity.
Love it or hate it, celebrity is one of the dominant features of modern life--and one of the least understood. Fred Inglis sets out to correct this problem in this entertaining and enlightening ...social history of modern celebrity, from eighteenth-century London to today's Hollywood. Vividly written and brimming with fascinating stories of figures whose lives mark important moments in the history of celebrity, this book explains how fame has changed over the past two-and-a-half centuries.
Epicentre of the Revolution of 1789, erstwhile bastion of the skilled working-class and centre of radical agitation, along with Pigalle and Montmartre a focus for popular and raffish night-life in ...the early twentieth century, the Bastille area of Eastern Paris (also known as the Faubourg Saint-Antoine) is now an ethnically and socially mixed quartier which still bears the traces of its previous avatars. In a fascinating tour, Keith Reader charts the history and cultural geography of this unique area of Paris, from the fortress and prison that gave the area its name to the building of the largest and costliest opera house in the world.
In this book, Lauren Ristvet rethinks the narratives of state formation by investigating the interconnections between ritual, performance, and politics in the ancient Near East. She draws on a wide ...range of archaeological, iconographic, and cuneiform sources to show how ritual performance was not set apart from the real practice of politics; it was politics. Rituals provided an opportunity for elites and ordinary people to negotiate political authority. Descriptions of rituals from three periods explore the networks of signification that informed different societies. From circa 2600 to 2200 BC, pilgrimage made kingdoms out of previously isolated villages. Similarly, from circa 1900 to 1700 BC, commemorative ceremonies legitimated new political dynasties by connecting them to a shared past. Finally, in the Hellenistic period, the traditional Babylonian Akitu festival was an occasion for Greek-speaking kings to show that they were Babylonian and for Babylonian priests to gain significant power.
After the abolition of slavery in 1897, Islamic courts in Zanzibar (East Africa) became central institutions where former slaves negotiated socioeconomic participation. By using difficult-to-read ...Islamic court records in Arabic, Elke Stockreiter reassesses the workings of these courts as well as gender and social relations in Zanzibar Town during British colonial rule (1890–1963). She shows how Muslim judges maintained their autonomy within the sphere of family law and describes how they helped advance the rights of women, ex-slaves, and other marginalised groups. As was common in other parts of the Muslim world, women usually had to buy their divorce. Thus, Muslim judges played important roles as litigants negotiated moving up the social hierarchy, with ethnicisation increasingly influencing all actors. Drawing on these previously unexplored sources, this study investigates how Muslim judges both mediated and generated discourses of inclusion and exclusion based on social status rather than gender.
Agnieszka Helman-Ważny's Archaeology of Tibetan Books provides a comprehensive guide to the making of Tibetan books. Concerned with the relation of papers, inks, and layout to questions of provenance ...and dating, this work is a must-have companion to any textual analysis.
This book investigates the social construction of the processes of marijuana criminalization and marijuana medicalization. It is the first substantive study on the subject to include a detailed ...historical context in which to situate a new theoretical model for examining the contemporary U.S. drug policy debate.
Over the course of the fourth century, Christianity rose from a religion actively persecuted by the authority of the Roman empire to become the religion of state-a feat largely credited to ...Constantine the Great. Constantine succeeded in propelling this minority religion to imperial status using the traditional tools of governance, yet his proclamation of his new religious orientation was by no means unambiguous. His coins and inscriptions, public monuments, and pronouncements sent unmistakable signals to his non-Christian subjects that he was willing not only to accept their beliefs about the nature of the divine but also to incorporate traditional forms of religious expression into his own self-presentation. InConstantine and the Cities, Noel Lenski attempts to reconcile these apparent contradictions by examining the dialogic nature of Constantine's power and how his rule was built in the space between his ambitions for the empire and his subjects' efforts to further their own understandings of religious truth.
Focusing on cities and the texts and images produced by their citizens for and about the emperor,Constantine and the Citiesuncovers the interplay of signals between ruler and subject, mapping out the terrain within which Constantine nudged his subjects in the direction of conversion. Reading inscriptions, coins, legal texts, letters, orations, and histories, Lenski demonstrates how Constantine and his subjects used the instruments of government in a struggle for authority over the religion of the empire.
Lysenko became one of the most notorious figures in twentieth-century science after his genetic theories were discredited decades ago. Yet some scientists now claim that discoveries in epigenetics ...prove that he was right after all. Loren Graham reopens the case, to determine whether new developments in molecular biology validate Lysenko's claims.
