Using a plethora of hitherto unused and under-utilized sources from the Ottoman, British and Iranian archives, Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands traces seven decades of intermittent work by Russian, ...British, Ottoman and Iranian technical and diplomatic teams to turn an ill-defined and highly porous area into an internationally recognized boundary. By examining the process of boundary negotiation by the international commissioners and their interactions with the borderland peoples they encountered, the book tells the story of how the Muslim world's oldest borderland was transformed into a bordered land. It details how the borderland peoples, whose habitat straddled the frontier, responded to those processes as well as to the ideas and institutions that accompanied their implementation. It shows that the making of the boundary played a significant role in shaping Ottoman-Iranian relations and in the identity and citizenship choices of the borderland peoples.
Living in the Ottoman Realm brings the Ottoman Empire to life in all of its ethnic, religious, linguistic, and geographic diversity. The contributors explore the development and transformation of ...identity over the long span of the empire's existence. They offer engaging accounts of individuals, groups, and communities by drawing on a rich array of primary sources, some available in English translation for the first time. These materials are examined with new methodological approaches to gain a deeper understanding of what it meant to be Ottoman. Designed for use as a course text, each chapter includes study questions and suggestions for further reading.
The Ottomans ruled much of the Arab World for four centuries. Bruce Masters's work surveys this period, emphasizing the cultural and social changes that occurred against the backdrop of the political ...realities that Arabs experienced as subjects of the Ottoman sultans. The persistence of Ottoman rule over a vast area for several centuries required that some Arabs collaborate in the imperial enterprise. Masters highlights the role of two social classes that made the empire successful: the Sunni Muslim religious scholars, the ulama, and the urban notables, the acyan. Both groups identified with the Ottoman sultanate and were its firmest backers, although for different reasons. The ulama legitimated the Ottoman state as a righteous Muslim sultanate, while the acyan emerged as the dominant political and economic class in most Arab cities due to their connections to the regime. Together, the two helped to maintain the empire.
InBrokering Empire, E. Natalie Rothman explores the intersecting worlds of those who regularly traversed the early modern Venetian-Ottoman frontier, including colonial migrants, redeemed slaves, ...merchants, commercial brokers, religious converts, and diplomatic interpreters. In their sustained interactions across linguistic, religious, and political lines these trans-imperial subjects helped to shape shifting imperial and cultural boundaries, including the emerging distinction between Europe and the Levant.
Rothman argues that the period from 1570 to 1670 witnessed a gradual transformation in how Ottoman difference was conceived within Venetian institutions. Thanks in part to the activities of trans-imperial subjects, an early emphasis on juridical and commercial criteria gave way to conceptions of difference based on religion and language. Rothman begins her story in Venice's bustling marketplaces, where commercial brokers often defied the state's efforts both to tax foreign merchants and define Venetian citizenship. The story continues in a Venetian charitable institution where converts from Islam and Judaism and their Catholic Venetian patrons negotiated their mutual transformation. The story ends with Venice's diplomatic interpreters, the dragomans, who not only produced and disseminated knowledge about the Ottomans but also created dense networks of kinship and patronage across imperial boundaries. Rothman's new conceptual and empirical framework sheds light on institutional practices for managing juridical, religious, and ethnolinguistic difference in the Mediterranean and beyond.
Introducing new evidence from more than 600 secret Ottoman documents, this book demonstrates in unprecedented detail that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks from the late Ottoman ...Empire resulted from an official effort to rid the empire of its Christian subjects. Presenting these previously inaccessible documents along with expert context and analysis, Taner Akçam's most authoritative work to date goes deep inside the bureaucratic machinery of Ottoman Turkey to show how a dying empire embraced genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Although the deportation and killing of Armenians was internationally condemned in 1915 as a "crime against humanity and civilization," the Ottoman government initiated a policy of denial that is still maintained by the Turkish Republic. The case for Turkey's "official history" rests on documents from the Ottoman imperial archives, to which access has been heavily restricted until recently. It is this very source that Akçam now uses to overturn the official narrative.
The documents presented here attest to a late-Ottoman policy of Turkification, the goal of which was no less than the radical demographic transformation of Anatolia. To that end, about one-third of Anatolia's 15 million people were displaced, deported, expelled, or massacred, destroying the ethno-religious diversity of an ancient cultural crossroads of East and West, and paving the way for the Turkish Republic.
By uncovering the central roles played by demographic engineering and assimilation in the Armenian Genocide, this book will fundamentally change how this crime is understood and show that physical destruction is not the only aspect of the genocidal process.
Akturk discusses how the definition of being German, Soviet, Russian and Turkish radically changed at the turn of the twenty-first century. Germany's ethnic citizenship law, the Soviet Union's ...inscription of ethnic origins in personal identification documents and Turkey's prohibition on the public use of minority languages, all implemented during the early twentieth century, underpinned the definition of nationhood in these countries. Despite many challenges from political and societal actors, these policies did not change for many decades, until around the turn of the twenty-first century, when Russia removed ethnicity from the internal passport, Germany changed its citizenship law and Turkish public television began broadcasting in minority languages. Using a new typology of 'regimes of ethnicity' and a close study of primary documents and numerous interviews, Sener Akturk argues that the coincidence of three key factors – counterelites, new discourses and hegemonic majorities – explains successful change in state policies toward ethnicity.
The bleak steppe and rolling highlands of inner Anatolia were one of the most remote and underdeveloped parts of the Roman empire. Still today, for most historians of the Roman world, ancient Phrygia ...largely remains terra incognita. Yet thanks to a startling abundance of Greek and Latin inscriptions on stone, the cultural history of the villages and small towns of Roman Phrygia is known to us in vivid and unexpected detail. Few parts of the Mediterranean world offer so rich a body of evidence for rural society in the Roman Imperial and late antique periods, and for the flourishing of ancient Christianity within this landscape. The eleven essays in this book offer new perspectives on the remarkable culture, lifestyles, art and institutions of the Anatolian uplands in antiquity.
Debating Turkish Modernity describes the opening act of Turkey's half century bid to join the European Community. Between 1959 and 1980, Turks from all walks of life weighed in on their prospective ...integration into Europe. This book details how these Turks made sense of the project of European Unification and how they spoke about it. It argues that Turkey's EEC debates, by resurrecting past questions over Turkey's relationship to Europe, became the principle forum where Turks of the Second Republic defined who they were, where they came from, and where they were going.
Turkey's involvement in the Gulf War in 199 paved the way for the country's acceptance into the European Union. This book traces that process and in the first part looks at Turkey's foreign policy in ...the 1990s, considering the ability of the country to withstand the repercussions of the fall of communism. It focuses on Turkey's achievement in halting and minimising the effects of the temporary devaluationin its strategic importance that resulted from the waning of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the skilful way in which Turkay avoided becoming embroiled in the ethnic upheavals in Central Asia, the balkans and the Middle East, and the development of a continued policy of closer integration into the European and western worlds. Internal politics are the focus of the second part of the book, addressing the curbing of the Kurdish revolt, the economic gains made, and the strengthening of civil society. Nachmani goes on to analyse the prospects for Turkey in the twenty-first century, in the light of the possible integration into Europe, which may leave the country's leadership free to deal effectively with domestic issues. This book will make crucial reading for anyone studying Turkish politics, or indeed European or European Union politics.
In the Denizli Basin (Turkey), located in the western Anatolian extensional province, travertine and tufa deposition has been an ongoing process for at least 600,000years. Travertine bodies, which ...are 30 to 75m thick and each covers areas of 1 to 34km2, are up to 1km3 in volume.
Today, spring waters in this area have temperatures of 19 to 57°C, are of the Ca–Mg–HCO3–SO4 type in the Pamukkale, Kelkaya and Pınarbaşı areas and the Ca–Mg–SO4–HCO3 type at Çukurbağ. Thermal waters along the northern margin of the basin are generally hotter than those in the east–southeast and south. The δ18O and δD values of the spring waters indicate a meteoric origin. The average temperatures of the hydrothermal systems in the Denizli Basin appear to have decreased from Pleistocene to Holocene.
Travertine, which formed from the hotter water, is more widespread than the tufa that formed in the cooler spring waters. Deposition of the travertine, which formed largely on slopes, in depressions, and along fissure ridges (mostly on northern basin margins), was controlled by the interplay between various intrinsic and extrinsic parameters. The travertines are formed largely of calcite with only minor amounts of aragonite in some of the vertically banded, crystalline crust, raft and pisoid travertines found in some of the northern sites. The aragonitic samples, rich in Sr, are typically found around the spring orifices and along the central axis of the fissure ridges.
The stable isotope values of the travertine found in the northwest and southeast parts of the basin are different. The δ13C values of the northern travertine deposits are more positive (3.7 to 11.7‰ VPBD) than those found in the south–southeast areas (−4 to 5.8‰ VPDB). In contrast, the travertine and tufa in the southeastern areas have higher δ18O values (−15.2 to −7.8‰ VPDB) than those of the northern areas (−16.6 to −4.8‰ VPDB). Available evidence indicates that spring activity and associated travertine precipitation in the Denizli Basin were controlled largely by tectonic activity rather than by climatic conditions.
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