Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire


Book Description

This book examines gender politics through slavery and social regulation in the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.










Ottoman Empire and European Theatre Vol. III


Book Description

On 3 May 1810 George Gordon, Lord Byron, swam like the mythic Leander from Sestos on the European side of the Hellespont to Abydos on the Asian shore. The hero of his poem "Don Juan" has lived in “feminine disguise” in the sultan's harem for more than a century. To commemorate Byron's Don Juan, the third volume of the "Ottoman Empire and European Theatre" series focuses on the image of the harem in literature and theatre. Nineteen international contributors explore historical conceptions of the Ottoman harem and seraglio in British, French and South East European sources from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Contributions by Jennifer L. Airey, Gönül Bakay, Michael Chappell, Anne Greenfield, Isobel Grundy, Bent Holm, Michael Hüttler, Hans Peter Kellner, Emily M. N. Kugler, Andreas Münzmay, Domenica Newell-Amato, Walter Puchner, Marian Gilbart Read, Käthe Springer, Stefanie Steiner, Laura Tunbridge, Himmet Umunc, Hans Ernst Weidinger, Mi Zhou.







'Turquerie' and the Politics of Representation, 1728-1876


Book Description

Devoted explicitly to the examination of Ottoman/Turkish-inspired architecture in Western Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in this study Nebahat Avcioglu rethinks the question of cultural frontiers not as separations but as a rapport of heterogeneities. Reclaiming turquerie as cross-cultural art from the confines of the inconsequential exoticism it is often reduced to, Avcioglu analyses hitherto neglected constructions, and links them to notions of self-representation and politics.




"Turquerie and the Politics of Representation, 1728?876 "


Book Description

In this first full-length study devoted explicitly to the examination of Ottoman/Turkish-inspired architecture in Western Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Nebahat Avcioglu rethinks the question of cultural frontiers not as separations but as a rapport of heterogeneities. Reclaiming turquerie as cross-cultural art from the confines of the inconsequential exoticism it is often reduced to, Avcioglu analyses hitherto neglected images, designs and constructions; and links Western interest in the Ottoman Empire to notions of self-representation and national politics. In investigating why and to what effect Europeans turned to the Turk for inspiration, Avcioglu provides a far-reaching cultural reinterpretation of art and architecture in this period. Presented as a series of case studies focusing on three specific building types?kiosks, mosques, and baths?chosen on the basis that each represents the first full-fledged manifestations of their respective genres to be constructed in Western Europe, the study delves into the cultural politics of architectural forms and styles. The author argues that the appropriation of those building types was neither accidental, nor did it merely reflect European domination of another culture. The process was essentially dialectical, and contributed to transculturation in both the West and the East.




Defining Corruption in the Ottoman Empire


Book Description

How did the premodern Ottomans understand public office corruption? To answer this question, Defining Corruption in the Ottoman Empire explores how Ottoman jurists, statesmen, political commentators, and others characterized this notion and what specific transgressions they associated with it before the nineteenth century. The book is based on extensive research and a wide variety of sources, including jurisprudential texts, imperial orders and communications, chronicles, and travel and diplomatic accounts. It identifies articulations of self-interested abuses of power by official and communal actors in these sources and illustrates how they resonate in some ways with modern perspectives. These premodern formulations, however, are shown to have collectively constituted a conceptual space that was contentious and temporally unstable, and no single overarching term was able to encapsulate all the specific misdeeds frequently linked to modern depictions of corruption. The book's genre-specific discursive survey is complemented by discussions that highlight, in the Ottoman context, the shifty boundaries that separated legitimate and illegitimate forms of revenue extraction; that examine the state's efforts to monitor and punish abuses by government officials; and that explore the context-dependent and often contested moralities of many acts, such as gift giving as bribery, office selling, and favoritism. It also considers the ways in which "corrupt" state actors might have rationalized their offenses. Defining Corruption is a conceptually driven work that is both comparative and interdisciplinary, engaging seriously with non-Ottoman historiographies, including broader Middle Eastern, European, and Chinese, and multiple disciplines besides history, in particular anthropology and economics, to provide a comprehensive analysis of premodern Ottoman perceptions of administrative abuse.




English Explorers in the East (1738-1745)


Book Description

In English Explorers in the East (1738-1745). The Travels of Thomas Shaw, Charles Perry and Richard Pococke, Rachel Finnegan offers an account of the influential travel writings of three rival explorers, whose eastern travel books were printed within a decade of each other. Making use of historical records, Finnegan examines the personal and professional motives of the three authors for producing their eastern travels; their methods of researching, drafting, and publicising their works while still abroad; their relationships with each other, both while travelling and on their return to England; and the legacy of their combined works. She also provides a survey of the main features (both textual and visual) of the travel books themselves.