Financial and Administrative Organization and Development


Book Description

Since the opening of the Ottoman Archives, research on the history of the Ottoman Empire prior to 1800 has resulted primarily in the publication of individual financial and administrative records, sometimes with analysis. Dr. Shaw's study is the first effort to use all the available records concerning an individual province, synthesizing them into an exhaustive study of Egypt’s administration under Ottoman rule, from its conquest in 1517 until the French invasion of Egypt in 1798. A unique work of scholarship, the book shows in detail the changes made over the centuries, and is based both on the local archives and on the Imperial Ottoman archives located in Istanbul. Originally published in 1962. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.










Egyptian Society Under Ottoman Rule, 1517-1798


Book Description

First study to cover the whole of this period and focus on both social change and cultural/religious life The period is crucial to understanding modern Egyptian consciousness Author uses primary sources, not available anywhere else




Conquête ottomane de l'Égypte (1517)


Book Description

Conquête ottomane de l’Égypte (1517) est le premier ouvrage collectif consacré à la victoire de Selīm Ier sur les Mamelouks, qui a fait du sultanat ottoman l’unique puissance musulmane en Méditerranée orientale, et ravalé l’Égypte au rang de province. Il en renouvelle l’approche en faisant appel à des sources ottomanes, arabes et occidentales très variées. Les contributions réunies par Benjamin Lellouch et Nicolas Michel s’attachent à mesurer les transformations structurelles qu’a induites l’événement dans la société, les pouvoirs, la culture littéraire, artistique et matérielle en Égypte. Elles explorent ses antécédents et son impact géopolitique, et restituent les échos, bruyants puis assourdis, qu’il a suscités, au Proche-Orient, en Italie, et plus généralement en Méditerranée. Conquête ottomane de l’Égypte (1517) is the first collective work that deals with Selīm Ist’s crushing victory over the Mamluks, which made the Ottoman sultanate into the sole remaining Muslim power in the eastern Mediterranean, and reduced Egypt to the rank of a province. The book offers new insights into this major event by using a wide range of Ottoman and Arabic as well as Western sources. These essays in French and English collected by Benjamin Lellouch and Nicolas Michel examine to what extent the Ottoman conquest altered the structures of Egyptian society, power relations, literature, arts and material culture. They explore both its backgrounds and geopolitical aftermath, and reconstruct its echoes - loud at first, then gradually fading out - in the Middle East, Italy, and the Mediterranean.




Under Osman's Tree


Book Description

Osman, the founder of the Ottoman Empire, had a dream in which a tree sprouted from his navel. As the tree grew, its shade covered the earth; as Osman’s empire grew, it, too, covered the earth. This is the most widely accepted foundation myth of the longest-lasting empire in the history of Islam, and offers a telling clue to its unique legacy. Underlying every aspect of the Ottoman Empire’s epic history—from its founding around 1300 to its end in the twentieth century—is its successful management of natural resources. Under Osman’s Tree analyzes this rich environmental history to understand the most remarkable qualities of the Ottoman Empire—its longevity, politics, economy, and society. The early modern Middle East was the world’s most crucial zone of connection and interaction. Accordingly, the Ottoman Empire’s many varied environments affected and were affected by global trade, climate, and disease. From down in the mud of Egypt’s canals to up in the treetops of Anatolia, Alan Mikhail tackles major aspects of the Middle East’s environmental history: natural resource management, climate, human and animal labor, energy, water control, disease, and politics. He also points to some of the ways in which the region’s dominant religious tradition, Islam, has understood and related to the natural world. Marrying environmental and Ottoman history, Under Osman’s Tree offers a bold new interpretation of the past five hundred years of Middle Eastern history.




Studies in the History of the Near East


Book Description

First Published in 1973. This volume brings together a number of studies concerned with the Near East and its history from the sixteenth century. They fall into three groups. The first is concerned with English Arabists of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and particularly with Edward Pococke. The papers in the second group deal with the history of the Nilotic Sudan, and especially attempt to exploit the sparse source-materials available on the Funj Sultanate and to throw some light on developments between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century. Another dark age in modern Near Eastern history is the subject of the third group of papers-the period of Egyptian history from the Ottoman conquest in 1517 to the French occupation in 1798.







Public Finance of the Dutch Republic in Comparative Perspective


Book Description

This study offers the first complete overview of the remarkable public finances of the Dutch Republic of the United Provinces. Wantje Fritschy has analysed the development and structure of its public revenue and expenditure. She argues that a ‘tax revolution’ and the ‘fiscal resilience’ of the provinces together were more important for its surprising performance than Holland’s public debt alone, and the institutional and economic characteristics of its ‘urban system’ were more important than wealth due to foreign trade. Comparisons with the fiscal systems of three more centralized states - the Venetian Republic, Britain and the Ottoman Empire - underline the crucial importance of long-term ‘urbanization trajectories’ in understanding early-modern fiscal performance. It was not because it was federal that the Dutch Republic collapsed.




The Black Death in Egypt and England


Book Description

Throughout the fourteenth century AD/eighth century H, waves of plague swept out of Central Asia and decimated populations from China to Iceland. So devastating was the Black Death across the Old World that some historians have compared its effects to those of a nuclear holocaust. As countries began to recover from the plague during the following century, sharp contrasts arose between the East, where societies slumped into long-term economic and social decline, and the West, where technological and social innovation set the stage for Europe's dominance into the twentieth century. Why were there such opposite outcomes from the same catastrophic event? In contrast to previous studies that have looked to differences between Islam and Christianity for the solution to the puzzle, this pioneering work proposes that a country's system of landholding primarily determined how successfully it recovered from the calamity of the Black Death. Stuart Borsch compares the specific cases of Egypt and England, countries whose economies were based in agriculture and whose pre-plague levels of total and agrarian gross domestic product were roughly equivalent. Undertaking a thorough analysis of medieval economic data, he cogently explains why Egypt's centralized and urban landholding system was unable to adapt to massive depopulation, while England's localized and rural landholding system had fully recovered by the year 1500.