Wealth in the Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Balkans


Book Description

Wealth in the Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Balkans demonstrates the economic and social transformations wrought by wars, state centralization, European expansion and the gradual Ottoman withdrawal from the Balkans. As a new middle class emerged, and the power of religion faded, Ottoman and post-Ottoman social, economic and cultural norms changed rapidly across the region. This book illustrates not only how markers of wealth accumulation and poverty were socially defined across the region, but also the ways inequality was experienced, revealing the relationships between the state, economy, society, modernity in the context of Balkan, Ottoman and European development. Evguenia Davidova marshals a compendium of thirteen contributions wherein new archival data and various case studies frame a comparative social portrayal of the modern Balkans, offering new truths to the major discourses about nationalism, modernity, and the Ottoman legacy in the respective Balkan national historiographies.




The Establishment of the Balkan National States, 1804-1920


Book Description

This highly readable and thoroughly researched volume offers an excellent account of the development of seven Balkan peoples during the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth centuries. Professors Charles and Barbara Jelavich have brought their rich knowledge of the Albanians, Bulgarians, Croatians, Greeks, Romanians, Serbians, and Slovenes to bear on every aspect of the area’s history--political, diplomatic, economic, social and cultural. It took more than a century after the first Balkan uprising, that of the Serbians in 1804, for the Balkan people to free themselves from Ottoman and Habsburg rule. The Serbians and the Greeks were the first to do so; the Albanians, the Croatians, and the Slovenes the last. For each people the national revival took its own form and independence was achieved in its own way. The authors explore the contrasts and similarities among the peoples, within the context of the Ottoman Empire and Europe.




The Ottoman Balkans, 1750-1830


Book Description

The decades after 1750 saw the Ottoman Empire undergo tremendous stresses that culminated in the first stirrings of nationalism among Christian subjects and an irrevocable commitment to reform by the Muslim state. This volume examines instances of problems affecting the Balkans and of state efforts to fix them.




State, Faith, and Nation in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Lands


Book Description

Current standard narratives of Ottoman, Balkan, and Middle East history overemphasise the role of nationalism in the transformation of the region. Challenging these accounts, this book argues that religious affiliation was in fact the most influential shaper of communal identity in the Ottoman era, that religion moulded the relationship between state and society, and that it continues to do so today in lands once occupied by the Ottomans. The book examines the major transformations of the past 250 years to illustrate this argument, traversing the nineteenth century, the early decades of post-Ottoman independence, and the recent past. In this way, the book affords unusual insights not only into the historical patterns of political development but also into the forces shaping contemporary crises, from the dissolution of Yugoslavia to the rise of political Islam.




The Nature of the Early Ottoman State


Book Description

A revisionist interpretation of the early origins of the Ottoman Empire.




Religion, Ethnicity and Contested Nationhood in the Former Ottoman Space


Book Description

There has been a growing interest in recent years in reviewing the continued impact of the Ottoman empire even long after its demise at the end of the First World War. The wars in former Yugoslavia, following hot on the civil war in Lebanon, were reminders that the settlements of 1918-22 were not final. While many of the successor states to the Ottoman empire, in east and west, had been built on forms of nationalist ideology and rhetoric opposed to the empire, a newer trend among historians has been to look at these histories as Ottoman provincial history. The present volume is an attempt to bring some of those histories from across the former Ottoman space together. They cover from parts of former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece to Lebanon, including Turkey itself, providing rich material for comparing regions which normally are not compared.




The Rise of the Ottoman Empire


Book Description

Paul Wittek’s The Rise of the Ottoman Empire was first published by the Royal Asiatic Society in 1938 and has been out of print for more than a quarter of a century. The present reissue of the text also brings together translations of some of his other studies on Ottoman history; eight closely interconnected writings on the period from the founding of the state to the Fall of Constantinople and the reign of Mehmed II. Most of these pieces reproduces the texts of lectures or conference papers delivered by Wittek between 1936 and 1938 when he was teaching at Université Libré in Brussels, Belgium. The books or journals in which they were originally published are for the most part inaccessible except in specialist libraries, in a period when Wittek's activities as an Ottoman historian, in particular his formulations regarding the origins and subsequent history of the Ottoman state (the "Ghazi thesis"), are coming under increasing study within the Anglo-Saxon world of scholarship. An introduction by Colin Heywood sets Wittek's work in its historical and historiographical context for the benefit of those students who were not privileged to experience it firsthand. This reissue and recontextualizing of Wittek’s pioneering work on early Ottoman history makes a valuable contribution to the field and to the historiography of Asian and Middle Eastern history generally.




Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History


Book Description

Annotation The 19th century prevails in this anthology on the transformation of the late Ottoman state into modern Turkey. Thirty-three articles are arranged in three categories: the Ottoman socio-political transformation, the population movements of immigration and migration, and the formation of nation-states with politico-religious identities. Karpat (history, U. of Wisconsin) has a central aim: to counteract what would become bureaucratic Republican attempts by the Turkish Historical Society (formerly, the Ottoman Historical Society) to cut off Turkish history from its Ottoman past. The THS was able to do this by instead connecting the Republic with its earlier Central Asian roots, and by relying too heavily on European versions of Ottoman/Turkish history more unfavorable to things Ottoman. Topics include the social and economic transformation of Istanbul in the 19th century, Jewish population movements in the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman relations with the Balkan nations after 1683, and Romanian independence and the Ottoman state. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).