Ottoman History Podcast

During the nineteenth century, the urban space of Istanbul was transformed by actors consciously involved in reshaping the face of Ottoman and high society in this European capital. In this episode, Nilay Özlü explores the culture and architecture of the Pera neighborhood during these formative years through the story of three generations of the Vallaury family, Levantine Istanbulites who rose to prominence in the fields of cuisine, cafe culture, and finally architecture through the figure of Alexander Vallaury.

Günümüzde tarihin nasıl algılandığı, yeniden üretildiği, sembolize ve politize edildiği tartışılırken, geçmiş toplumların kendi geçmişlerini nasıl algıladıkları sıklıkla gözden kaçmaktadır. Bu podcastımızda Yard. Doç. Dr. Tülün Değirmenci resimli el yazmalarındaki I. Selim (1512-1520) imgesi üzerinden 17. yüzyıl Osmanlı şehirlilerinin tarih algısını inceliyor. Siyaset, popüler algı ve tarihyazımı arasındaki ilişkiyi gözler önüne sermekle kalmıyor, ikonografi, kitap üretimi ve okuma kültürü gibi Osmanlı entellektüel tarihinin önemli mevzularını da mercek altına alıyor. In spite of a lively debate over how history is reconstructed today, historians have paid less attention on how past societies perceived their own past. In this episode, based on a seventeenth-century illustrated manuscript, Tülün Değirmenci explores how 17th century Ottoman city-dwellers perceived the controversial figure of Sultan Selim I (note: this episode is in Turkish).

The discovery of the malaria parasite and the mosquito as its vector changed human understandings of the disease and gave rise to scientific and medical approaches that mixed new and old practices. The twentieth century saw a great push to eliminate malaria from many parts of the world, and while these programs had successes, they also led to unintended consequences. In this third and final part of our three part series on the history of malaria, we discuss new approaches to malaria that arose both in colonial settings and within the framework of new nation states, touching on the cases of Turkey, India, Algeria, Israel/Palestine, Italy, the US and others.

Malaria was present in much of the Ottoman Empire throughout its six centuries of existence; yet, the relationship between humans and the disease environment was anything but unchanging. In this second part of our three part series on the history of malaria, we discuss the role of the disease in Ottoman history, make some observations about changes in settlement and disease, and explore early attempts to control malaria through state interventions and the use of science and medicine.

Malaria is a disease that has been with human beings since their earliest days. It has shaped our relationship with our environment throughout time, thereby changing the course of history. In our three part series on malaria, we look at malaria in the world and the Ottoman Empire as well as more recent scientific approaches to malaria in the last century. This first episode examines malaria in the long duree and its various interactions with human society.

Genelde hükümdar merkezli bir siyasi tarih anlayışı geliştiren Osmanlı tarihyazımı ironik bir şekilde bu hükümdarlar üzerine kapsamlı biyografiler üretememiştir. Bu podcastimizde Collège de France ve Sorbonne Üniversitesi’nden Dr. Güneş Işıksel ile II. Selim’in şehzadelik dönemine odaklanarak üzerine pek fazla bilgimizin olmadığı bir alan olan Osmanlı diplomasisini inceledik. Modern Osmanlı Devleti’nin oluşumu ve egemenlik anlayışı gibi kavramlar çerçevesinde bir şehzadenin diplomatik etkinliğini ele alarak, gereğinden fazla payitaht merkezli bir Osmanlı siyasi tarihinin de eleştirisini yapmaya çalıştık. Even though Ottoman historiography was generally centered on Sultans and their reigns, ironically, it did not produce biographies of these rulers. In this episode, Güneş Işıksel explores Selim II's period as a prince and his role in diplomacy during the reign of his father Suleiman the Magnificent (note: this episode is in Turkish).

During World War I, over 600,000 troops from South Asia were part of the British army's invasion of Ottoman Iraq. Thousands were taken prisoner in this failed campaign and became part of a larger story that is the tragedy of the First World War, witnessing and sharing the plight of deported Armenians as they marched across Anatolia. In this podcast, Vedica Kant talks about the experience of Indian POWs in the Ottoman Empire as well as that of Ottoman soldiers captured by the British army and brought to India and Burma, with additional commentary by Robert Upton regarding military recruitment in British India and the complex relationship between imperialism, war, and nationalism for Indian intellectuals of the period.

World War I disrupted all aspects of life in Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Within the context of a brutal war, soldiers sought to protect the culturally-symbolic holiday of Christmas from these disruptions through events such as the Christmas Truce of 1914. In the Ottoman Empire, charity organizations and foreign governments worked with the Ottoman state to secure Christmas meals and privileges to contact their families for prisoners being kept in Anatolia. However, all-out war also brought conflict, violence, and politics to the Christmas season. In this podcast, we examine a few Christmas cases from the WWI period based on research in the Ottoman archives.

While it is common knowledge that Zionist settlement in Palestine began during the Ottoman era, conventional historiography has under-emphasized the extent to which the issue of Palestine was a question that initially emerged in an Ottoman political and social context. In this podcast, Dr. Louis Fishman restores this Ottoman context and explores debates between Jewish and Palestinian Ottoman subjects during the Second Constitutional Era.

After centuries of living side by side with other communities in the Ottoman Empire, most of the Greeks and Orthodox Christians of Anatolia were exiled to Greece and elsewhere in the aftermath of World War I, the Greek occupation of Western Anatolia, the Turkish War of Independence, and the population exchanges that followed. Since then, reconciliation between Greece and Turkey has been hampered not only by an unwillingness of many to come to terms with this past but also an inability to imagine a different future. In this episode, we talk with Valantis Stamelos, a Greek-American filmmaker whose documentary entitled "Hello Anatolia" tells the story of his journey of return to establish new roots in Izmir, Turkey as well as get in touch with the old roots of the city's Greek community.

Zanzibar and the Swahili coast of East Africa sat at the interface of the Ottoman world, the Indian Ocean, and the rich mainland. When Portuguese sailors began to enter the Indian Ocean trade networks during the sixteenth century, the region also came within the sphere of European maritime empires. However, before Zanzibar entered into any lasting a colonial relationship with a European power (the British at the end of the nineteenth century), a dynasty based in Muscat (modern-day Oman) that had its own imperial visions controlled the island. In this podcast, Jeffrey Dyer reconstructs the historical context of early nineteenth-century Zanzibar, the role of the Busaidi sultans of Muscat and Zanzibar among global empires, and connections to late-Ottoman dabbling in imperial influence.

Osman Hamdi Bey is recognized today as the foremost artist of the late-Ottoman period. Yet, in his time, it was his unique access to the ancient past as the head of Istanbul's archaeology museum that drew the interest of his Western contemporaries. In this episode, Emily Neumeier retraces the story of a rare Osman Hamdi Bey painting (At the Mosque Door, 1890) that turned up in the Penn archaeology museum and explains what it tells us about art, artifacts, and diplomacy during the late-Ottoman era.

Why does a familiar bird and favorite Thanksgiving day meal have the same name as the country of Turkey? What is the name for the turkey in other languages? Is there any link between the spread of turkeys into the Anglophone world and the Ottoman Empire? In this episode, we answer these questions and discuss more broadly the historical context within which the turkey and other foods such as potatoes and corn became part of global diets.

Dialects are formed by complex historical processes that involve cultural exchange, migration, and organic transformation. Thus, the study of dialects can provide information about the history of a particular language as well as the communities that have historically spoken that given language. In this episode, Bernt Brendemoen discusses the emergence of the Turkish dialect of the Black Sea region, its relationship with early Anatolian and Ottoman Turkish as well as Pontic Greek, and what it can tell us about the evolution of the modern Turkish language.

The past years have shown how a period of transformation across the entire Middle East region can result in very different outcomes in different places. In this podcast, we discuss another historical period of transformation in the Middle East--the post-World War II era culminating with the year of 1958--and explore the economic backdrop of these events and their different outcomes in Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt with particular emphasis on agrarian economy and the role of the United States.