Ottoman History Podcast

The entity known today as the Ottoman Empire is often taken by historians as an exemplary model of an imperial state. Yet, until the nineteenth century, Ottomans had never referred to their state as an empire in their writings or bureaucratic records and diplomatic correspondences. In this podcast, Einar Wigen explores the curious absence of the term "empire" within the Ottoman vocabulary, explains how the concept entered Ottoman Turkish, and deals with some possibly equivalent Ottoman titles and designations that may be considered imperial.

Much like pirates, corsairs performed raids on coastal populations and interrupted shipping in the Mediterranean. However, unlike pirates, corsairs had the legal backing of sovereign states, who sponsored their activities. In this episode of the Ottoman History Podcast, Emrah Safa Gürkan discusses the role of these go-betweens in the early modern Mediterranean and suggests new ways of thinking about corsairs outside of the Christianity vs. Islam dichotomy.

The Ottoman state's relationship with potentially problematic foreign visitors from merchants and missionaries to spies and refugees is well documented. But what happened when a foreigner residing in the Ottoman Empire committed an "ordinary" crime such as theft, disorderly conduct, murder, or rape? This podcast explores 5 such cases through documents found in the archival record over the course of the nineteenth century. These cases vary greatly in gravity but whether a nineteen-year old French Algerian or American diplomat, all of our actors share the status of Westerners getting into trouble within the Ottoman domains. Documents include: foreigners partying loudly, Saint-Simonians harassing women in Istanbul, man accused of group sodomy, German citizen administering illegal abortions, and American consul accused of raping a child

While the Ottoman Empire was undoubtedly home to rich and diverse musical traditions, the subject of Ottoman music has often evaded historical analysis due to the scant nature of pre-nineteenth century sources on the subject. In this podcast, Mehmet Uğur Ekinci provides a general outline of the history of music during the Ottoman period along with its various waves of transformation and discusses his upcoming publication of Kevseri Mecmuası, an eighteenth century musical treatise that provides a rare glimpse of notation in Ottoman music before the nineteenth century. We also provide a number of recordings of Ottoman music composed during different periods. Mehmet Uğur Ekinci is a PhD student at SOAS in London and a professional kanun player (see academia.edu) Chris Gratien is a PhD candidate studying the history of the modern Middle East at Georgetown University (see academia.edu)

Many have attributed the richness of the Islamic calligraphic tradition to a prohibition on the use of human images; however, this interpretation is based on many false assumptions about history and culture in the Islamic world as well as the normativity of the Western cultural experience. In this episode, Irvin Cemil Schick dismantles some of the usual cliches about art in Muslim societies and considers calligraphy (hat sanatı) as a symbolic art form in its own right. Birçok araştırmacı zengin ve köklü bir geleneğe sahip olan İslam hat sanatının ortaya çıkışını İslam dininin insan suretinin resmedilmesini yasaklaması ile açıklamaya çalışmıştır. Ancak, bu yorum İslam dünyasının kültür ve tarihi hakkında bir takım yanlış çıkarsamalara olduğu kadar, Batının tarihi ve kültürel gelişimini normatif olarak kabul eden modası geçmiş bir tarihsel metodolojiye de dayanmaktadır. Bu bölümde Irvin Cemil Schick İslam toplumlarında sanat hakkındaki klişeleri yeniden gözden geçirirken, hat sanatını kendine özgü ve bağımsız bir sembolik sanat formu olarak değerlendirmektedir. Note: the podcast is in Turkish

Türkçe yaptığımız ilk podcastimizde Kahraman Şakul ile Yeni Askeri Tarih üzerine konuşuyoruz. Aynı zamanda genel bir literatür değerlendirmesini de içeren bu podcastimizde, Yrd. Doç. Dr. Şakul bize Osmanlı tarihyazımında görece ihmal edilmiş bir alan olan Askeri Tarihin sadece savaş ve seferlerin tarihi olmadığını belirterek, verdiği çeşitli örneklerle bu tarihin sosyal, ekonomik ve kültürel boyutlarını gözler önüne seriyor. Military history is more than just writing about battles and strategy. It involves examining social, economic, and cultural issues as well. In our first Turkish language podcast, Kahraman Şakul explains why a new approach to military history of the Ottoman Empire--a relatively neglected field as of late--can both enrich and be enriched by other areas of social history, and he provides a historiographical overview of the new kind of military history.

While almost all of the well-known authors of the Ottoman period are men, women also participated in Ottoman intellectual circles as authors and artists. In this podcast, Didem Havlioğlu describes the world of early modern Ottoman intellectuals and discusses how we can study the cultural of production of women within this context.

Ottoman life was deeply embedded in the countryside and rural production, and thus, issues of irrigation and ecology surrounding the production of staple food crops ranking high on the list of imperial concerns. In this episode, Alan Mikhail explains the ecological history of the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and its breadbasket in Egypt, and explores other issues related to the nascent field of Middle East environmental history.

Although the Middle East has largely been absent from conversations about environmental history, recent developments point to a growing tendency towards ecological perspectives among historians and scholars focusing on the Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East. In this podcast, we discuss some of the major themes and approaches within this emerging field and explore issues of theory, methodology and sources.

Conventional wisdom on the history of nationalism tells us that nations are of recent construction, and this has often been the case within the historiography of the modern Middle East. For the case of Palestine, some have denied the significance of the name before the nineteenth century. Yet, Ottoman and Arabic sources from throughout the Ottoman period are full of references to a place called Palestine. In this episode, Zach Foster explores the continuity of Palestine as a geographical construct throughout the Ottoman period and changes in the significance and limits of this territorial designation.

Historians have used accounts of the ritual slaughter of horses as evidence of non-Islamic and Central Asian elements within early Ottoman identity. However, such an interpretation may miss the real significance of these historical accounts and the practice of horse sacrifice for Ottoman warriors. In this podcast, Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano explores this debate and highlights some new ways of a looking at horse sacrifice and the texts that discuss the topic within the proper historical context.

Tozsuz Evrak is a new blog by Ottoman History Podcast that narrates the history of the Ottoman Empire in tiny fragments, short posts showcasing interesting archival documents and primary sources. In this podcast, we present some of these documents and discuss what they can tell us about the Ottoman past.

Ottoman society was comprised of many different communities with overlapping linguistic, ethnic, and confessional identities. One such community, the Karamanlis of Anatolia, was a group that spoke Turkish and shared in a common Anatolian folk culture but maintained a Greek Orthodox religious belief and used the Greek alphabet in their Turkish language writings. During the nineteenth century, with the rise of ethnic nationalism and tensions between the Ottoman Empire (later Turkey) and Greece in particular, this group was caught in the middle. In this podcast, Ayça Baytar gives an overview of Karamanli culture and self-identification throughout this period of confusion and transformation.

Dreams are an essential part of the human experience but are attributed different significance in various times and places. For many Ottomans, dreams were a forum for the revelation of hidden or unseen knowledge, and dream narratives as well as their interpretations found their way into many Ottoman texts. In this podcast, Asl0131 Niyazio011Flu explains the role of dreams within Ottoman society, focusing on dream narratives in biographical dictionaries of the early modern era, and we discuss possible changes over time in the understanding of dreams in the Ottoman world.

While there are many travel narratives from the early modern era, few match Evliya Çelebi's Seyahatnâme in terms of richness and detail. As an Ottoman gentleman or çelebi, Evliya was able to travel throughout Eastern Europe and the Middle East and record his observations, leaving historians a rich archive of material about Ottoman society during the seventeenth century. Yet, Evliya's own sensibilities and mentality can as reflected in his narratives may tell us even more about the time and place that he inhabited. In this episode, Madeleine Elfenbein gives us some clues regarding the mentality of this celebrated figure through excerpts from the Seyahatnâme.