Ottoman History Podcast

Historians have used classical Ottoman texts to explore social issues such as sexuality, with compiled manuscripts from various literary genres often forming a data-mine for historical information. However, this type of selective reading has often distorted or obscured the original meaning and context of literary works. Sometimes, texts that appear erotic or sexual in nature such as gazel could have been intended for an entirely different purpose. In this episode, Dr. Selim Kuru examines the concepts of mahbub peresti (worship of the beloved) and gulâm pâregi (pederasty) and various motifs concerning male beauty in the shehrengiz (Gibb's "city-thrillers") genre in search of a more contextualized approach these would-be erotic texts.

Groups variously labeled as nomadic and tribal formed an integral part of Ottoman society, but because their communities exercises a wide degree of autonomy, they are often represented as somehow separate or "other" to urban and settled populations. However, social history of these communities reveal that tribes and their members were involved in the continual transformation of Ottoman society not just as a force of resistance or hapless victims of state policies but also as participants. In this podcast, Nora Barakat deals with the social history of such communities, which appear in the court records of Salt (in modern Jordan) as "tent-dwellers," and their place in the complex legal sphere of the Tanzimat era in which both shar`ia law courts as well as new nizamiye courts served as forums for legal action.

Unlike many historical topics, drug use is often absent in the historical record due to its illicit nature. However, thanks to authorities who sought to control the drug trade and commentators that wrote about drug culture, we can piece together some of the social networks that drug trade and use facilitated in the past. In this episode, Zach Foster discusses the evolution of the drug trade in the Eastern Mediterranean during the period of transition from Ottoman to British and French Mandate rule.

The interwar period was an era of significant change in urban-rural relations throughout the world and witnessed an unprecedented use of technology in the agrarian and ecological spheres. Most notably, class specific urban movements posed as apolitical incorporated technocratic changes in the countryside as part of a nation-building project, place the romanticized peasantry as an object at the heart of these social transformations. In this episode, Sam Dolbee discusses one such movement based at the American University in Beirut during the 1930s, as middle class students and officials became involved in an ambiguous effort to transform the Lebanese-Syrian countryside in the shadow of French colonial rule.

Born during the last years of Ottoman rule, Amal al-Atrash, the daughter of a notable Druze family from southern Syria, improbably rose to fame as one of the most popular and controversial signer-celebrities of interwar Cairo. As a performer, she dazzled and sometimes scandalized her audiences. As a woman, she tried to balance her new-found fame with familial expectations. As the member of a politically active family in Mandate Syria, she became caught up in the historical movements of the time that shaped the modern Middle East. Her early death in 1944, much like the rest of her life story, remains shrouded in mystery. Join us in our third installment of historiographical mixtapes, as we explore the biography and music of Faqidat al-Fann, Asmahan.

The level and type of information that states can collect radically impacts their potential for centralization and activity both domestically and in the international arena, and thus, the development of information gathering systems both formal and covert has accompanied the growth of more centralized political entities. In this podcast, Dr. Emrah Safa Gürkan explains the development of information gathering systems in the early modern Mediterranean citing examples from Ottoman, Hapsburg, and French history.

Composed by a physician from fifteenth-century Anatolia named Şerefeddin Sabuncuoğlu, Cirahiyyetü'l-Haniyye (Imperial Surgery) is a unique illustrated surgery manual the sheds light onto medical practice and experimentation in the early Ottoman Empire. Sabuncuoğlu's manual describes treatment that range from medical to cosmetic dealing with virtually every part of the human body. In this podcast, we unveil our image collection based on the manual and give some background regarding Sabuncuoğlu and Ottoman medicine.

Resettlement and transfer of populations deemed problematic has long been a strategy employed by states throughout the world from tribal settlement campaigns in the Ottoman Empire and Indian Reservations in the United States to penal colonies in Australia and Siberia. During the twentieth century, "the camp," which represents various types of improvised mass resettlement and centralization of populations, emerged in many forms including refugee camps and the infamous concentration camps of the Second World War. In this episode of the Ottoman History Podcast, Dorothee Kellou discusses regroupement, which was a tactic used by the French military during the Algeria War of Independence (1954-1962) in order to control mountain and rural populations and separate them from FLN combatants. As many as two million Algerians were removed from their villages and settled into camps called regroupment centers, many of which became the sites of permanent settlements.

Folk songs (türküs) have played a prominent role in the making of a Turkish national consciousness. As a cultural link with the past, türküs have bridged the gap between a the differentiated and multicultural region of Anatolia and a nationalist project. At the same time, these songs also tell us things about the Ottoman past. In this podcast, we explore the rise of the türkü phenomenon during the early republican era and links between history and music in modern Turkey using an assortment of songs from past and present.

Although it is not uncommon when reading about the Ottoman Empire to see it portrayed as a monolithic, rational state apparatus serving a purported state interest, factions with their own interests and agendas played a major role in Ottoman decision-making. In this episode, Dr. Emrah Safa Gürkan explains the importance of disconglomerating state interests and examining factionalism when approaching politics in the Ottoman Empire.

Migration has been a major vehicle of change in human history, and the modern world has in many ways been shaped by the activities and experiences of migrants. In this episode, Andrew Arsan discusses the historical experience of Arab migrants who left regions of the Eastern Mediterranean such as Syria and Mount Lebanon and the economic and social transformations that resulted both in the region as well as in the mahjar.

One of the central questions in the history of modern Turkey continues be the late-Ottoman legacy and in particular, the experience of World War I and the War of Independence (1914-1923). While some authors choose this period as a start or end point for their historical studies, others seek to identify continuities across Ottoman and republican temporal space. In this episode, Nick Danforth explains different approaches to the periodization of modern Turkish history and explain the political and cultural views and sensibilities that lie behind some of these frameworks.

The notion of putting one's feet up may be as old as the act of sitting itself, but the aesthetic of repose has varied across time and space. During the eighteenth century, European households sought to incorporate items that reflected the "Turkish mode of sitting" such as the ottoman, the sofa, and the divan in order to access the decadence and luxury of the East. However, with time, the ottoman, much like its imperial namesake, shrunk to the proportions of a small footstool and in the process lost much of its exotic charm. In our 50th and final episode of year one on the Ottoman History Podcast, we explore the all but forgotten history of this piece of subaltern furniture.

The 1908 Young Turk revolution, which restored the Ottoman constitution and brought to power the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), a modernist and Turkish nationalist party, ushered in a new and paradoxical era of politics on the eve of World War I in the Ottoman Empire. On one hand, the CUP was the steward of liberalism, Ottomanism, and secular politics in the empire that sought to put an end to the political abuses of the Hamidian era. On the other, it promoted a brand of ethnic nationalism and is often remembered for its role in various acts of oppression during World War I that included the wholesale deportation and massacre of Ottoman Armenians and ruthless crackdowns on dissent in the Arab provinces. In this episode, Zach Foster considers the complex political dynamic between the CUP and the region of Greater Syria following 1908.

The early modern era was a period of tremendous fluidity in terms of borders of identities. In this podcast, we discuss the life and times of Sefer Muratowicz, an Armenian merchant born in Ottoman Anatolia during the late sixteenth century who settled in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and became an envoy to the Safavid Shah in Persia through his role as a merchant. Sefer left an account of his visit, which our guest Michael Polczynski has translated and analyzed. The account provides information about Sefer's journey as well as his diplomatic and mercantile activities, painting a picture in the process of some aspects of travel, diplomacy, and perhaps even espionage in borderlands regions during the early modern period.