Ottoman History Podcast

Despite its importance, the family is often not placed in a historical context. Misconceptions and generalizations about past families are often used to define the present. In this podcast, we examine the basic issues and questions in the history of the family in Ottoman Syria. Topics include marriage, household size and structure, gender and the lives of women, law, politics and kinship.

Slavery, the practice of owning human beings, is a nearly universal historical phenomenon that reached its global peak during the eighteenth century and remains present to this day. However, slavery has taken many different forms in different regions: plantation slavery, domestic slavery, concubinage, military slavery and the like, often predicated on difference of religion or race. In this episode, we discuss slavery as practiced in different regions of the world from the Atlantic to the Middle East to the Black Sea in a comparative perspective.

Atay, the sweet mixture of mint and green tea consumed throughout Morocco, is nothing less than a national symbol. However, consumption of tea in the Maghreb only became widespread during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this episode, Graham Cornwell examines the rise of tea in Morocco alongside the rise of the nation-state and other transformations of the modern era.

France's invasion of Egypt under Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798 was once seen as a seminal moment in the history of the Middle East and the spread of a modernity equated with European civilization to Muslim world. This narrative, which was largely the product of Napoleon's own propaganda, has been criticized, and scholars using sources such as al-Jabarti's chronicle of the Egypt expedition have focused less on the immediate political impact than on the ways that the French and their Egyptian partners viewed their respective others. The expedition also produced, Description de l'Egypte, a massive but very problematic study of Egypt that can be seen as the birth of Orientalism. In this episode, we explore these issues by considering Napoleon's Egypt campaign not in terms of its military significance but rather its symbolic meaning.

Lebanon is a country of just a few million, but its musical output has historically rivaled its much larger neighbors in the Arab world. This episode of the Ottoman History Podcast provides an overview of the the history of music in modern Lebanon as well as an overview of the history of modern Lebanon through music. We discuss topics such as nationalism, war, migration, and gender, all while listening to some of the most memorable and beloved songs and artists that the country has produced.

For all the debate the question has so often provoked, historians have been left with more confusion, disagreement, and apathy than answers when asking whether or not their discipline should be considered a science. However, this debate should have major implications for how historians relate to scholars in other fields and how their discipline is perceived (and funded) in their societies. In this podcast, we examine the question by looking at some scholarly debates about the definitions of science itself in conjunction with a discussion of how working definitions of history relate to these debates.

In our second installment of an ongoing series on Ottoman Syria, we explore the ecological and economic conditions of Bilad al-Sham and their transformations throughout four centuries of Ottoman rule. Influenced by new interpretations of the region's history over the past decades that have highlighted the dynamism of the Syrian economy, we provide a qualitative overview of the major agricultural and finished products of the different parts of Greater Syria such as modern-day Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Southern Turkey as well as the different modes of economic production.

Human beings live their lives under a state of constant observation that is both perceived and real. Widespread folk traditions such as the notion of the "evil eye" (Turkish: nazar) reflect a belief in the profound power of the mere act of looking, which psychoanalysts such as Lacan have developed into theories of gaze (French: le regard) and the gaze effect that have gained resonance within the humanities and the social sciences. In this episode, Dan Pontillo joins us to discuss the gaze from the perspectives of psychoanalysis, the social sciences, and the scientific approaches of vision study and eye tracking.

For at least two centuries, Western countries have used international criminal, civil, and commercial law as a means of influencing the Ottoman and Turkish governments, leading some to speak of a phenomenon called legal imperialism, and while these efforts have impacted policies in Turkey, they have not always achieved their intended effect. In this episode, Chris Gratien discusses an interesting case of would-be trademark infringement in early Republican Turkey, as the Kolynos toothpaste company sought to protect its commercial rights against an alleged act of Turkish piracy. However, in the case file, we also learn some other things about American sensibilities at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly with regards to racism in marketing, allowing us to make some observations about the peculiar legal foundations of global capitalism.

Food is one of the most fundamental aspects of human life, which of course means that historians rarely talk about it, but an exciting new web project called the Ottoman Food Map (ottomanfoodmap.com) is intent on changing all that. On this episode of the Ottoman History Podcast, Nick Danforth explains how looking at the geographical spread and distribution of different foods can challenge our basic understanding of nationalism and the cultural divides and continuities of the modern Middle East.

Zazaki (also known Kirmançki, Kirdki and Dimli) is a language spoken by a large community mostly residing in Southeastern Anatolia in modern Turkey. Though Zazas have historically inhabited the mountainous regions of Dersim (Tünceli), Bingöl and Siverek, their language shares descent from the Northwest Iranian language branch with other languages such as Gorani and the Caspian languages of Northern Iran such as Gilaki and Mazandarani, meaning that Zazaki is only distantly related to the Kurdish (Kurmanji) and Armenian spoken by its historical neighbors. However, this issue becomes complex when one considers the sociolinguistic milieu of most Zaza speakers and that they have historically been bilingual in Kurdish and many consider themselves to be Kurds. In the political context of modern Turkey, this makes even a straightforward linguistic discussion a sensitive debate touching on issues of identity and the complicated history of Anatolia's ethnolinguistic communities. This podcast, which is largely based on the proceedings of the first International Conference on Zaza Studies, introduces some of these topics.

From 1516 to 1918, most of Greater Syria (also known as Bilad al-Sham, the Levant), which includes modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and Jordan, was under Ottoman rule. However, this rule took many forms throughout those four centuries as the Empire and its communities transformed and evolved. In this episode, Chris Gratien provides a historiographical overview of some of the major events, figures, topics and themes in the history of Ottoman Syria, which will serve as a backdrop for subsequent investigation.

Folk traditions in the early modern world were fluid and passed easily from one culture to another. Thus, it is common to find links between old songs or stories throughout wide regions and diverse communities; however, recent intercommunal tensions associated with the rise of nationalism have resulted in conflicting claims of purported ownership and origination of such shared traditions. "Sar0131 Gelin," a song which is found among various communities in the Middle East and Caucasus, is one such piece of folklore that has been hotly contested alongside recent violence, border disputes and population exchanges between Azeri, Armenian and Turkish communities. In this episode, Chris Gratien discusses the variations of the "Sari Gelin" folk song, not through the lens of these present-day disputes, but rather, within the song's historical context, focusing on the shared elements between its different versions in the Azeri, Turkish, Armenian and Persian languages (this podcast includes audio samples).

The urban history of Istanbul has long been a favorite topic of Ottoman historians, but more recently the history of neighborhoods has emerged as a way of understanding social change in ways that can challenge or confirm larger narratives. In this podcast, Timur Hammond explains the ways in which Eyüp, a peripheral but important neighborhood of Istanbul, has evolved through the centuries as it has been both consciously and unconsciously recreated as an "Islamic space."

Istanbul has a long recorded history of large earthquakes, and unfortunately, many of the buildings constructed during the city's recent expansion are not equipped to withstand a large quake. Thus, the issue of retrofitting buildings to survive earthquakes as well as the development of emergency response services have become major concerns for many of the city's residents, particularly in the wake of the 1999 İzmit earthquake. In this episode of the Ottoman History Podcast, Elizabeth Angell discusses Istanbul's seismic past, it's current state of earthquake preparedness, and the ways in which people and organizations are evaluating and responding to risk.