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This book analyzes the expansion of the Anatolian livestock trade, focusing on sheep and cattle, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries— a period marked by significant changes in state policies, society and environment. It examines the impact of these changes on both human and non-human actors, maps trade routes and networks, and explores their transformations over time, thereby contributing to the literature on Ottoman environmental and socioeconomic history. The book identifies three regions —central, northeastern, and northwestern Anatolia— and four Eastern Mediterranean ports (İzmir, İskenderun, Mersin, and Antalya) as major centers of livestock trade. It examines a combination of environmental, economic, social, and political dynamics that shaped the emergence of these regions as primary suppliers of sheep to Istanbul and the ports as gateways for livestock exports. By highlighting diverse ecosystems and socioeconomic dynamics, and utilizing a variety of primary sources including Ottoman and British state documents, newspapers, memoirs, and travel accounts, the book aims to address several key questions: How did the ecosystems and socioeconomic dynamics of these regions and ports change in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? What were the repercussions of these changes on livestock production and trade? And how did they impact the organization of livestock and meat trade in Istanbul?

In the early nineteenth century, the most consequential developments in Ottoman architecture were taking place not in Istanbul but in the farthest reaches of imperial territory. Emily Neumeier investigates this wider phenomenon through a consideration of the architecture of Ali Pasha of Ioannina, one of the most prolific patrons in the history of the Ottoman Empire, who undertook a building program so ambitious that it ultimately got him killed.Ali Pasha is still a household name in present-day Greece and Albania, where he served as Ottoman governor from 1788 to 1822. To consolidate his rule over an incredibly diverse population, the governor set out on a sweeping building program that included mosques, palaces, military fortifications, dervish lodges, and even Orthodox Christian monasteries. Drawing upon a wealth of primary sources, Neumeier reveals how Ali Pasha's buildings shifted the sociopolitical order by testing the standards of patronage established by the imperial court and relocating administrative authority from center to province. To reconstruct the world that Ali Pasha built, Neumeier draws from both extensive fieldwork and abundant archival material, whose far-flung nature—from Istanbul to London—reflects the impressively wide scope of Ali Pasha's influence.Rigorously researched and packed with fascinating stories, this book presents an innovative spatial history of the Ottoman frontier during the age of revolutions, a pivotal period in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when there was no obvious blueprint for power. It will be of interest to specialists in art and architectural history, the Ottoman Empire, and Mediterranean, Islamic, and Modern Greek studies.

Based on many previously unused sources from Ottoman and British archives, Governing the Frontiers in the Ottoman Empire offers a micro-history to understand the nineteenth century Ottoman reforms on the eastern frontiers. By examining the administrative, military and fiscal transformation of Muş, a multi-ethnic, multi-religious sub-province in the Ottoman East, it shows how the reforms were not top-down and were shaped according to local particularities. The book also provides a story of the notables, tribes and peasants of a frontier region. Focusing on the relations between state-notables, notables-tribes, notables-peasants and finally tribes-peasants, the book shows both the causes of contention and collaborations between the parties.

This book narrates the rise and fall of Kurdish nobility in the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century. Focusing on one noble Kurdish family based in the emirate of Palu, a fortressed town in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, it provides the first systematic analysis of the hereditary nobility in Kurdistan.The book centres on the crucial moment in the 1840s during which the Ottoman state set out to abolish the hereditary privileges of the Kurdish beys, confiscating their large landholdings and setting the stage for a conflict over the fertile lands of Palu that would last nearly six decades. This tug-of-war between Armenian financiers, Armenian and Muslim sharecroppers, the Kurdish beys and the Ottoman state ended in 1895 with a series of massacres against the Armenian population of Palu. Through exhaustive archival research in an untapped body of sources, this book sheds light on the impact this conflict-filled process had on the intercommunal relations in the locality. In doing so, the author brings the voices of Armenian and Kurdish commoners to the fore and highlights the important roles that they, too, played in the local struggles and wider changes in governance.As the first study to present the dissolution of the Kurdish nobility using a social history lens, the book gets to the heart of the historical transformations that changed Palu from a diverse and economically affluent town into an ethnoreligiously homogenised, culturally conservative and economically deprived place. Peppered with vignettes and stories culled from a wide range of archival sources, the author presents a cohesive narrative of the region's socio-economic and political history between 1720 and 1895, situating developments taking place in the small province of Palu within the larger developments in the Ottoman Empire and the world at large.

The Greek Revolution in the Age of Revolutions (1776-1848) brings together twenty-one scholars and a host of original ideas, revisionist arguments, and new information to mark the bicentennial of the Greek Revolution of 1821. The purpose of this volume is to demonstrate the significance of the Greek liberation struggle to international history, and to highlight how it was a turning point that signalled the revival of revolution in Europe after the defeat of the French Revolution in 1815. It argues that the sacrifices of rebellious Greeks paved the way for other resistance movements in European politics, culminating in the ‘spring of European peoples'in 1848. Richly researched and innovative in approach, this volume also considers the diplomatic and transnational aspects of the insurrection, and examines hitherto unexplored dimensions of revolutionary change in the Greek world. This book will appeal to scholars and students of the Age of Revolution, as well as those interested in comparative and transnational history, political theory and constitutional law.

This volume is a local history, focusing on the experiences of people andcommunities as they navigated and enacted institutions and transformationsassociated with modernization in the late Ottoman era. Focusing onthe local political arena of a relatively small, predominantly rural and ordinarysetting, this book examines two neighboring Western Anatolian towns:Yenişehir and İznik.Utilizing rigorous historiographical inquiry and in-depth use of archivalmaterials, this book sketches a dynamic picture of late Ottoman imperialpolitical belonging with the agendas and priorities of the countryside, wherethe majority of Ottomans lived. The monograph contributes to understandingof modernization from different local perspectives by excavating theprovincial hinterland of the imperial capital. It uses a narrative technique ofanalyzing certain local events to address larger structures and transformationspertaining to the long 19th century in general and Ottoman history inparticular. As a “micro” study, it argues for the significance of individuals'and social groups'agencies, strategies and conceptions of their world in theunfolding of Ottoman modernization.Offering a vivid picture of local communities and their engagements withmodern political, social and judicial structures in the late Ottoman era, thisbook will appeal to scholars and advanced graduate students interested incomparative imperial history, Ottoman history and Middle Eastern studies.

Investigating how a number of modern empires transform over the long 19th century (1789-1914) as a consequence of their struggle for ascendancy in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State moves the study of the modern empire towards a comparative, trans-regional analysis of events along the Ottoman frontiers: Western Balkans, the Persian Gulf and Yemen. This inter-disciplinary approach of studying events at different ends of the Ottoman Empire challenges previous emphasis on Europe as the only source of change and highlights the progression of modern imperial states.The book introduces an entirely new analytical approach to the study of modern state power and the social consequences to the interaction between long-ignored'historical agents'like pirates, smugglers, refugees, and the rural poor. In this respect, the roots of the most fundamental institutions and bureaucratic practices associated with the modern state prove to be the by-products of certain kinds of productive exchange long categorized in negative terms in post-colonial and mainstream scholarship. Such a challenge to conventional methods of historical and social scientific analysis is reinforced by the novel use of the work of Louis Althusser, Talal Asad, William Connolly and Frederick Cooper, whose challenges to scholarly conventions will prove helpful in changing how we understand the origins of our modern world and thus talk about Modernity. This book offers a methodological and historiographic intervention meant to challenge conventional studies of the modern era.

As a result of the various reforms of the mid-nineteenth century Tanzimat ('reorganisation') era, Ottoman authority in Iraq was much stronger and better administered by the 1870s, than it had been when the Ottomans imposed direct rule over the region in the 1830s. Drawing upon original source documents, Ebubekir Ceylan provides the first comprehensive study of the Tanzimat reforms in Iraq in the nineteenth century, focusing on aspects of political reform, modernization and development and analyzing both the successes and failures of the reform process. The reforms included administrative and military centralization, the establishment of provincial councils and these, as well as the Ottoman tribal policy and the Ottoman contribution to the modernization of urban life and infrastructure. Ceylan demonstrates that the origins of modern Iraq can be found in the period of Ottoman rule in the nineteenth century.

During the era of Sultan Abdülhamid II, modern state institutions were established in Palestine, while national identities had not yet developed. Hamidian Palestine explores how the inhabitants of the Ottoman District of Jerusalem interacted with each other and how they organised their interests in a historical moment before ‘Arabs'and ‘Jews'emerged as the central political categories in the country. Based on a wide range of Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew sources, the book examines the social and political relations of Palestinians from a wide variety of perspectives. By situating individual case studies within larger contexts such as modernisation, regionalisation and state-building, it allows Palestinian society to be compared with other local societies within the Ottoman Empire and beyond.

A dynasty that ruled for more than six centuries certainly developed many strategies to confront “legitimacy crises” and undertook various endeavors to legitimize their rule. After the introduction that establishes a theoretical framework for examining the Ottoman state's legitimacy, the present volume deploys into three sections. “The Well-Founded Order” deals with the question of how the Ottomans imagined the order of their polity and how they tried to live up to this self-representation. “Religiosity and Orthodoxy” turns to the question of religiosity and orthodoxy as defined by Ottoman political theory and how these concepts related to the issue of legitimacy. The last section discusses how the Ottoman notions of legitimacy were exposed to criticism, discussion or simply to transformations in situations of crisis, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In this impressive and ambitious survey Dr Bayly studies the rise, apogee and decline of what has come to be called `the Second British Empire'-- the great expansion of British dominion overseas (particularly in Asia and the Middle East) during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic era that, coming between the loss of America and the subsequent partition of Africa, constitutes the central phase of British imperial history.