List of figures and acknowledgements

The purpose of this section of the Journal of medieval history is to include a brief notice of new books in medieval history, and to list new editions and reprints, appearing during the months immediately preceding the date of publication of each issue. The Journal will not carry reviews; it asks publishers to send, instead of copies of new books, brief notices about them of not more than 150 words in length. To meet the cost of this exercise, the Journal is obliged to charge a fee of $10 (£5) for a brief announcement (max. 150 words) and $5 (£2.50) for listing a reprint or new edition. Texts of such announcements and details of reprints, together with remittance, should be sent to the Publisher, from whom further details of the scheme may be had.     

Halil İnalcık (1916–2016): a preliminary anatomy of a legacy

Halil Inalcik (1916–2016) was the pre-eminent historian of the Ottoman Empire in the world from his establishment as a published scholar in the 1950s until the time of death. This article is an initial examination of his legacy to the study of Ottoman history broadly. His goal was to create an empirically-based narrative of Ottoman history from beginning to end, based on exploitation of the vast resources of the Ottoman archives as well as the extensive library of Ottoman narrative chronicles, together with non-Ottoman sources. In addition, he invested extensive energies in training several generations of Ottoman historians. Overall, his impact on scholarly and public perceptions of the Ottoman Empire has been unmatched to the present day.     

Municipal Boundary Conflicts Between Jewish and Arab Local Authorities in Israel: Geography of Administration or Geopolitics?

Municipal boundaries shape the influence of local government on patterns of development and disparities. Based on a largely qualitative assessment of initiatives to change municipal boundaries of Arab localities in Israel between the 1960s and 2001, we aim to demonstrate the tension between geographical‐administrative considerations and political, particularly geopolitical, issues at two levels: Arab claims and central government decisions. We emphasize that municipal boundary conflicts provide broader insights on societal transformations and dilemmas, as well as influencing them. Growing activism of Arabs and trends of political decentralization led not only to class‐based demands, but also to ethno‐national‐based demands. In addition to development needs with an emphasis on equality, claims of Arab municipalities also reflect aspirations to reverse consequences of the 1948 war and to redefine the Jewish essence of the state. A major dilemma among Arabs is whether to emphasize geographic‐administrative justifications or to explicitly take the ethno‐national path. Among central government decision‐makers, an explicitly political discourse has apparently given way to a professional one, which faces dilemmas of incorporating unique political‐cultural attributes of Arabs in professional assessments, and balancing them with concerns of security and state identity. Whereas professional jargon is not value free and can mask political agendas, dialogues based on a professional jargon could lead to solutions in otherwise dead‐end political disputes, although such dialogues could gain momentum only if showing results.     

Going to War Against the Middle Kingdom? Continuity and Change in British Attitudes towards Qing China (1793–1840)

This article investigates British attitudes towards Qing China as a consequence of their early encounters from the Macartney embassy to the opium crisis. Examining this medium-term time span, to which previous scholarship has paid inadequate attention, shows the continuity and change in these attitudes through different historical contexts. With its focus on war-related discussions, this article reveals how the idea of war against the Chinese empire was developed and debated on the basis of these changing ideas. The First Anglo-Chinese War, to a great extent, could not have developed into the form and scale it did without these developments.     

Cartographical evidence of efforts to develop Acre during the last decades of Ottoman rule: did the Ottomans neglect the city?

Using dozens of Ottoman maps from the Central Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, the article challenges the prevailing standpoint regarding the historical-geographic process that took place on both sides of the Bay of Acre/haifa during the last decades of the Ottoman period, and led to Haifa’s emergence as one of the most important port towns in the eastern Mediterranean, and concomitantly to Acre’s demise and negligence. To date, the few researchers who have dealt with this process, especially from the viewpoint of Haifa’s local history, have viewed the Ottoman regime as a passive force that did not act to preserve the status or economic strength of Acre, the regional headquarters, the province’s capital city and the region’s most important town for many years. We argue that the central Ottoman government in Istanbul did not perceive the process of Acre’s demise and Haifa’s rise as a deterministic process. Official Ottoman maps drawn at the request of the imperial centre as early as the 1880s show that plans existed to develop Acre and its region. These plans, even if only partially implemented, would have clearly contributed to preserving Acre’s status over Haifa. The Ottomans attempted to preserve the geo-strategic status of Acre and its importance and made plans to upgrade various infrastructures in the town’s vicinity, which might have changed processes related to physical conditions and powerful technological advances. This approach, which is based on the belief in the human ability to confront and deal with deterministic geographic and physical conditions, seems to have been the foundation of Ottoman planning in the case of Acre. The Ottomans’ capacity to implement these plans was very limited, however, and they eventually had to acknowledge this reality. Thus, Acre was reduced to its formal status as the capital of an Ottoman administrative district until the end of the Ottoman rule in Palestine. In a way, its fate was not very different from that of other traditional centres of Ottoman rule along the eastern Mediterranean coast, whose importance diminished at that time, while new centres that were more cosmopolitan and connected to developments overseas came to power.     

Getting the punchline: deciphering anti-Jewish humour in Anglo-Norman England

The idea that laughter was impossible for medieval monks has been largely overturned in recent decades, but the paucity of sources and the cultural specificity of humour still makes understanding their sense of humour difficult. William of Malmesbury, a twelfth-century English Benedictine, nevertheless provides a rare glimpse of what made monks laugh in his collection of Marian miracles, the Miracula sanctae Mariae. Introducing one of his miracle stories as ‘a great joke that will have readers laughing out loud’, William gives us invaluable information about the way humour could infiltrate the most unlikely of genres, in this case one generally thought to be devotional and edificatory in nature. The story is also virulently anti-Jewish. By placing the joke in its historical context, exploring the themes of corruption, political weakness and interaction between Jews and Christians in twelfth-century England, we can understand what this joke meant and what it can in turn reveal about the world that produced it.     

Weert: a Scheldt polder village in the fourteenth century

St Bavo's abbey of Ghent reclaimed considerable land during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries on its estate at Weert, along the Scheldt in northeastern Flanders. Other lords, notably Jacques van Artevelde, also had interests in the polder, but their presence caused such hostility that two peasants with Weert connections were involved in the assassination of Artevelde's son in 1370. Poor soil and natural disasters forced St Bavo's to abandon the project in the late fourteenth century, after a final vigorous effort in the 1350s. The work of the monks and of the counts of Flanders had nonetheless separated Weert topographically from Flanders and diverted the Scheldt westward into its present course by the early fourteenth century. Despite a subsistence economy and a high incidence of poverty, conditions which might be expected to foster rapid turnover among the settlers, peasant society at Weert demonstrated remarkable stability.     

以色列哈西德派初探

哈西德派是18世纪末产生于东欧的一支犹太民间教派。二战后,部分在纳粹大屠杀中劫后余生的哈西德信徒在犹太人的故地巴勒斯坦进行社团重建。哈西德派不是犹太复国主义者,其对该运动的态度经历了从强烈反对到逐步接受的过程。自视为犹太传统的真正捍卫者、拥有独立教育体系的哈西德派在以色列社会是一个相对隔离和孤立的宗教文化群体。为塑造以色列国家的犹太性和确保自身在宗教事务上的发言权,哈西德派有节制地参与以色列的政治生活,并形成政坛上一支相对稳定的力量。哈西德派的服兵役豁免权成为其与世俗犹太人矛盾与冲突的焦点。经济贫困和与主流社会的疏离已成为当前制约以色列哈西德派健康、正常发展的两大难题。     

Clay Tobacco Pipes and Coffee Cup Sherds in the Archaeology of the Middle East: Artifacts of Social Tensions from the Ottoman Past

Nearly all discussion in historical archaeology exploring issues of consumption and commodities is focused on the Euro-American world. This paper contributes data from archaeological investigations in the Middle East for exploring modern consumption. Commodities of pleasure, such as tobacco and coffee, entered Middle Eastern social life after the fifteenth century and greatly impacted the cultural landscape of the Middle East, entangling the peoples of the region into larger socio-political arenas. Examples from provincial corners of the Ottoman Empire illustrate the potential of historical archaeology for uncovering the material self-definition of peoples in the Middle East and for breaking down perceived divisions between components of the modern world.     

War Time Hysteria, 1917: Senator Miles Poindexter, ‘American-ness’ and the Strange Case of Colonel Carl Reichmann*

When, on 6 April 1917, the United States entered into the First World War, a wave of anti-German sentiment captured the nation. The Army was not immune from accusations of subversion. In 1917 Senator Miles Poindexter accused a high ranking officer named Carl Reichmann of being in league with Germany. Despite the support from officers such as Hugh Lennox Scott and John J. Pershing, Reichmann was not permitted a promotion to general or service in France. Although most senators supported the promotion, Poindexter was able to prevent a vote on the subject using internal Senate rules. The resulting notoriety Poindexter gained made him a viable Republican candidate in the 1920 election. Although the military did not prevail over Poindexter — thereby continuing the constitutional expectation of military subservience to the civil government — the forces sent to France were without a commander who had gained a scholarly understanding of modern warfare well before the actual conflict.     

THE LIMITS OF OTTOMAN PRAGMATISM

In this paper I reflect critically on the concept of pragmatism as it is used in Ottoman historiography. Pragmatism has gained increasing currency over the last ten to fifteen years as one of the defining features of the Ottoman polity. I argue that unless it is properly defined from a theoretical‐philosophical perspective, and carefully contextualized from a historical perspective, pragmatism cannot be used as an explanatory or comparative category. When used as a framework of explanation for historical change, pragmatism blurs more than it clarifies an essential aspect of the Ottoman polity that it seeks to define, namely, the political. It is essential to reflect on the difference between the political and politics because whereas the political refers to the configuration of the power relations that organize a society as a legitimate entity, politics refers to the strategies, practices, institutions, or discourses whose purpose is to construct and retain hegemony within a polity. Through an analysis of the concept of pragmatism in Ottoman historiography, I show that for most proponents of Ottoman pragmatism, pragmatism pertains to politics rather than to the political. From a perspective rigorously confined to political theory, I argue that much like the discourse of modern tolerance, pragmatism in Ottoman historiography posits a problematic periodization, relegates the political to the background, and depoliticizes essential power relations.     

Could've Been a Contender: The Making and Breaking of “China” in the Ottoman Empire

Growing interest in global historical archaeology is often focused on commodities exchange, especially between the west and the rest. However, ceramics production and consumption in the Ottoman Empire during the fourteenth through twentieth centuries was not only between the Ottomans and the west, but also the Far East. Chinese porcelains served as inspiration for the production of many Ottoman ceramics, especially during the Empire's height in the sixteenth century. Although with less success, Ottoman ceramics contended for a place within local and global markets. This paper will examine the production and consumption of Ottoman ceramics as part of this empire's struggle to achieve and maintain power relationships globally, as well as within its own dominions.