Sowing the Seeds of Modernity on the Ottoman Frontier: Agricultural Investment and the Formation of Large Farms in Nineteenth-Century Transjordan

In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire initiated a series of modernization reforms. In an effort to address the economic viability of the state, it turned its attentions to its frontiers, in an attempt to bring these regions back into the fold of the empire. In Transjordan, the state targeted Bedouin subjects; as part of the Ottoman project of modernity, efforts were made to settle nomadic pastoralists and transform pastureland into agricultural spaces. The rural countryside was opened to capitalist investment in agriculture. However, agricultural intensification, and the establishment of large farms created a crisis of modernity for many Bedouin. The intensification of agriculture brought increased taxation, diminished control over production, indebtedness, and ultimately the appropriation of land. But some Bedouin used the built environment and natural landscape to confront the Ottoman project of modernity as it unfolded on the frontier.     

The Image of the Bedouin in Travel Literature and Western Researchers Who Visited Palestine in the Nineteenth Century

With the weakening of the Ottoman government from the end of the sixteenth century onwards, the Bedouin took over the control of the entire Country of Palestine. As the Bedouin were present across the country, western travelers and researches visiting the Holy Land as tourists, visitors, and investigators often met the Bedouin, especially during the robbery and plunder executed by the Bedouin upon travelers, and when hiring them as tour guides, renting their camels, or employing them as guards. On their return to their countries, these travelers reported on their experiences in the East in the form of books. These western travelers and researchers, in their writings, dealt with the Bedouin. They described them as providers of services to caravans, transporters of luggage, tour guides, and robbers. The writers and researchers explicitly described the traits, characters, food habits, clothing, residences, and occupations of the Bedouin.     

Evidence of the crested form of domestic hen (Gallus gallus f. domestica) from three post-medieval sites in Hungary

In this paper, the authors introduce finds of crested hen from three post-medieval Ottoman Period (16th–17th century) sites in Hungary. All the remains were found in Buda, the former capital of Hungary. Two sites are located within the castle area, while the third lies south of the royal palace. Since the animal bone assemblages yielding the skulls of crested hen under study showed Ottoman Turkish influence and the castle of Buda was a high status area, it is likely that crested hen represents one of the newly introduced breeds of domestic animals that arrived to Hungary with people of Balkan origins.     

Ottoman Merchants in Constantinople During the First Half of the Fifteenth Century

Abstract

Despite growing interest among both Byzantinists and Ottoman scholars in the respective long-distance commercial ventures of Byzantine Greek and Ottoman Muslim merchants, studies focusing on the trade relations between these two groups have not yet been undertaken. This article, which examines some sources that document the presence and economic activities of Ottoman Turks in Constantinople during the first half of the fifteenth century, is intended to serve as a contribution to this neglected field of study. Moreover, by means of an examination of commercial relations, the article aims to shed further light on the daily, informal contacts between the Byzantines and the Ottomans which remains a relatively unexplored aspect of Byzantine-Ottoman relations.     

Prousa/Bursa,a city within the city: chorography,conversion and choreography

Abstract

Narratives on the birth of the Ottoman city of Bursa, the first capital of the Ottomans, known to the Byzantines as Prousa, highlight its early Ottoman identity. Although Bursa represents one of the richest legacies of early Ottoman architecture, the city's urban fabric has suffered from several fires and earthquakes that resulted in heavy restorations and remodellings. The first aim of this paper is to discuss the textual and visual evidence for the built environment in the early fourteenth century and, second, to offer commentary on the Ottoman attitude toward Byzantine architecture in an effort to unearth the Byzantine substrata of Ottoman Bursa. In the service of the latter goal, this article debunks the Ottoman-centric views. With the aid of drawings of Bursa's upper city that predate the 1855 earthquake we may begin to visualize a city far less uniform in character, in which the Byzantine legacy both endured and informed the construction and urban design practices of the ascendant Ottomans.     

Producing Ottomans: Internal Colonization and Social Engineering in Ottoman Immigrant Settlement

In the past decade, historians of the Armenian Genocide have productively explored broader trends in Ottoman population politics to situate the genocide within the totality of Ottoman social engineering techniques and to highlight continuities between the Second Constitutional Period (1908–1918) and the Kemalist era (1919–1950). This article contributes to the effort to understand state building, internal colonization, and state-enacted violence across regimes by examining Ottoman archival documents related to immigrant settlement. Rather than focusing exclusively on the Young Turk period, this article traces Ottoman conceptions of its territory and population from the 1850s forward. In 1857, concerns about population density and population productivity inspired the Tanzimat High Council to issue a new set of migration regulations, which encouraged immigration by promising free land, tax exemption, and religious freedom for colonists from Europe and the United States. The issuing of the 1857 regulations occurred almost simultaneously with the initiation of a decades-long mass Muslim migration from the Crimean Peninsula, Caucasus, and Balkans into the shrinking territory of the Ottoman state. In 1860, the Empire established a centralized Immigrant Commission (Muhacirin Komisyonu) for receiving, categorizing, and settling the Muslim immigrants. Most immigrants did not meet the selection criteria established in the 1857 regulations. Nevertheless, immigrant settlement became a key component in nineteenth-century Ottoman internal colonization and social engineering. Ultimately, settlement policies and data generated about the population and territory allowed officials to enact assimilative and expulsive policies based not only on ethnic or religious characteristics but also on tropes of productivity and civilization. Examining immigrant settlement as internal colonization situates the Ottoman Empire within global patterns of state building and imperialism and reveals continuity in how officials conceived of population productivity and population removal, allowing historians to understand better political, infrastructural, and ideological precursors to the Armenian genocide.     

On the Trail of the Oldest Domestic Cat in Poland. An Insight from Morphometry,Ancient DNA and Radiocarbon Dating

It is believed on the basis of archaeozoological research that the domestic cat appeared in Central Europe during the Roman Period. In Poland, the domestic cat is a common species in medieval deposits. Only a few finds of cat remains of pre‐medieval age have been reported from Poland to date, including several specimens from deposits older than the Roman Period, dated to the pre‐Roman Period and even the Bronze Age. To clarify the earliest history of the domestic cat in Poland, the paper presents a review of the available published cat remains and adds some data about newly discovered remains. Combined methods of morphometry and ancient DNA were applied to enable distinction of wildcats and domestic cats. The domestic cat remains were radiocarbon dated. In six cases of domesticated cat reported in the literature, five were positively taxonomically verified, both by morphology and by genetic analysis, and one was recognised as a European wildcat. According to radiocarbon chronology, the oldest studied find is dated to the fourth–third century bc and represents a wildcat. Only two individuals of domestic cat – skeletons from Łojewo and Sławsko Wielkie, both from Kuyavia region (central‐northern Poland) – represent the Roman Period (first–third century ad ), and they are the oldest confirmed domestic cats in Poland. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The appearance and disappearance of Birket El-Kamar,Jaffa, Israel

ABSTRACT

The harbor of Jaffa is one of the oldest in the land of Israel and was a significant entry from the sea for the last 4000 years, from the Middle Bronze Age to the twentieth century. Birket el-Kamar was a sandy bay in the coastal strip south of modern Jaffa harbor that had been part of the harbor during various past periods, but no longer exists. Its name, meaning ‘the Moon Pool’, occurs in historical archival documents, mainly maps, from the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. This study focuses on the changing outlines of Birket el-Kamar during the last 800 years, based on recently revealed archaeological remains, and documentary evidence. It seems that in addition to the natural processes, the Ottoman fortress that was built on the natural sand strip connecting the rocks in the sea with the coast, also affected the on-going processes, through which the inner port, the central port and the north anchorage suffered higher erosion rates and the shoreline retreated eastward.     

The Protestant Garden Tomb in Jerusalem,Englishwomen, and a Land Transaction in Late Ottoman Palestine

Abstract

In 1894 the Garden Tomb Association concluded the purchase of a small property outside of the Old City of Jerusalem. The site in question was known as 'Skull Hill' or 'Gordon's Calvary' and was reputed to be the real site of the burial place of Jesus. This case study of a land transaction in Ottoman Jerusalem reveals several important themes from the period. The purchase by foreigners of sites in Palestine was a circuitous process that sometimes involved the intervention of foreign consuls and it sheds light on the Ottoman land laws. The Garden Tomb, a unique property, was part of a larger process of the development of new holy places in Palestine by Europeans. Lastly, the association that purchased the site was primarily funded, initiated and run by notable English women, illustrating their increasing involvement in 19th century religious and activist movements.     

Settlement Reorganisation and the Rebirth of the Ottoman Empire: Bayesian Modelling Narrows Dates for Post-Medieval Occupation at Kaman-Kalehöyük,Kırşehir Province,Turkey

The Ottoman reoccupation of the site of Kaman-Kalehöyük (K?r?ehir Province, Turkey) apparently occurred sometime during the fifteenth century CE, a time of massive territorial and administrative transformation in the Empire. A rich suite of archaeobotanical material recovered from the site offers a potentially invaluable source of information on Ottoman-era Anatolian agroeconomy, especially since historiographic research on the topic has uniformly ignored archaeological perspectives. Here we present results of a multi-proxy analysis aimed at establishing an absolute multiphasic chronology for Kaman-Kalehöyük’s Ottoman occupation, founded upon Bayesian statistical modelling of high-precision radiocarbon dates from cereal remains. We use the new chronology to position Kaman-Kalehöyük’s resettlement within a historical context, allowing a new perspective on settlement responses to large-scale Ottoman sociopolitical change in Anatolia.     

The real-and-imagined spaces of philhellenic travel

This article focuses on philhellenic travellers' perceptions and experiences of Greece in the early nineteenth century, especially during the War of Independence in the 1820s. The central argument is that philhellenes – that is to say, supporters of Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire – understand Greece as a ‘real-and-imagined’ space. Greece is an ‘imagined’ location in the sense that philhellenic conception of it is shaped by certain rhetorical assumptions and priorities. But, evidently, it is also a ‘real’ space, not simply in the obvious sense that the landscape has a tangible existence, but also in that those rhetorical constructions have concrete consequences and expressions. These expressions are especially significant because philhellenic travellers conceive the region as both a literal and conceptual borderland on the edges of Europe. They consider Greece fundamental to European history, culture and self-definition, but because it is ruled by the Ottoman Empire, it is also an unfamiliar space at the margins of Europe. In other words, Greece is both within and outside European space, and its liminal position represents wider uncertainties about the conception of Europe in the early nineteenth century.     

The Policy of Serbian Expansionism,with Specific Reference to Albanians in the Decade Preceding the Balkan Wars

The Balkans at the end of the nineteenth century was in flux. The Eastern Crisis, the Treaty of San Stefano and the Congress of Berlin had established a new political geography in the region that was fated not to hold for long. Here were intertwined the interests of the Great Powers and the newly established Balkan states. The Ottoman Empire which had controlled the region for centuries was in terminal decline. The newly established states supported by the Great Powers very quickly established expansionist policies cloaked in the guise of ‘liberation’ for the remaining Balkan lands from the Ottoman Empire. The question of the Albanian population of the region was largely ignored in European diplomacy. Serbia became fixated on expansion towards the Adriatic and the occupation of Albanian lands. After tracing the historical context of Serbian expansionism and its codification in Na?ertanije, this article makes full use of (chiefly Serbian) diplomatic sources in order to survey the practical implementation of this policy especially with regard to the Albanian population of the Ottoman territories in Europe in the decade before 1912.     

Reconstruction of the landscape history around the remnant arch of the Klidhi Roman Bridge,Thessaloniki Plain,North Central Greece

This paper deals with the palaeoenvironmental reconstruction of the area surrounding the remnant arch of the ancient bridge of Klidhi, Thessaloniki Plain, Greece. 19th century travellers and 20th century historians discussed the age of the monument and concluded that it was built during Late Roman Times (3rd Cent. AD) and supported a branch of the Via Egnatia road. However, few studies have considered the environmental context of the construction of the bridge, and until now, only two hypotheses have been presented: The bridge was built on or over a junction of the Aliakmon and Loudias Rivers, or on a coastal barrier. Within the framework of a geoarchaeological project developed in April 2008, five boreholes were drilled and the sediment cores analysed for microfauna and sedimentology. Seven ¹⁴C AMS dates provided a chronostratigraphic sequence and helped to define the geomorphological evolution of the area. Spatial interpretation of the results was possible using a Landsat TM image (False Colour Composite – FCC). Our data indicate the gradual transition of the site from a marine to a terrestrial environment during Ancient Times. Lagoonal conditions dominated during the construction of the bridge and the presence of a palaeochannel of the Aliakmon River was later revealed (transition from Byzantine and Ottoman periods), overlying sediments of a coastal barrier.     

‘The Gospel of Health’: American Missionaries and the Transformation of Ottoman/Turkish Women's Bodies, 1890–1932

This article explores an overlooked aspect of American missionary modernisation efforts in the late Ottoman Empire: the attempted transformation of women's bodies. By the late nineteenth century, American missionary women and Ottoman government officials both viewed Ottoman women's bodies as a visible reflection of the empire's weaknesses, yet also as central to its survival and revival. The transformation of women's bodies from ‘uncontrolled’ to ‘robust’, they believed, was a prerequisite for a modern society. Through a close reading of missionary reports, correspondences and student memoirs, this study traces the development of physical education, hygiene and recreational sports at the missionary‐run American College for Girls (ACG) in Istanbul. Over time, the female teachers at the ACG partnered and collaborated with male Ottoman/Turkish government officials to implement these courses at girls’ schools across the region. While the government endorsed physical education as key to national progress and regeneration, the ACG educators framed it as a mode of international, feminist self‐empowerment. In reality, the missionaries continued to assert their own Western superiority and advance Orientalist notions through the education courses. By highlighting the shifts in women's body ideals, curricular development and nationalist rhetoric, I argue that women's bodies must be studied as a crucial site of missionary and republican reform.     

Rethinking Idris-i Bidlisi: An Iranian Bureaucrat and Historian between the Shah and the Sultan

A bureaucrat and historian of Iranian origin, Idris-i Bidlisi (b. Ray/Iran 1457–d. Istanbul 1520), is undoubtedly one of the most original and important intellectual figures in the Ottoman?Iranian borderland in the sixteenth century. He lived in a very turbulent period and established different relationships with Iranian and Ottoman dynasties at the end of the fifteenth century and at the beginning of the sixteenth century. He and his works have been the focus of long-standing historical debates in Turkey that have continued to the present day. Until now, most modern scholarly works on Bidlisi have failed to provide a proper, in-depth textual and historical analysis. As a result, such modern works have come to present a skewed, romanticized image of Bidlisi, largely detached from the nature and dynamics of the historical context in which Bidlisi lived and evolved as an intellectual and writer. This paper provides a realistic appraisal of Bidlisi and discusses the shortcomings of modern historiography on him. By looking at Bidlisi and his corpus, and more specifically at the ways in which the latter was shaped by Bidlisi’s patronage relationships, the paper aims to open up a window into Bidlisi’s evolving mindset and worldview. In other words, through an in-depth analysis of his corpus and new archival sources the paper strives to unveil the intellectual life and career of an Iranian bureaucrat and historian positioned between Ottoman?Iranian borderland and provide a glimpse into the nature of patronage in the sixteenth century.     

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.     

The origins of Turkish Republican citizenship: the birth of race*

Abstract. This article explores the emergence of the dominance of racialised Turkish citizenship. Contrary to the conventional methods that investigate the early republican era, this paper starts by examining the final years of the Ottoman Empire with a special emphasis on the Balkan Wars as the birth of racialised technologies of citizenship. Then, I analyse the encounters between racialised thought in the Ottoman Empire in the twentieth century and its recurring counterpart in these encounters: ‘European modernity’. Next, I dwell on an illustration of a materialisation of racialised citizenship in the Ottoman Empire: the displacement and elimination of Armenian citizens. Finally, by probing the dominant strand of modern citizenship and nationhood in Europe, I articulate the commonalities of racialised citizenship in Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century. I conclude by arguing that race as a particular identity should not be seen as an institutionalised aspect of citizenship only in ostensibly ‘Oriental and absolutist regimes’. Instead, the focus should be on moments at which ‘European modernity’ and various nationalisms (racial, ethnic, cultural) mutually constitute each other.