with Nilay Özok-Gündoğan hosted by Sam Dolbee | As the Ottoman state expanded in the sixteenth century, it extended a number of privileges to elite families in Kurdistan. In this episode, Nilay Özok-Gündoğan discusses her new book The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire, which explains how these hereditary privileges—unique in the empire—developed and changed in the region of Palu between this moment and the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman state attempted to rescind such autonomy. Writing against scholarship that either ignores such families or understands them only in nationalist terms, Özok-Gündoğan attends to property, labor, and mineral extraction and how they ultimately all shaped the nature of the unprecedented violence at the end of empire. She also discusses her own journey writing this book, including her time teaching in Mardin and eventually being forced to leave Turkey.   « Click for More »

Aslıhan Gürbüzel Sunucu: Can Gümüş | Bu bölümde, Doç. Dr. Aslıhan Gürbüzel’in bu sene başında University of California Press’ten çıkan kitabı “Taming the Messiah: The Formation of an Ottoman Political Public Sphere, 1600–1700” başlıklı kitabı temelinde Osmanlı’da kamusal siyasetin oluşumunu tartışıyoruz. Kitap, Osmanlı’da devlet inşası sürecinin bir parçası olarak devletin artan merkezî gücüne, genişleyen bir kamusal siyasetin eşlik ettiğine işaret ediyor; erken modern dönemin aktif yurttaş oluşumunu görmek açısından kritik bir öneme sahip olduğunun altını çiziyor. Bu sohbette, söz konusu dönemdeki çoğul kamusal alanların katılımcılarını tanıyıp devletle ilişkilerini incelerken, Osmanlı örneğinin kamusal alan tartışmaları ve araştırmalarına sunduğu katkıları detaylandırıyoruz. « Click for More »

Samuel Dolbee hosted by Chris Gratien and Reem Bailony | What can we learn about the late Ottoman Empire from the histories of its would-be margins? In this episode, we explore that question in multiple senses through a conversation with longtime Ottoman History Podcast contributor Sam Dolbee about his book "Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East." The book studies the dynamic history of the Jazira region, which straddles the modern borders of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. From the Tanzimat-era reordering of the Ottoman provinces to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of new nation-states, we discuss how the environment of the Jazira region and its people were both actors and objects in the remaking of the Middle East. Building out from the changing lives of locusts, grasshoppers that intermittently imposed themselves on the Jazira's history by devouring agricultural crops, Dolbee casts light onto communities of nomads and migrants often excluded from the empire's modern history. In the process, he shows how the people of Jazirah both made and resisted new administrative and national borders of the period. « Click for More »

with Chloe Bordewich and Lydia Harrington hosted by Meryum Kazmi and Harry Bastermajian | a collaboration with Harvard Islamica --- In this episode, we leave Harvard and Cambridge to explore the little-known history of immigration from the former Ottoman Empire to Boston in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While completing their PhDs at Boston University and Harvard, Dr. Lydia Harrington and Dr. Chloe Bordewich began to research the history of the neighborhood in today's Chinatown and South End once known as Little Syria. Through the study of property maps, newspapers, oral history interviews, and immigration records, Chloe and Lydia have uncovered the story of this diasporic community from today’s Syria and Lebanon and added both to our understanding of Ottoman immigration to the United States and the history of Boston. The resulting public history project now includes walking tours of Little Syria, an article in both English and Arabic, an exhibit, and a digital humanities project. « Click for More »

with Nicholas Morton hosted by Maryam Patton | The Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire in history, yet its influence on the social and political history of the realms that came under its domain is often minimized due to its short-lived nature. In some ways, the most lasting effects of the Mongol invasions were the unexpected geopolitical shakeups that their arrival brought. Notable examples included the increase in the slave trade which facilitated the rise of the Mamluk sultanate, or the controlled chaos of competing Turkmen tribes who had fled to Anatolia, setting the stage for the eventual rise of the Ottomans. The Mongols were not merely invaders, however, and an overemphasis on military history often conceals the rich cultural history of a nomadic society with its own religious traditions and policies of tolerance towards the diverse societies of the medieval Near East. In this episode, we discuss these topics and more with Nicholas Morton, the author of a new book on the Mongols, entitled The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East. « Click for More »