Ottoman History Podcast

with Ian Nagoski hosted by Suzie Ferguson | Zabelle Panosian's ethereal music transfixed audiences from Boston to Paris in the early years of the twentieth century. Yet, by the 1960s, her work was all but forgotten. In this episode, we explore Panosian's life story and some of her exceptional music. What did it mean to leave behind an Ottoman homeland, only to watch the destruction of the 1915 Armenian genocide from afar? What was it like to be diva in Europe and an ambitious Armenian woman artist in the United States, only to be siloed into the category of "ethnic music" by major record labels as anti-immigrant sentiment rose? In this epsiode, we listen to many of Zabelle's songs to explore these questions and more with record producer and music researcher Ian Nagoski. Zabelle's story helps us to understand how and why 'serious artists' have been remembered or forgotten in the annals of American music, especially the immigrants among them. « Click for

Episode 529 with Jesse Howell & Marijana Mišević hosted by Sam Dolbee | In this special episode of the Ottoman History Podcast, Sam Dolbee and Jesse Howell travel by bike along the Ćiro Trail from Dubrovnik in Croatia to Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where they meet fellow Ottoman historian Marijana Mišević. Along the way, they consider the legacy and traces of early modern Ottoman caravan roads across this space, as well as their intersections with the Austro-Hungarian, Yugoslav, and more recent past. The episode is about mobility, memory, and the built environment. Also bicycles, friendship, and the journey. « Click for More »

Episode 527 with Richard Antaramian hosted by Matthew Ghazarian | How did the Ottomans secure widespread buy-in for modernization projects across the empire's many geographies and communities? This episode explores that question through the experiences of Armenians in the Ottoman East. Our guest, Richard Antaramian, shares some of his research, which argues that Ottoman shared governance worked through networks of power that linked center to periphery and sustained relationships among notables of different confessions, classes, and locations. The Ottoman tax-farming system of the 18th century forged ties among central authorities, provincial notables, and Armenian financiers. As the Ottoman government embarked upon the modernizing reform projects of the late 1700s and 1800s, those forms of shared governence frayed. In the Ottoman East, the Armenian Patriarchate's attempts to enact new notions of reform saw major successes, with the establishment limited representative governance, a constitut

Episode 526 with Ozan Ozavci hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan | How was European military intervention in the Ottoman Empire justified throughout the nineteenth century? What did Ottoman statesmen and subjects think of these would-be attemepts to provide them with more security? From the late eighteenth century, as a new international system was emerging, European powers considered the Ottoman Empire a weaker foil to their own expanding empires. In this episode, Ozan Ozavci explores how this perception of Ottoman weakness, known as the Eastern Question, affected the Ottoman Empire's place in and engagement with the new international system and law. Exploring the different phases of the Eastern Question, from the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 to the Civil War in Greater Syria durings the 1860s, Ozavci highlights agency of individual actors in the Ottoman capital and the provinces. « Click for More »

Mayte Green-Mercadohosted by Brittany White | In 1609, King Phillip III of Spain signed an edict to expel a community known as the Moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula. The Moriscos were Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity during the 16th century, after Christian kingdoms displaced the last remaining Muslim rulers in Iberia. The persecution and erasure of the Moriscos following the Reconquista are well documented in the historiography, where alongside Iberian Jews, they appear as victims of the fall of Islamic al-Andalus. But in this episode of Ottoman History Podcast, we’ll explore what these events looked like through the eyes of the Moriscos themselves and study their roles as political actors in the momentous political shifts of the 16th century. In this conversation with Mayte Green-Mercado about her book Visions of Deliverance, we discuss the circulation of Muslim and crypto-Muslim apocalyptic texts, known as jofores; and how these texts were catalysts for morisco political mobilization a

with Helen Pfeifer hosted by Maryam Patton | In 1517, the Ottomans captured Cairo and with it, the Arabophone lands of the Mamluk Sultanate. Suddenly, scores of learned scholars who had been preparing and vying for positions of esteem in either the academy or the bureaucracy found themselves under new authority. How did these scholars navigate the new political and linguistic environments? As Helen Pfeifer argues in a new book, Empire of Salons: Conquest and Community in Early Modern Ottoman Lands, the answer lies in gentlemanly salons, where elite men displayed their knowledge and status. These social laboratories played a key role in negotiating Syria and Egypt’s integration into the empire. Through Pfeifer's study of the life and network of the star scholar Badr al-Din al-Ghazzi, we learn how urban elite of former Mamluk Syria and Egypt continued to exert social and political influence, rivaling powerful officials from Istanbul. The gentlemanly salons also illustrate how Ottoman culture was f

with Chris Gratien hosted by Susanna Ferguson | How did ordinary Ottoman subjects experience the momentous changes that made our modern world? This episode explores that question through the history of the Çukurova region of southern Turkey. As our guest Chris Gratien has argued in a new book entitled The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier, Çukurova can be studied as a microcosm of social and environmental change in the late Ottoman Empire. In our conversation, we explore how the approaches of environmental history can offer a fresh perspective on the political history of the Tanzimat period, and we discuss how the history of malaria -- an ancient disease -- sheds light on a modern experience of displacement and dispossession for rural communities in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. « Click for More »

with Carlos Grenier hosted by Maryam Patton | How did one learn to be a good Muslim in the early 15th century? In newly conquered Ottoman lands where Christians and converts lived side by side, how would one go about learning the proper rites and beliefs to hold? This conversation with Carlos Grenier explores the lives and ideas of two brothers, Mehmed Yazıcıoğlu and Ahmed Bican, Sufis of the frontier city of Gelibolu who grappled with this very question. Their response was to craft a synthesis, an Ottoman Islam so to speak, in the form of Turkish texts that guided their communities on the proper way to be a Muslim. They reached an enormous readership and rank as some of the most popular books to ever be produced in Ottoman Turkish. And as Grenier explains, the Yazıcıoğlus articulated a new Ottoman spiritual vernacular forged in the balance between two worlds of the Balkan and Mediterranean frontiers and the Islamic intellectual sphere. « Click for More »

with Marc Baerhosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan | The expulsion of Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula and their arrival in the Ottoman Empire thereafter changed the relationship of Jewish communities to the Ottoman dynasty. The history of Ottoman Jews would become part and parcel of a narrative that contrasted the Ottoman Empire's beneficence and tolerance with the anti-Semitism of other European societies. Yet as Marc Baer explains in this second part of a two-part conversation, the image of "Sultanic saviors" became entangled with the denial not only of anti-Semitism in Turkey but also of violence against Christians in the late Ottoman Empire and the Armenian Genocide. Adopting a history of emotions approach, Baer explores the reasons for the erasure of violence and persecution in the memory of the Ottoman Empire's relationship with Christians and Jews and uses the sentiments that animate this historiography and memory as a starting point for a way forward. « Click

  with Shay Hazkani hosted by Sam Dolbee | The 1948 War resulted in the creation of the state of Israel and the Nakba of 750,000 Palestinian refugees. In Dear Palestine, Shay Hazkani sheds new light on these events through a unique source base: hundreds of personal letters secretly copied by an Israeli censorship apparatus. We talk in this episode both about his struggle to access these materials and the subversive truths that they reveal, including everything from Moroccan Jewish volunteers who felt solidarity with Arabs to Palestinian refugees who attempted to care for and return to their homes in the immediate aftermath of the conflict. « Click for More »

with Giancarlo Casalehosted by Brittany White | Osman of Timișoara was a Muslim subject of the Ottoman Empire born during the late 17th century in modern-day Romania. As a young man serving in the Ottoman military, he was captured by the Habsburg army. He would spend more than a decade as a captive in Austria. Many people of his time had similar stories. What made Osman special was that he left behind a rare autobiographical account of his experiences and exploits. In our conversation with Giancarlo Casale about his translation of Osman’s memoir entitled Prisoner of the Infidels, we’ll explore the similarities among experiences of enslavement in the Ottoman and Habsburg lands and learn how Osman positioned himself as a linguistic and later diplomatic go-between. And through the life of Osman, his account of his own efforts to return to the Ottoman Empire, and the momentous events he witnessed, we will reflect on his autobiography as a work of literature and the messages contained within it.

with Şölen Şanlı Vasquez hosted by Brittany White | Over the course its final decades, millions of Muslim immigrants, many of them refugees of war and Russian conquest, settled in the Ottoman Empire. Between a quarter and a third of people in Turkey today have ancestors who arrived with those migrations. Yet their history often stops short of capturing the personal experiences of such people, what was erased, and what they have sought to preserve. In this episode, we speak with sociologist Şölen Şanlı Vasquez about how to write a more empathetic history of migration in Turkey through the lens of the Circassian diaspora. For her, this history is not just the story of how people from the North Caucasus were expelled from one empire and settled in an another. It is also a personal story about continuity, rupture, and recovery within the families of immigrants across generations and continents. Through a conversation about her ongoing research project called "The Home Within," we explore the t

with Rudi Lindner hosted by Joshua White & Maryam Patton | Among the most murky periods of the Ottoman dynasty's six-century history is the period of its very emergence in medieval Anatolia. In this episode, we talk to Rudi Lindner about his attempts to understand this early period of Ottoman history and the development of hypotheses and methods concerning the investigation of Ottoman origins over the past century of scholarship. We also reflect on what decades of research and teaching have taught Lindner about sources for history and the questions they require us to ask. « Click for More »

with Nada Moumtaz hosted by Susanna Ferguson | The waqf, often translated as "endowment," is a critical player in the story of urban landscapes, charitable giving, property management, and religion in the Islamic world. But what is a waqf? In this episode, Nada Moumtaz uncovers the many lives of waqf in the city of Beirut, from Ottoman times until the present. We talk about waqfs as buildings, processes, acts, and investments. We see how the story of waqf illuminates central features of the modern state while blurring boundaries between family life and public life, religion and business, charity and investment, past and future, and human and divine. « Click for More »

with Rayya Haddad | The modern history of Beirut has been defined by periods of intense construction, destruction, and reconstruction. In this episode, we explore the layers of history in Beirut's cityscape through a walking tour with Rayya Haddad. We chart Beirut's transformation from its rise as a late Ottoman capital through the expansion of the port during the French Mandate period, its golden age as a commercial center in independent Lebanon during the 1950s and 60s, the long civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990, and the postwar reconstruction carried out by the company Solidere. We also explore the history of Beit Beirut, a unqiue building designed by Youssef Aftimus--Beirut's foremost architect of the late Ottoman and French Mandate period--from its Mediterranean revivalist origins to its redesign as a sniper's haven during the war, ending with its rescue and renovation by activists in recent decades. We conclude with some thoughts on what this layered history of the city

with Fariba Zarinebaf hosted by Sam Dolbee and Nir Shafir | In this episode, Fariba Zarinebaf discusses the history of Galata and the early modern Mediterranean more broadly. Beginning with the incorporation of Galata's Genoese community of Istanbul under Ottoman rule in 1453, Zarinebaf explains how the treaties known as the capitulations (ahdname in Turkish) provided a durable framework for commercial exchange and pluralistic everyday life in Ottoman port cities. She also considers how these arrangements compared with commerce and life in non-Ottoman Mediterranean ports. Through a focus on French-Ottoman relations, Zarinebaf offers a glimpse of how treaties become involved in changing economic fortunes in the Mediterranean and the world. She also attends to how these economic patterns shaped the more intimate aspects of social life in Galata, closing with the impact of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt on the French community of Galata. « Click for More »

with Christine Philliou hosted by Sam Dolbee and Brittany White | Refik Halit Karay (1889-1965) was a writer, bureaucrat, and political exile whose life spanned the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. Christine Philliou traces his life as well as a genealogy of political opposition more broadly in her new book Turkey: A Past Against History. Following Refik Halit between his exiles in Sinop, Syria, and elsewhere as well as his momentous encounter with Mustafa Kemal in the Telegraph Episode, Philliou sheds light on the complicated transition between empire and nation. She also grapples with the challenge of telling history based on the voluminous and often satirical musings of a figure himself deeply invested in interpreting the past. « Click for More »

with Faisal Husain hosted by Chris Gratien | The Ottoman conquests of the 16th century represented a watershed moment in many senses. Our guest Faisal Husain explains the most literal of these senses: the unification of the Tigris and Euphrates basins under a single political authority and its ramifications for the history of Iraq. In our conversation, we explore how Ottoman rule in Iraq created new ecological possibilities and realities, setting the stage for momentous interventions in the rivers detailed in Husain's recent book Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire. We also reflect on what Iraq reveals about Ottoman history writ large and the empire's dualist historical identity as an agrarian empire on one hand and flexible one on the other, in which accommodating local ecological difference was critical to governance. « Click for More »

with Zeynep Gürsel | The Ottoman archives contain just over a hundred photographs that look like old family portraits, but they were created for an entirely different purpose. They document the renunciation of Ottoman nationality, "terk-i tabiiyet," by Armenian emigrants bound for the US and elsewhere. As our guest Zeynep Devrim Gürsel explains, these photographs were "anticipatory arrest warrants for a crime yet to be committed"--the crime of returning to the Ottoman Empire. Gürsel's research goes far beyond the story of the small number of photographs that remain as she has documented over four thousand individuals who went through the process of "terk-i tabiiyet." In this Ottoman History Podcast-AnthroPod collaboration, we talk to Gürsel about her research project on the production, circulation and afterlives of these photographs titled "Portraits of Unbelonging." It is a double-sided history that explores not only the context of Armenian migration an

with Michael Christopher Lowhosted by Sam Dolbee | In the Hijaz, the Ottoman Empire managed not only Mecca and Medina--the two holiest cities in Islam--but also port cities of the Red Sea with connections to the Indian Ocean and beyond. In this episode, Michael Christopher Low explains how the empire ruled this region as the hajj transformed thanks to steam travel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While European colonial anxieties about the hajj focused on epidemic disease and subversive politics, Ottoman concerns centered on the legal status of the region and its infrastructural networks. Although projects such as the Hijaz Railway are often understood as manifestations of Abdulhamid II's commitment to pan-Islam, Low suggests that these measures were more accurately a product of emerging technocratic forms of Ottoman governance. He also discusses continuities with the Saudi state. Low's book is Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj.  « Click f