Crafts And Craftsmen Of The Middle East

Crafts and Craftsmen of the Middle East presents research on craft workers within and outside the guild structure from the modern and contemporary Mediterranean world. From the late sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire to traditional style crafts in twentieth-century Turkey and Egypt, the book surveys a multitude of traditions. It begins in 1582 when Istanbul artisans paraded in front of Sultan Murad III; moves through to the eighteenth-century struggles between artisans and tax farmers in Tokat, the artisans of Cairo and the craftsmen of Adana; and into nineteenth-century accounts of Istanbul's women workers and Jewish butchers. This book is essential to all those interested in the history of the culture and society of the Islamic Mediterranean.

Using recent approaches in economic, social, labour and institutional history, this volume analyses guilds in the period 500-1700 AD.

Covering the costumes, equipment, and artefacts of the Bedouin of Saudi Arabia, it examines the work of jewellery makers, leather workers, basket weavers, carpenters and metal workers, with color photographs to illustrate each example. In the text provides a sense of the traditional lifestyle and ethnology of this people.

The nexus of urban governance and human migration was a crucial feature in the modernisation of cities in the Ottoman Empire of the nineteenth century. This book connects these two concepts to examine the Ottoman city as a destination of human migration, throwing new light on the question of conviviality and cosmopolitanism from the perspective of the legal, administrative and political frameworks within which these occur. Focusing on groups of migrants with various ethnic, regional and professional backgrounds, the book juxtaposes the trajectories of these people with attempts by local administrations and the government to control their movements and settlements. By combining a perspective from below with one that focuses on government action, the authors offer broad insights into the phenomenon of migration and city life as a whole. Chapters explore how increased migration driven by new means of transport, military expulsion and economic factors were countered by the state’s attempts to control population movements, as well as the strong internal reforms in the Ottoman world. Providing a rare comparative perspective on an area often fragmented by area studies boundaries, this book will be of great interest to students of History, Middle Eastern Studies, Balkan Studies, Urban Studies and Migration Studies.

Islamic art is justly famed for its technological sophistication, varied approaches to ornament, and innovative employment of the written word. But what do we know about the skilled artisans who spent their lives designing and creating the paintings, objects and buildings that are so admired today? This anthology of written sources (dating from the seventh to the twentieth centuries) explores numerous aspects of the crafts of the Middle East from the processing of raw materials to the manufacture of finished artefacts. You will learn about: the legal and ethical dimensions of the arts and crafts, the organisation of labour in urban and rural contexts, the everyday lives of artisans, the gendered dimensions of making things, and the impact of industrialisation upon traditional methods of manufacture. Each chapter begins with an introduction providing a wider context for the primary sources. There are also suggestions for further reading.

This book traces the history of everyday relations of Greek-Orthodox Christians and Muslims of Cappadocia, an Ottoman countryside inhabited by various ethno-religious groups, either sharing the same settlements, or living in neighbouring villages. Based on Ottoman state archives, testimonies collected by the Centre of Asia Minor Studies, and various pre-1923 hand-written and printed sources mostly in Ottoman- and Karamanli-Turkish, and Greek, the study covers the period from 1839 to 1923 and proposes an anthropological perspective on everyday cross-religious interactions. It focuses on questions such as identification and mapping of communities, sharing of space and resources, use of languages, and religiosity in the context of conversions and of shared sacred spaces and beliefs to investigate everyday realities of a multireligious rural society which disappeared with the fall of the Empire.

Brief details about handicrafts of India.