The Frontiers Of The Ottoman World

The Ottoman Empire was one the crucial forces that shaped the modern world. These essays combine archaeological and historical approaches to shed light on how the Ottoman Empire approached the challenge of governing frontiers as diverse as Central and Eastern Europe, Anatolia, Iraq, Arabia, and the Sudan over the 15th to 20th centuries.

The Ottoman empire as a political entity comprised most of the present Middle East (with the principal exception of Iran), north Africa and south-eastern Europe. For over 500 years, until its disintegration during World War I, it encompassed a diverse range of ethnic, religious and linguistic communities with varying political and cultural backgrounds. Yet, was there such a thing as an ‘Ottoman world’ beyond the principle of sultanic rule from Istanbul? Ottoman authority might have been established largely by military conquest, but how was it maintained for so long, over such distances and so many disparate societies? How did provincial regions relate to the imperial centre and what role was played in this by local elites? What did it mean in practice, for ordinary people, to be part of an ‘Ottoman world’? Arranged in five thematic sections, with contributions from thirty specialist historians, The Ottoman World addresses these questions, examining aspects of the social and socio-ideological composition of this major pre-modern empire, and offers a combination of broad synthesis and detailed investigation that is both informative and intended to raise points for future debate. The Ottoman World provides a unique coverage of the Ottoman empire, widening its scope beyond Istanbul to the edges of the empire, and offers key coverage for students and scholars alike.

The Ottoman Empire was one the crucial forces that shaped the modern world. These essays combine archaeological and historical approaches to shed light on how the Ottoman Empire approached the challenge of governing frontiers as diverse as Central and Eastern Europe, Anatolia, Iraq, Arabia, and the Sudan over the 15th to 20th centuries.

Frontiers of the Ottoman Imagination is a compilation of articles celebrating the work of Rhoads Murphey, the eminent scholar of Ottoman studies who has worked at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham for more than two decades. This volume offers two things: the versatility and influence of Rhoads Murphey is seen here through the work of his colleagues, friends and students, in a collection of high quality and cutting edge scholarship. Secondly, it is a testament of the legacy of Rhoads and the CBOMGS in the world of Ottoman Studies. The collection includes articles covering topics as diverse as cartography, urban studies and material culture, spanning the Ottoman centuries from the late Byzantine/early Ottoman to the twentieth century. Contributors include: Ourania Bessi, Hasan Çolak, Marios Hadjianastasis, Sophia Laiou, Heath W. Lowry, Konstantinos Moustakas, Claire Norton, Amanda Phillips, Katerina Stathi, Johann Strauss, Michael Ursinus, Naci Yorulmaz.

A theoretically informed account of how the Ottoman state redefined itself during the last decades of empire.

An analysis of Balkan Islam and the formation of one of the largest Muslim communities in the early-modern Ottoman Balkans.

Dr Heywood’s second volume of collected papers in the Variorum series brings together fourteen studies published between 2000 and 2010. They represent two of the main strands of his interests during the past decade: the era of Ottoman history dominated by the ministerial family of Köprülü; and the maritime history of the ’post-Braudelian’ Mediterranean, in the later 17th and early 18th centuries. Aspects of the Köprülü era under examination in Part One include the shifting chronology of the Çehrin campaign of 1678; a study of the role of renegades in Ottoman service, linked in this instance to the Venetian betrayal of the Cretan fortress of Grabusa to the Ottomans in 1691, and a study of the reorganisation of the Ottoman state courier service in 1696, together with three studies of English diplomacy at the Porte during the ’Long War’ of 1683-99. In Part Two maritime and Mediterranean themes predominate. Four papers revolve around the complexities of the English maritime and commercial presence in Algiers in the decades before and after 1700, and two examine the Ottoman maritime frontier in the western Mediterranean and in the Aegean in the same period. The volume concludes with a look at the daily (and mainly maritime) uncertainties in the life of the French community in Cyprus at the turn of the eighteenth century, and an examination of the emergence of Fernand Braudel’s intellectual involvement with Ottoman history, down to the publication in 1949 of his epochal study of the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II.

The first history of Lake Tanganyika and of eastern Africa's relationship with the wider Indian Ocean World during the nineteenth century.