The Well Protected Domains

How did the late Ottoman Empire grapple with the challenge of modernity and survive? Rejecting explanations based on the concept of an Islamic empire, or the tired paradigm of the Eastern Question, the author argues that far richer insights can be gained by focusing on imperial ideology and drawing out the striking similarities between the Ottoman and other late legitimist empires like Russia, Austria and Japan.

In Well-Connected Domains, Pascal W. Firges, Tobias P. Graf, Christian Roth, and Gülay Tulasoğlu showcase recent scholarship on the deep entanglements between the Ottoman Empire and the world beyond its borders, offering novel interpretations and fresh impulses for future research.

There has been a tendency to view the history of the Balkans as essentially determined by historical legacies. Whether in scholarly literature or in popular discourse, the Ottoman or Habsburg pasts are thought to be accountable for a large variety of phenomena ranging from democratic culture (or the lack thereof) and adaptability to a free market economy to nepotism and the filthiness of public facilities. By contrast, the papers in this volume demonstrate that "legacies" are not unchanging determinants. Instead, they are very much open to constant reinterpretations and re-assessments depending on conditions in the present; they are, in short, as much shaped by the present as they are by the past. (Series: Studien zur Geschichte, Kultur und Gesellschaft Sudosteuropas - Vol. 10)

The Ottoman chronicles recount that the first sultan, Osman, dreamt of the dynasty he would found - a tree, fully-formed, emerged from his navel, symbolising the vigour of his successors and the extent of their domains. This is the first book to tell the full story of the Ottoman dynasty that for six centuries held sway over territories stretching, at their greatest, from Hungary to the Persian Gulf, and from North Africa to the Caucasus. Understanding the realization of Osman's vision is essential for anyone who seeks to understand the modern world.

This volume investigates how the peace and trade agreements, better known as capitulations, regulated Catholics in the Ottoman Empire. As one of the many non-Muslim groups that made up Ottoman society, Catholic communities were scattered around the Empire, from the Hungarian plains to the Aegean Islands and Palestine. Besides the more famous cases of the French capitulations of 1604 and 1673, this work explores the evolution of often ignored religious privileges granted by the Ottoman sultans to the Catholic rulers of Venice, the Holy Roman Empire, and Poland-Lithuania, as well as to the Protestant Dutch Republic and Orthodox Russia. While focused on the seventeenth century, precedents of the fifteenth century and later developments in the eighteenth century are also considered. This volume shows that capitulations essentially addressed the presence and religious activities of Catholic laymen and clerics and the status of churches. Furthermore, it demonstrates that European translations, the primary sources of previous scholarly works, offered a flawed perspective over the status of Catholics under Muslim rule. By drawing heavily on both original Ottoman-Turkish texts and previously unpublished archival material, this volume is an ideal resource for all scholars interested in the history of Catholicism in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire.

This book situates protection at the centre of the global history of empires, thus advancing a new perspective on world history.

Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion surveys two thousand years of the Christian missionary enterprise in the Middle East within the context of the region's political evolution. Its broad, rich narrative follows Christian missions as they interacted with imperial powers and as the momentum of religious change shifted from Christianity to Islam and back, adding new dimensions to the history of the region and the nature of the relationship between the Middle East and the West. Historians and political scientists increasingly recognize the importance of integrating religion into political analysis, and this volume, using long-neglected sources, uniquely advances this effort. It surveys Christian missions from the earliest days of Christianity to the present, paying particular attention to the role of Christian missions, both Protestant and Catholic, in shaping the political and economic imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Eleanor H. Tejirian and Reeva Spector Simon delineate the ongoing tensions between conversion and the focus on witness and "good works" within the missionary movement, which contributed to the development and spread of nongovernmental organizations. Through its conscientious, systematic study, this volume offers an unparalleled encounter with the social, political, and economic consequences of such trends.