Wealth In The Ottoman And Post Ottoman Balkans

Wealth in the Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Balkans demonstrates the economic and social transformations wrought by wars, state centralization, European expansion and the gradual Ottoman withdrawal from the Balkans. As a new middle class emerged, and the power of religion faded, Ottoman and post-Ottoman social, economic and cultural norms changed rapidly across the region. This book illustrates not only how markers of wealth accumulation and poverty were socially defined across the region, but also the ways inequality was experienced, revealing the relationships between the state, economy, society, modernity in the context of Balkan, Ottoman and European development. Evguenia Davidova marshals a compendium of thirteen contributions wherein new archival data and various case studies frame a comparative social portrayal of the modern Balkans, offering new truths to the major discourses about nationalism, modernity, and the Ottoman legacy in the respective Balkan national historiographies.

Wealth in the Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Balkans demonstrates the economic and social transformations wrought by wars, state centralization, European expansion and the gradual Ottoman withdrawal from the Balkans. As a new middle class emerged, and the power of religion faded, Ottoman and post-Ottoman social, economic and cultural norms changed rapidly across the region. This book illustrates not only how markers of wealth accumulation and poverty were socially defined across the region, but also the ways inequality was experienced, revealing the relationships between the state, economy, society, modernity in the context of Balkan, Ottoman and European development. Evguenia Davidova marshals a compendium of thirteen contributions wherein new archival data and various case studies frame a comparative social portrayal of the modern Balkans, offering new truths to the major discourses about nationalism, modernity, and the Ottoman legacy in the respective Balkan national historiographies.

Current standard narratives of Ottoman, Balkan, and Middle East history overemphasise the role of nationalism in the transformation of the region. Challenging these accounts, this book argues that religious affiliation was in fact the most influential shaper of communal identity in the Ottoman era, that religion moulded the relationship between state and society, and that it continues to do so today in lands once occupied by the Ottomans. The book examines the major transformations of the past 250 years to illustrate this argument, traversing the nineteenth century, the early decades of post-Ottoman independence, and the recent past. In this way, the book affords unusual insights not only into the historical patterns of political development but also into the forces shaping contemporary crises, from the dissolution of Yugoslavia to the rise of political Islam.

The emergence of the Balkan national states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has long been viewed through an Orientalist lens, and their birth and evolution traditionally seen by scholars as the effect of the Ottoman Empire's decline. As a result, the role played by the great European revolutions, wars and intellectual developments is often neglected. Rejecting these traditional Orientalist narratives, this work examines Balkan nationalist movements within their broader European historical contexts. Drawing on a range of unused archival research and ranging from the Napoleonic era to the Bolshevik Revolution, contributors variously consider the complex roles played by Europe's internal geo-political ruptures in forming the Balkan states, and demonstrate how the Balkan intelligentsia drew inspiration from, and interacted with, contemporary European thought. Shedding light onto the strong intellectual, political and military interconnections between the regions, this is essential reading for all those studying Balkan and European history, as well as anyone interested in the question of national identity. Published in Association with the British Institute at Ankara

As was the case in many other countries, it was only in the early years of this century that Greek and Turkish labour historians began to systematically look beyond national borders to investigate their intricately interrelated histories. The studies in Working in Greece and Turkey provide an overdue exploration of labour history on both sides of the Aegean, before as well as after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Deploying the approaches of global labour history as a framework, this volume presents transnational, transcontinental, and diachronic comparisons that illuminate the shared history of Greece and Turkey.

This book is a post-revisionist history of the late Ottoman Empire that makes a major contribution to Ottoman scholarship.

The historiography of death, memory, and testamentary practices is already abundant in Western Europe and a fairly large number of extra-European regions. For East-Central Europe there are many short studies in various regional languages, mainly on anthropological/ethnographic aspects of the funeral rituals. This is an edited collection of studies by international scholars on the interlocking themes of attitudes and discourses on death, commemorative practices, and inheritance/testamentary strategies in the Balkans and East-Central Europe. These and other related themes are addressed comparatively and cover areas including Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece, and areas of the former Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Austria from the perspective of imperial – Ottoman and Habsburg – legacies. Pro refrigerio animae: Death and Memory in East-Central Europe contributes to this subject by: linking anthropological/religious/cultural approaches to death to the legal/economic aspects of inheritance/commemoration; adding a still absent East-Central European and Habsburg, Balkan, and Ottoman dimension to the study of death, memorialization, and testaments; and presenting an abundant primary and secondary material in English translation and thus placing research on death and testaments by East-Central and Greek scholars within the international scholarly circuit.