Language, Power, and Law in the Ottoman Empire

Episode 441 with Heather Ferguson hosted by Zoe Griffith Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this episode, historian Heather Ferguson takes us behind the scenes of early modern Ottoman state-making with a discussion of her recent book The Proper Order of Things. We discuss how the architecture of Topkapı palace, the emergence of new bureaucratic practices, and the administration of space from Hungary to Lebanon projected early modern discourses of “order” that were crucial to imperial legitimacy, governance, and dissent. Heather also offers rare insights into the challenges, vulnerabilities, and victories of transforming a dissertation into a prize-winning book manuscript. « Click for More »

Bölüm 437 Leyla Kayhan Elbirlik Sunucu Can Gümüş Podcast'i indir Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud Osmanlı'da çiftler nasıl evlenir, nasıl boşanırdı? Bu podcast'te Leyla Kayhan Elbirlik ile İstanbul Bab, Davud Paşa ve Ahi Çelebi mahkemelerinin 1755-1840 yıllarındaki kayıtlarını inceleyerek tamamladığı doktora araştırması odağında, Osmanlı İstanbul'unda evlilik ve boşanma davaları üzerine sohbet ediyoruz. Elbirlik'in araştırması, kadınların evlilik, boşanma ve mülkiyetle ilişkili konularda mahkemeleri aktif olarak kullandıklarını gösterirken, Osmanlı ailesinde ve toplumunda kadının rolüne dair yaygın kanıları da yeniden değerlendiriyor. « Click for More »

Episode 430 with Nurfadzilah Yahaya hosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud During the 19th century, Southeast Asia came under British and Dutch colonial rule. Yet despite the imposition of foreign institutions and legal codes, Islamic law remained an important part of daily life. In fact, as our guest Fadzilah Yahaya argues, Islamic law in the region underwent significant transformation as a result of British and Dutch policies. But rather than merely a top-down transformation, Yahaya highlights the role of the small and largely mercantile Arab diaspora as a major factor in European policy towards Islamic law in Southeast Asia. In our conversation, we  discuss Islamic law and the Arab diaspora in Southeast Asia during the colonial period as well as some of the more unusual court cases arising from this period and the implications of this history for Southeast Asia today. « Click for More »

Episode 345 with Will Hanley hosted by Taylor M. Moore Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this episode, Will Hanley transports us to the gritty, stranger-filled streets of the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, as we discuss his book, Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria. We explore how nationality—an abstract tool in the pages of international legal codes—became a new social and legal category that tangibly impacted the lives of natives and newcomers to Alexandria at the turn of the twentieth century. We consider how nationality brought together the previously impersonal, stranger networks using an array of paper technologies, vocabularies, and legal practices that forged bonds of affiliations between the individuals and groups that inhabited the city. Finally, we discuss how Egyptians and non-European foreigners, such as Algerians, Tunisians, and Maltese, benefited or were disenfranchised from a legal hierarchy that privileged white, male Europeans. « Click for More »

with Julie Stephenshosted by Chris Gratien and Tyler Conklin Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud During the 1920s, a publisher in Lahore published a satire on the domestic life of the Prophet Muhammad during a period of religious polemics and communal tension between Muslims and Hindus under British rule. The inflammatory text soon became a legal matter, first when the publisher was brought to trial and acquitted for "attempts to promote feelings of enmity or hatred between different classes" and again when he was murdered a few years later in retaliation for the publication. In this episode, Julie Stephens explores how this case highlights debates over the meaning of religious and political liberties, secularism, and legal transformation during British colonial rule in South Asia. In doing so, she challenges the binary juxtaposition between secular reason and religious sentiment, instead pointing to their mutual entanglement in histories of law and empire. « Click for More »

with Elyse Semerdjianhosted by Chris Gratien Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud The changing of one's religion may be viewed today as a matter of personal spirituality or identity, but as the historiography of the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere increasingly shows, conversion was often a public act with political, socioeconomic, and gendered components. In this episode, Elyse Semerdjian returns to the podcast to discuss her research on conversion in early modern Aleppo and how women sometimes utilized the act of conversion (or non-conversion) and the legal structures of the Ottoman Empire to gain the upper hand in familial and economic matters. « Click for More »

with Omar Chetahosted by Zoe Griffith Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud The Capitulations are regarded as one of the most obvious and humiliating signs of European dominance over Ottoman markets and diplomatic relations in the 19th century, granting European merchants and their Ottoman protégés extensive extraterritorial privileges within the empire. In this podcast, Professor Omar Cheta probes the limits of the Capitulations in the Ottoman province of Egypt, where the power of the local Khedives intersected and overlapped with the sovereignty of the sultan and the capitulatory authority of the British consulate. Commercial disputes involving European merchants and their protected agents on Ottoman-Egyptian soil reveal the ambiguous and negotiable nature of jurisdiction and legal identities in the mid-19th century. These ambiguous boundaries provided spaces for merchants and officials to contest the terms of extraterritorial privileges. The creation of new legal forums such as the mixed Merchants' Courts gave rise to new norms and procedures, while reliance on Shari'a traditions continued to appear in unexpected places.  « Click for More »

with Cengiz Kırlı hosted by Chris Gratien Within Anglophone historiography, the Tanzimat period is conventionally represented as an era of centralizing reforms emanating from the imperial center that represent a trend often labeled as "modernization" or "Westernization." Less attention has been given to what these administrative changes meant in practice and how they were carried out in the different provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In this episode, Cengiz Kırlı discusses his work on various facets of the Tanzimat and its implementation, offering a preview of his new Turkish-language monograph on the "invention of corruption" in the Ottoman Empire and examining the interplay of local and imperial power during an the early Tanzimat period in the Balkans. a:hover { cursor:pointer; } with Cengiz Kırlı hosted by Chris Gratien Download the episode Podcast Feed | iTunes | Soundcloud Within Anglophone historiography, the Tanzimat period is conventionally represented as an era of centralizing reforms emanating from the imperial center that represent a trend often labeled as "modernization" or "Westernization." Less attention has been given to what these administrative changes meant in practice and how they were carried out in the different provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In this episode, Cengiz Kırlı discusses his work on various facets of the Tanzimat and its implementation, offering a preview of his new Turkish-language monograph on the "invention of corruption" in the Ottoman Empire and examining the interplay of local and imperial power during an the early Tanzimat period in the Balkans. (This podcast refers to visuals available below) « Click for More »

with Samy Ayoub hosted by Hadi Hosainy and Christopher Rose Download the episode Podcast Feed | iTunes | Soundcloud Much of the scholarship on the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence, which had its roots in the sociopolitical context of the 8th century Iraq, focuses on the early centuries of that school's development. Meanwhile, recent scholarship on the later periods emphasizes the transformations within the Hanafi jurisprudence in the early modern and modern periods, particularly as a result of the increasing role of the Ottoman state in the process of lawmaking. Dr. Samy Ayoub presents a different approach on Ottoman Hanafi jurists, who maintained the integrity of the legal discourse while recognizing the needs of the times. In this episode, Dr. Ayoub shares some of his reseach on the question of continuity and change under the self-desctibed “late-Hanafis” from the 16th century until the making of mecelle, the first attempt at codifying Islamic law, during the late 19th century. « Click for More »

with Michael Talbot & Güneş Işıksel hosted by Arianne Urus and Sam Dolbee Download the episode Podcast Feed | iTunes | Soundcloud This podcast explores murky boundaries in two senses. The first has to do with Anglo-Ottoman commerce and diplomacy in the early modern period. Like the more well-known case of the the British East India Company in South Asia, British diplomatic representation in Constantinople was also controlled by a corporate entity. Known as the Levant Company, the institution ensured that from the late 16th to the early 19th century there was little distinction between merchants and statesmen when it came to British diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire. The blurred lines gave way to what might be called a “cycle of necessity,” in which British diplomats gave gifts to secure commercial privileges for British merchants who would then fund the diplomats to provide gifts again. Yet the cycle did not always proceed smoothly, and discrepancies between translations of agreements often played a key role in hitches, in the process raising basic yet profound questions about what treaty-making meant. The second part of the podcast considers Ottoman maritime space and legal order more broadly. With respect to this theme, murkiness makes another appearance, this time as it related to the ability to possess or control the sea. What did it mean to draw a line across the waves, to differentiate between su and derya? Particularly in an age of imprecise mapmaking technologies, these efforts at delineation often were accompanied by a good deal of ambiguity, pointing to the complexity - if not always plurality - of legal cultures and claims to sovereignty that existed in the Ottoman maritime space and, indeed, that extended even ashore the well-protected domains as well. « Click for More »