This study sheds new light on the legal position of Westerners and their Ottoman protégés (berātlıs) by investigating the dynamic relations between Islamic judges and foreign consuls in the Ottoman Empire, providing detailed case studies and critical analyses of theory, perception, and practice.

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 By drawing heavily on both original Ottoman-Turkish texts and previously unpublished archival material, this volume is an ideal resource for all scholars interested in the history of Catholicism in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire.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 is an account of the British experience in Egypt over two centuries, informed by the testimonies of a diverse set of individuals. Providing life stores alongside institutional portraits, it offers multiple perspective on colonial and imperial cultures, from five generations of a British Alexandrian family to a Reuters correspondent with the ear of ambassadors, generals, and pashas. By relating the British colony to discourses on civilising missions, race and nation, law and order, religion, governance, and war, the book identifies the contradictory attitudes of consuls and bishops, artists and soldiers, mothers and daughters, patricians and clients, and long-term and short-term colonials. A biographical treatment of the colony discloses problems of historical memory, identifying divergences based on location, time period, and profession. Official narratives sometimes bore little resemblance to private recollections, indicating that the imperial 'project' was not uniform or even coherent. Nevertheless, certain salient features emerge, among them that the colony in its initial phase was more Levantine than imperial, and that it was recollected as having its 'golden age' between the military occupation of 1882 and the end of the First World War, with the ensuing years being marked by conflicting visions of a threatened colonial future. These themes engage with recent imperial historiography, but are applied to a setting that is often overlooked, in spite of the prominent treatment of Egypt in Edward Said's ground-breaking Orientalism. Egypt was an integral site in the imperial network and this book will be of great interest to area specialists working in political, historical, or cultural studies."--

This book seeks to explain the political and religious factors leading to the economic reversal of fortunes between Europe and the Middle East.

Second edition of an authoritative text on the Ottoman Empire.

The core of this edited volume originates from a special issue of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (JOTSA) that goes well beyond the special issue to incorporate the stimulating discussions and insights of two Middle East Studies Association conference roundtables and the important work of additional scholars in order to create a state-of-the-field volume on Ottoman sociolegal studies, particularly regarding Ottoman international law from the eighteenth century to the end of the empire. It makes several important contributions to Ottoman and Turkish studies, namely, by introducing these disciplines to the broader fields of trans-imperial studies, comparative international law, and legal history. Combining the best practices of diplomatic history and history from below to integrate the Ottoman Empire and its subjects into the broader debates of the nineteenth-century trans-imperial history this unique volume represents the exciting work and cutting-edge scholarship on these topics that will continue to shape the field in years to come.

This in-depth analysis of French trade in Istanbul in the eighteenth century deals extensively with the nature and mechanisms of this trade, Ottoman monetary and financial history, bills of exchange, Ottoman traders and guilds, and Ottoman economic integration with Europe.

Mediterranean Encounters traces the layered history of Galata—a Mediterranean and Black Sea port—to the Ottoman conquest, and its transformation into a hub of European trade and diplomacy as well as a pluralist society of the early modern period. Framing the history of Ottoman-European encounters within the institution of ahdnames (commercial and diplomatic treaties), this thoughtful book offers a critical perspective on the existing scholarship. For too long, the Ottoman empire has been defined as an absolutist military power driven by religious conviction, culturally and politically apart from the rest of Europe, and devoid of a commercial policy. By taking a close look at Galata, Fariba Zarinebaf provides a different approach based on a history of commerce, coexistence, competition, and collaboration through the lens of Ottoman legal records, diplomatic correspondence, and petitions. She shows that this port was just as cosmopolitan and pluralist as any large European port and argues that the Ottoman world was not peripheral to European modernity but very much part of it.

Studies of early-modern Islamic cities have stressed the atypical or the idiosyncratic. This bias derives largely from orientalist presumptions that they were in some way substandard or deviant. The first purpose of this volume is to normalize Ottoman cities, to demonstrate how, on the one hand, they resembled cities generally and how, on the other, their specific histories individualized them. The second purpose is to challenge the previous literature and to negotiate an agenda for future study. By considering the narrative histories of Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul, the book offers a departure from the piecemeal methods of previous studies, emphasizing their importance during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and highlighting their essentially Ottoman character. While the essays provide an overall view, each can be approached separately. Their exploration of the sources and the agendas of those who have conditioned scholarly understanding of these cities will make them essential student reading.