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

This dissertation examines the Ottoman Empire's transregional role in global developments in the Mediterranean and Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It emphasizes the importance of Ottoman Libya, its coastlines and hinterland, as a critical territory that connected Africa to the Middle East. Consulting primary sources in Arabic, Turkish, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese, it argues that Ottoman statesmen first targeted Tripolitania and Fezzan and then Cyrenaica to accomplish what I call Ottoman settlerism in North Africa. My dissertation contends that the goal of extending Ottoman sovereignty over these three North African provinces was the creation of the "Second Egypt"--A vast territory targeted to become a cultivated and profitable commercial center along the African hinterland and Mediterranean coast. These imperial efforts led to the creation of newly established settler colonies that laid the foundations for Ottoman expansionism, sovereignty, and security through refugees, migrants, and exiles. I demonstrate that Ottoman Libya was far from isolated, but was organically connected to the Caucasus, the Balkans, the Ottoman-Persian borderlands, the islands of the Mediterranean, and other regions of Africa. This investigation of Ottoman settlerism in the Second Egypt provides a crucial intervention in historiography of the Middle East and North Africa, and, more broadly, the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century trans-imperial rivalry over the Mediterranean Sea and Africa by focusing on the overlooked role of Ottoman imperial power in Africa

Frontiers of Ottoman Studies provides a comprehensive overview of the surge in research into Ottoman history and culture over the past two decades. The first volume reflects the growing interest in the provinces, communities and cultures outside the imperial capital of Istanbul and covers four major areas: politics and Islam; economy and taxation; development of Ottoman towns and Arab and Jewish communities. Chapters on Ottoman legal and fiscal institutions provide a fascinating insight into the Ottoman government's interaction with the Empire's subjects, while reviews of Egypt and the Arab provinces emphasise the stirrings of Arab nationalism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that ultimately contributed to the demise of the Empire.

In the late fifteenth century, the north-eastern Balkans were under-populated and under-institutionalized. Yet, by the end of the following century, the regions of Deliorman and Gerlovo were home to one of the largest Muslim populations in southeast Europe. Nikolay Antov sheds fresh light on the mechanics of Islamization along the Ottoman frontier, and presents an instructive case study of the 'indigenization' of Islam – the process through which Islam, in its diverse doctrinal and socio-cultural manifestations, became part of a distinct regional landscape. Simultaneously, Antov uses a wide array of administrative, narrative-literary, and legal sources, exploring the perspectives of both the imperial center and regional actors in urban, rural, and nomadic settings, to trace the transformation of the Ottoman polity from a frontier principality into a centralized empire. Contributing to the further understanding of Balkan Islam, state formation and empire building, this unique text will appeal to those studying Ottoman, Balkan, and Islamic world history.

In Age of Rogues, leading scholars engage with themes of historical and cultural legacies, contentious interactions within imperial regimes, and the biographical trajectory of men and women who challenged the political status quo of their time. Rebels, revolutionaries and racketeers played central roles in the violent process of imperial disintegration as it unfolded in the frontiers of the Ottoman, Habsburg, Romanov and Qajar empires. This is a history of these transgressive actors from the late-19th century to the interwar years. This time was marked by similar, if not shared, revolutionary experiences and repertoires of contention across the connected geography of the Balkans, the Middle East and the Caucasus.

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.

"Frontiers of Ottoman Studies provides a comprehensive overview of the surge in research into Ottoman history and culture over the past two decades. The first volume reflects the growing interest in the provinces, communities and cultures outside the imperial capital of Istanbul and covers four major areas: politics and Islam; economy and taxation; development of Ottoman towns and Arab and Jewish communities. Chapters on Ottoman legal and fiscal institutions provide a fascinating insight into the Ottoman government's interaction with the Empire's subjects, while reviews of Egypt and the Arab provinces emphasize the stirrings of Arab nationalism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that ultimately contributed to the demise of the Empire."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

As a result of the formation of the modern Turkish state, nationalist narratives of the Ottoman Empire's collapse are commonplace. Remapping the Ottoman Middle East, on the other hand, examines alternative and disparate routes to modernity during the nineteenth century. Pursuing a comparison of different regions of the empire, this book demonstrates that the Ottoman imperial universe was shaped by three distinct and simultaneous narratives: market relations in its coastal areas; imperial bureaucracy in the cities of central Anatolia, Syria and Palestine; and Islamic trust networks in the frontier regions of the Arabian Peninsula. In weaving together these localized developments, Cem Emrence departs from narratives of state centralism and suggests that a comprehensive way of understanding the late Ottoman world and its legacy should start from exploring regionally-constituted and network-based historical trajectories. Introducing a persuasive new model for understanding the late Ottoman world, this book will be essential reading for historians of the Ottoman Empire.

Based on many previously unused sources from Ottoman and British archives, Governing the Frontiers in the Ottoman Empire offers a micro-history to understand the nineteenth century Ottoman reforms on the eastern frontiers. By examining the administrative, military and fiscal transformation of Muş, a multi-ethnic, multi-religious sub-province in the Ottoman East, it shows how the reforms were not top-down and were shaped according to local particularities. The book also provides a story of the notables, tribes and peasants of a frontier region. Focusing on the relations between state-notables, notables-tribes, notables-peasants and finally tribes-peasants, the book shows both the causes of contention and collaborations between the parties.

The Unsettled Plain studies agrarian life in the Ottoman Empire to understand the making of the modern world. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the environmental transformation of the Ottoman countryside became intertwined with migration and displacement. Muslim refugees, mountain nomads, families deported in the Armenian Genocide, and seasonal workers from all over the empire endured hardship, exile, and dispossession. Their settlement and survival defined new societies forged in the provincial spaces of the late Ottoman frontier. Through these movements, Chris Gratien reconstructs the remaking of Çukurova, a region at the historical juncture of Anatolia and Syria, and illuminates radical changes brought by the modern state, capitalism, war, and technology. Drawing on both Ottoman Turkish and Armenian sources, Gratien brings rural populations into the momentous events of the period: Ottoman reform, Mediterranean capitalism, the First World War, and Turkish nation-building. Through the ecological perspectives of everyday people in Çukurova, he charts how familiar facets of quotidian life like malaria, cotton cultivation, labor, and leisure attained modern manifestations. As the history of this pivotal region hidden on the geopolitical map reveals, the remarkable ecological transformation of late Ottoman society configured the trajectory of the contemporary societies of the Middle East.