This collection of articles discusses various political, social, cultural and economic aspects of the Ottoman Middle East. By using various textual and visual documents, produced in the Ottoman Empire, the collection offers new insights into the matrix of life during the long period of Ottoman rule. The different parts of the volume explore the main topics studied by Amnon Cohen: Ottoman Palestine, Egypt and the Fertile Crescent under Ottoman rule, Ottoman Jews and their relations with the surrounding societies and various social aspects of Ottoman societies.

For more than a century Ottoman scholarship (and particularly that branch of it which deals with the socioeconomic history of the empire) has deemed TIMAR the basis of Ottoman agrarian system. The timar was - and still is, the object of numerous studies, more and more detailed and exhaustive. Summarized in the general courses on Ottoman history, they have led to the understanding that timar landholding was the most representative of the agrarian structure of the empire, and that all its other components, as far as they existed at all, were of less importance. The reason for such a widespread belief lay mainly with the accessible source bias - the numerous and very detailed kanunnames which regulated the relations among the central authority, the spahis and the reaya, the equally numerous timar registers, and the kadi sicills. Thus, the very sources directed research towards the "timar theme," and indeed exhausted it as a problem.

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

This collection brings together twenty-one articles that explore the diverse impact of modern empires on societies around the world since 1800. Colonial expansion changed the lives of colonised peoples in multiple ways relating to work, the environment, law, health and religion. Yet empire-builders were never working with a blank slate: colonial rule involved not just coercion but also forms of cooperation with elements of local society, while the schemes of the colonisers often led to unexpected outcomes. Covering not only western European nations but also the Ottomans, Russians and Japanese, whose empires are less frequently addressed in collections, this volume provides insight into a crucial aspect of modern world history.

The contributors to this text on the origins of modern Jordan have based their approach on original fieldwork and archives in Jordan, rather than on foreign archives, and avoid viewing the Jordanian state in the context of British imperial policy and the Arab-Israeli conflict.