The present volume contains most of the papers presented at the 18th symposium of the Comite International pour les etudes preottomanes et ottomanes (CIEPO) which has taken place in Zagreb in August 2008 (83 authors from 15 countries). CIEPO is the non-profit association of more than a hundred of world's leading scholars in Ottoman studies, founded in 1973, whose meetings are open for all other researchers as well. The contributions cover a very large field (Turkey, Central and Southeastern Europe, the Middle East, from ca. 1300 to 1922), including a vast variety of topics.

An attempt to reveal, recover and reconsider the roles, positions, and actions of Ottoman women, this volume reconsiders the negotiations, alliances, and agency of women in asserting themselves in the public domain in late- and post-Ottoman cities. Drawing on diverse theoretical backgrounds and a variety of source materials, from court records to memoirs to interviews, the contributors to the volume reconstruct the lives of these women within the urban sphere. With a fairly wide geographical span, from Aleppo to Sofia, from Jeddah to Istanbul, the chapters offer a wide panorama of the Ottoman urban geography, with a specific concern for gender roles.

Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul explores biography writing and dream narratives in seventeenth-century Istanbul. It focuses on the prominent biographer ‘Aṭā’ī (d. 1637) and with his help shows how learned circles narrated dreams to assess their position in the Ottoman enterprise. This book demonstrates that dreams provided biographers not only with a means to form learned communities in a politically fragile landscape but also with a medium to debate the correct career paths and social networks in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Istanbul. By adopting a comparative approach, this book engages with current scholarly dialogues about life-writing, dreams, and practices of remembrance in Habsburg Spain, Safavid Iran, Mughal India and Ming China. Recent studies have shown the shared rhythms between these contemporaneous dynasties and the Ottomans, and there is now a strong interest in comparative approaches to examining cultural life. This first English-language monograph on Ottoman dreamscapes addresses this interest and introduces a world where dreams changed lives, the dead appeared in broad daylight, and biographers invited their readers to the gardens of remembrance.

This book studies the role of the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey in providing refuge and prosperity for Jews fleeing from persecution in Europe and Byzantium in medieval times and from Russian pogroms and the Nazi holocaust in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It studies the religiously-based communities of Ottoman and Turkish Jews as well as their economic, cultural and religious lives and their relations with the Muslims and Christians among whom they lived.

The Ottoman Empire in the Tanzimat Era generates a new history of the Ottoman Empire’s Tanzimat reforms in the provinces of Edirne and Ankara. It studies variation across the two provinces and the crucial role of local intermediaries such as notables, tribal leaders, and merchants. The book provides insights into how states and societies transform each other in the most difficult of times using qualitative and quantitative social network analysis and deep research in the Ottoman and British archives to understand the Tanzimat as a process of negotiation and transformation between the state and local actors. The author argues that the same reform policies produced different results in Edirne and Ankara. The book explains how factors such as socioeconomic conditions and historical developments played a role in shaping local networks. The Ottoman Empire in the Tanzimat Era invites readers to rethink taken-for-granted concepts such as centralization, decentralization, state control, and imperial decay. It will be of interest to scholars and students interested in Middle Eastern and Balkan studies, and historical and political sociology.

In A Social History of the Late Ottoman Women, Duygu Köksal and Anastasia Falierou bring together new research on women of different geographies and communities of the late Ottoman Empire focusing particularly on the ways in which women gained power and exercised agency.

This book is a comparative study of imperial organization and longevity that assesses Ottoman successes as well as failures against those of other empires with similar characteristics. Barkey examines the Ottoman Empire's social organization and mechanisms of rule at key moments of its history, emergence, imperial institutionalization, remodeling, and transition to nation-state, revealing how the empire managed these moments, adapted, and averted crises and what changes made it transform dramatically. The flexible techniques by which the Ottomans maintained their legitimacy, the cooperation of their diverse elites both at the center and in the provinces, as well as their control over economic and human resources were responsible for the longevity of this particular 'negotiated empire'. Her analysis illuminates topics that include imperial governance, imperial institutions, imperial diversity and multiculturalism, the manner in which dissent is handled and/or internalized, and the nature of state society negotiations.

Addressing the contested nature of Ottoman Sunnism from the 14th to the early 20th century, this book draws on diverse perspectives across the empire. Closely reading intellectual, social and mystical traditions within the empire, it clarifies the possibilities that existed within Ottoman Sunnism, presenting it as a complex, nuanced and evolving concept. The authors in this volume rescue Ottoman Sunnism from an increasingly bipolar definition that seeks to present the Ottomans as enshrining a clearly defined orthodoxy, suppressing its contrasting heterodoxy. Challenging established notions that have marked the existing literature, the chapters contribute significantly not only to the ongoing debate on the Ottoman age of confessionalisation but also to the study of religion in the Ottoman context.

This book is dedicated to Metin Kunt, which primarily examines diverse cases of changes throughout Ottoman history. Both specialist and non-specialist readers will explore and understand the complexities concerning the longevity as well as the tenacity of the Ottoman Empire.

Debates on the world historical place of the Ottoman Empire in the last few decades have been conducted mainly in Turkey, but increasingly concepts have been introduced into the conversation from the study of European, Chinese and Central Asian history. This book, first published in 1992, examines the nature of the Ottoman state from a variety of perspectives, economic, political and social.